Lost Houses of Salem

Part six or seven or eight or more: I’ve certainly featured a fair amount of Salem houses lost to the Great Fire of 1914, casual neglect, deliberate demolition, or structural “redevelopment”. But today’s houses have something in common: they are all featured in John Mead Howells’ Lost Examples of Colonial Architecture. Buildings that Have Disappeared or Been so Altered as to be Denatured (1931–love the word denatured!).  For some reason, I have only recently discovered this book; in fact it was recommended to me by a reader of this blog to whom I will be forever grateful. I say for some reason because I was quite familiar with Howells’ other books: I remember leafing through his Architectural Heritage of the Piscataqua time and time again in my childhood home in York, Maine and I think he was probably my first guide to Portsmouth. But now I have this book, which includes all sorts of pictures of buildings and details of buildings from up and down the East Coast, and it has seldom left my side for the past month or so. Howells was an architect, an architect of skyscrapers, so it seems somewhat curious that he should be so focused on these much earlier, much lower structures, but he certainly was. As Fisk Kimball, the Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and author of Mr. Samuel McIntire, Carver: The Architect of Salem (1940, among several other architectural histories), points out in his introduction: “the assembling of these views has been no light task nor one likely to be duplicated; some seven years of loving labor has been necessary to track down the buildings shown and the old photographs here brought together for the first time”. But Mr. Howells was determined to (again, in Kimball’s words) “preserve for architects and all lovers of early America the aspect of buildings which have disappeared or which have been so altered as to lose their character and quality.” “Preservation” through photography–this was an undertaking that had begun in earnest decades before by Frank Cousins and others, and Howells relies on Cousins’ photographs quite a bit, as well as the ongoing HABS surveys and other sources, but he also took his own photographs. His primary role in this sideline pursuit was that of an assembler, compiler, recorder, and visual historian: he wasn’t perfect (see Simon Forrester House below) but he was passionate.

Houses lost to the fire:

That Chipman House at 442 Essex is a revelation to me–what a contrast to today’s parking lot! How majestic Lafayette Street must have been before the fire…….I featured the West House in a previous post.

Houses just lost, or “taken down”:

The Hubon House on Charter Street is long gone, but at least its beautiful staircase is preserved in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum (New York Public Library Digital Gallery); The Peabody House–wow! I’m going to explore that particular house a bit more in a future post. I’ve featured the Benjamin Pickman House on Essex many times in this blog, but never fully appreciated this door.

Houses “denatured”, moved, saved:

Howells doesn’t show us too many “denatured” buildings: this is a category I intend to explore much further in future posts. He doesn’t show us the full extent of the “denaturement” of the Gideon Tucker House, like this later photograph does (MACRIS). I had no idea the Knapp House still survived on Curtis Street, and contrary to Howells’ assertion, the Simon Forrester House on Derby Street is still very much still standing.