Category Archives: Houses

April 17, 2012

Out and About in Concord

By daseger

Yesterday was Patriot’s Day here in Massachusetts, commemorating the Battle of Lexington and Concord (even though it actually happened on the 19th; it’s a convenient long weekend for state employees such as myself).  My own Patriot’s Day tradition is to walk the Battle Road through Lexington, Lincoln and Concord, sometimes with a crowd, sometimes with just my immediate family, sometimes by myself.  This year I was all by myself, so I thought I might run the route rather than walk it, but I completely wimped out because of the heat:  it was in the high 80s, making it a very uncomfortable day for Boston marathoners (the other big event of the day).  I did walk most of the route, then I bailed and had lunch and went shopping in Concord Center.  Not very patriotic!

Concord is a stunning town, full of beautiful houses and lovely landscapes.  Nathaniel Hawthorne definitely preferred his beloved Wayside to any of his Salem dwellings, I must admit.  Salem was a little busy for him in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he always felt the burden of his family’s witch-hunting past there.  Concord was bucolic, but not so isolated that he couldn’t find interesting people to talk to like the Alcotts (from whom he bought his house) and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I’m always impressed by the variety of historic houses in Concord.  There are lovely colonial houses, but also houses in the full spectrum of nineteenth-century styles:  vernacular farmhouses, Greek and Gothic Revivals, Victorians,  and lots of center-gabled houses that I associate more  with New York than New England.  It is a wealthy town, so it has its share of Mcmansions too.  Here are a few photographs of some of my favorites, but I could have snapped many more.

Flags and banners all around Concord for Patriot’s Day; with the heat, it seemed more like July 4th than April 16th.  The tower on the last house above mirrors Hawthorne’s “writing tower” at the Wayside, below in 1910 Detroit Publishing and 1941 HABS photographs.

I have long admired the stone Gothic Revival house below:  look at the windows, the trim, the fence!  It’s spectacular.  Behind it is Concord’s hillside cemetery, with flags for Revolutionary War veterans.

More Concord houses:  a very random sampling.

A colonial house with a stone-like facade, the Old Manse, Hawthorne’s other Concord address, where he and his bride Sophia stayed after their marriage, an amazing house across from the Old Manse–its additions go on and on, a pristine colonial which is just over the line, in Lincoln, and my newest Concord house.

There’s a lot more to do in Concord than just walk around and take pictures of houses.  There is great shopping in its center, including one of my very favorite shops called Nesting on Main and a really neat kitchen shop, among others.  There are the Wayside and Orchard House museums and the great little Concord Museum, of which I am completely jealous for Salem, which deserves a dedicated history museum just as nice.  The Concord Museum gives you a great chronological timeline with period rooms and furnishings, and also has revolving exhibitions:  currently they are featuring 70+ treasures from the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collection arranged in an exhibition entitled The Object of History.

Tabletop items at Nesting on Main, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s study in the Concord Museum, along with the portrait of Dorothy Quincy, circa 1720 by an anonymous artist, part of “The Object of History:  Colonial Treasures from the Massachusetts Historical Society”, on view until June 17.

And then there is Walden Pond, which was very crowded this particular hot APRIL afternoon.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Houses

April 13, 2012

Salem Swags

By daseger

There is no more prominent motif of late eighteenth- and early twentieth-century design than the swag; it’s almost universal.  At least that’s my perspective from here in Salem, where I am literally surrounded by swag-embellished buildings. It certainly was a favorite feature of Samuel McIntire and his imitators, and on a nice Spring walk I suddenly took notice of all the swags around me and captured some of them on film.  Actually before I left for my walk I crawled out onto the flat roof of the apartment on the side of my house for a unique perspective of McIntire’s exterior drapery swags inserted into the brick north wall of Hamilton Hall, along with his famous eagle.

And then I was off, in swag heaven.  Right around the corner, across from where McIntire’s house once stood and now sadly no longer does, there is a lovely entrance with swag detail on the Georgian Eden-Browne-Sanders house.  The house predates McIntire, but the entrance has been attributed to him or his son.  Two streets over, on Federal Street, is a McIntire masterpiece, the Cook-Oliver House, with swags galore, embellishing both exterior and interior doors.  More McIntire swags grace the Peirce-Nichols fence urns (and a mantle inside) further down Federal Street, and the Derby summer house on the grounds of the Gardner-Pingree House downtown.

Frank Cousins photographs of a Cook-Oliver doorway and a Peirce-Nichols mantle, 1910-13, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Of course McIntire was a genius but he had a lot of inspiration:  swags had been around for a while before he started carving them in Salem. Thomas Sheraton’s Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book (1791–93) is full of them, and he is hardly the only source.  I’ve just been discovering the incredibly prolific British architect Sir William Chambers (1723-96) who also drew his share of swags. They even turn up on petticoats in the 1790s.

Pencil sketch for a panel by Sir William Chambers, pen and ink sketch for a candle urn by Chambers’ studio, c. 1770, and petticoat design by a Miss Vernon, c. 1792, all courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Back in Salem, there was a swag revival a century later when the Colonial Revival influence swept through the city.  On Essex Street, which is really Salem’s Main Street, there are several Colonial Revival houses which are almost festooned with swags.  For me, these 1890s swags seem to lack the delicacy, depth and detail of those of a century earlier, but I still think they work.  The last house is actually a colonial house, built in 1762, transformed into Colonial Revival house, swags and all, in 1893.


6 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Design, History, Houses

March 21, 2012

Camellia Craze

By daseger

One associates the camellia more with the South than the North (at least I always have), but in the early and middle part of the nineteenth century there was such intense interest in the flower among the elites of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia that the term craze seems apt. Camellias are far from hardy up here, so the camellia craze coincided with a flurry of greenhouse building.  All around Boston greenhouses popped up in the 1820s and 1830s, each one producing a profusion of hothouse flowers for Yankee homes.  At an exhibition sponsored by the fledgling Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1836, Charles Mason Hovey, a local nurseryman and later a prominent horticultural publisher, showed 12 varieties of Camellia Japonica, one of which was named after him.

Herman Bourne, Flores Poetici, The Florist’s Manual (Boston, 1833); J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées (1847).

Another prominent Camellia enthusiast was Boston merchant Theodore Lyman, who commissioned Salem’s own Samuel McIntire to design a country house  for his property west of the city in 1793.  The Lyman Estate or “The Vale”, as it was called then and now, included not only the McIntire mansion (later considerably altered and expanded; you can see a great post on its later history and interiors here), surrounding grounds, and a beautiful carriage house, but also a chain of greenhouses.  The Vale remained the country seat of the Lyman family for over 150 years, and was conveyed to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) in 1951.  Both the house and the carriage house are undergoing significant repairs at present but the greenhouses are open all year long, and I visited them last week, near the end of the annual “Camellia Days”.

The Vale in halcyon days, before its Victorian and Colonial Revival alterations (courtesy Historic New England) and last week, in the midst of roofing work.

There are four greenhouses at the Lyman Estate, the oldest one dating from 1804.  The “Camellia House” was built in 1820, right in the middle of the camellia craze in Boston.  I visit the greenhouses several times a year just to see the very established specimens within or for plant sales.  Even apart from the plants, the infrastructure is also very appealing, as is the juxtaposition of soft russet brick, Victorian steam fittings, and glass.  I have made it for the height of camellia season in the past, which is generally in February, but I was late in this busy year:  some of the camellias you see below are still blooming, but the general ambiance was one of faded glory.

The Camellia House is the last of the chain of greenhouses, so you go through glass rooms of tropical plants, fruit trees, succulents (!!!!), orchids, and then you’re there….

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History, Houses

March 15, 2012

Double Parlors

By daseger

We’re repainting our double parlor, finally.  For years friends have been telling me to go darker, to highlight the serious moldings in these rooms. It’s painted a very subtle blush pink now, but it just looks like a rather shabby off-white in the pictures below. And it looks cold. Clearly it’s time to paint: I’ve taken down all the pictures and removed all the moveable stuff, now out with the rugs, the couches and the mirrors–Moneypenny will stay on the radiator for as long as she possibly can. We haven’t quite decided on the exact color yet:  I really like Rundlett Peach from California Paints Historic Colors of America, while my husband is leaning toward something a bit more something with a bit more orange, or perhaps a warm grey (is there such a thing?) or something “buffy”. We tried a rather vibrant persimmon last year and realized we could not live with quite that much color in these rooms. Any suggestions would be welcome; there’s a lot of prep work to do so we have a few days to decide. The double parlor is really one large room separated by pocket doors which we rarely close; while it is a large area it is always rather dark, as our house is north-facing.  The matching grey marble mantles are the other consideration; obviously we want a color that complements them. Here’s a few pictures of the space now.

There are “fake doors” in both the front and rear parlors for symmetry, which is very Greek Revival.

After painting, lighting.  I’ve never really liked the fixture in the rear parlor, and what you are seeing above is a cap where a gas fixture once was so we need some wiring in the front parlor.

It’s fun to turn your house (and your cat) into a pencil sketch!

While looking around for some inspiration and colors for my double parlor, I kept coming across images of the Greek Revival house in Brooklyn Heights where Truman Capote lived when he wrote In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. No doubt Google was directing me there because I was searching for “Greek Revival Double Parlors” and this house is a Greek Revival with several parlors (I don’t think they are contiguous) but also because this house has recently been in the news for setting the sales record for a single-family home in Brooklyn: $12 million (though the asking price was $18 million–sign of the times). The house looks stunning even though it has a bit of an ’80s ambiance (1980s not 1880s, though neither is good); it has a lovely enclosed garden in back and the colors of its parlors are close to what I want for mine, although I think I need a warmer, slightly rosier color than that pictured below. I must admit that I like my softer grey mantles better.

I think both Federal and Greek Revival houses are quite adaptable to a range of furnishings. You can go very period if you like, or in a more contemporary direction, or mix it up (my preference), and it all seems to work in these spare, classical spaces. I love looking in my Richard Jenrette books, but that kind of grandeur is unattainable. House museums like the Merchant‘s House in New York City are fun to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. On the other hand, the parlor in cosmetics scion Aerin Lauder’s Greek Revival country house in the Hamptons is a bit too modern for me (although that orange might be just what my husband wants).

Richard Jenrette’s great book, followed up by More Adventures with Old Houses, which focuses on Edgewater, his amazing Greek Revival estate on the Hudson River, the front parlor of the Merchant’s House Museum in NYC, and Aerin Lauder’s Hamptons living room photographed for Elle Decor.

I think the warmer, traditional yet updated look that appeals to me the most is well represented by the double parlor of an 1838 Nantucket house designed by Thomas Jayne Design Studio for clients “who were committed to adapting to the historic architecture of their home rather than altering it to fit contemporary tastes”.  A lovely attitude and a lovely room.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Design, Home, Houses

March 13, 2012

The Bulfinch Bank

By daseger

In terms of architectural turf, I like to think of Salem’s own master woodcarver/architect Samuel McIntire as being so eminent and prolific that no other architect of his day could compete for commissions within the bounds of the then-bustling port. I like to think that, but I am wrong, as an even more eminent architect, Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844), designed several buildings in Salem, including one that is still standing: the Essex Bank Building.

Charles Bulfinch built Federal-era Boston in much the same way that Samuel McIntire built Federal-era Salem but the former architect had more of the background and inclinations of a “gentleman” (Harvard, the Grand Tour) than a craftsman, and seems to have been far more politically ambitious as well, serving on the Boston Board of Selectmen and as the Commissioner of Public Building in Washington. In addition to the residences he designed for wealthy Bostonians (including the Harrison Gray Otis house, the present-day headquarters of Historic New England), his New England commissions included buildings for Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital, the state houses of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine, and the majestic “Bulfinch Church” (Unitarian First Church of Christ/Fifth Meeting House) in Lancaster, Massachusetts. In Washington, Bulfinch was responsible for restoring the Capitol building after its burning by British troops occupying Washington during the War of 1812:  he rebuilt the wings, laid out grounds, and designed the center domed building that was later replaced by the much larger dome of today.

Bulfinch's Capitol Dome in 1846, Architect of the Capitol.

In Salem, Bulfinch designed at least three buildings that I know of:  The Salem Almshouse on Salem Neck (1816), Ezekiel Hersey Derby’s grand house on Essex Street (1800), and the Essex Bank.  There seems to be conflicting information about the Old Town House, which is sometimes attributed to Bulfinch and sometimes not, so I’m leaving that out.  The Almshouse, often called the “Poor Farm” survived until the 1950s when it was razed to make way for condominiums, and the Derby House survived until the 1970s, albeit in unrecognizable form as it was increasingly swallowed up by the commercial storefronts of busy Essex Street.

The Salem Almshouse and the Ezekiel Derby house in photographs from the early 20th century, after the latter had been transformed into the “All America Shoe Shop” adjacent to the Salem Five Cents Savings Bank. I couldn’t find a photograph of this Bulfinch house in its heyday, but you can see a similar house in Portsmouth in this post by the Downeast Dilletante. In her 1919 book A Loiterer in New England, Helen Weston Henderson attributes the Derby house to McIntire rather than Bulfinch and includes the elevation drawing above–she also bemoans the house’s “desecrated front”. The bottom photograph shows the Ezekiel Hersey Derby room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

These Bulfinch buildings in Salem are gone, but the Essex Bank Building survives, due in large part no doubt to the preservation efforts of Historic Salem, Inc. and the Salem Redevelopment Authority.  It was the first bank building in Essex County, and remained a bank for a good part of that century until it became the headquarters of the Salem Fraternity for Boys (the forerunner of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Salem) in 1869.  Frank Cousins’ photograph below indicates that it had reverted back to a bank in the early twentieth century. At the end of that century it became an antiques store (with a stunning second-floor apartment) and now it houses an antiquarian bookstore.

Frank Cousins photograph from the Urban Landscape Digital Collection at Duke University; the Essex Bank Building yesterday.


1 Comment   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Houses, Salem

February 21, 2012

George Washington Slept Here

By daseger

Last summer, I wrote about George Washington’s visit to Salem in a post on the Assembly House where he dined; today I’m featuring the house where he spent the night (October 29, 1789) after he was feted by the city’s notables:  the Joshua Ward house, built between 1784 and 1788 on what was then waterfront and what is now busy Washington Street.  Like my post on Lincoln last week, I’m trying to recognize and remember American statesmen on the days they were actually born (February 12 and 22) rather than on the generic “Presidents’ Day”.

Teddy tries to take over:  Puck Magazine, February 1909.

President Washington came to Salem as part of a New England tour in the Fall of 1789.  His diary entries indicate that he was impressed with the commerce of the town, but he has little to say about its architecture.  Washington was no Jefferson; he was clearly more interested in the quality of the land and the roads along his route than he was in culture, material or otherwise.  The Joshua Ward house was a brand new mansion when he arrived, ostensibly the finest residence in town, but he refers to it only as his “lodgings”.  He spent the night in the second-floor northeast bedchamber, on the right in the pictures below.

A bust of Washington appears to peer out at Salem from a window over the entrance of the Joshua Ward House.

The house is now home to the Higginson Book Company and appears well-maintained and seemingly-secure, despite being wedged in between a Dunkin Donuts (one of 57,000 in Salem), modern condominiums, and an office building.  Its location has determined that the Ward House has had an interesting history, to say the least.  At this point in time, it is far better known as a haunted house than a historic one, due to the fact that it was built on the former site of the house of  George Corwin, the High Sheriff of Essex County who issued the warrants for those arrested in the Witch Trials of 1692 and infamously placed the sequential stones on Giles Corey’s body which crushed him to death for failing to enter a plea.  Sheriff Corwin dropped dead of a heart attack 4 years after the trials at age 30, and the combination of a series of shady stories involving a curse and his corpse, along with an equally shady “spirit photograph” ostensibly taken in the early 1980s, have created a ghostly reputation for the Joshua Ward House.

Its location has threatened not only its reputation but also its preservation.  The Ward house was originally built on a bluff overlooking the South River, but as Salem developed the river was filled in to create the major commercial thoroughfare of Washington Street, and Salem’s massive Boston and Maine Railroad Station was built virtually in its front yard.  Eventually it became the “Washington Hotel”, indicating that its association with Washington was well-known, and commercial storefronts were built in front of it and a “New Washington House” adjacent.

The view looking south on Washington Street in the later nineteenth century and the Boston & Maine terminal in 1910, Detroit Publishing Company. The Ward house is located just beyond and behind the “Boston” building on the right:  quite a change from the river view of a century before!  A postcard from the late 1920s.  Below, a northwestern orientation, FACING but still obscuring the Ward House:  the New Washington House  (Dionne Collection, via Salem Patch), Washington Street in the 1930s, and today.  The posts in the lower left-hand corner of the modern picture are those of the Joshua Ward House fence.

The house is obscured in all of these pictures of its streetscape, but fortunately it is revealed in the photographs of Arthur C. Haskell, taken for the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1937 and accessible at the Library of Congress. These pictures show a house (labelled the Joshua Ward “Washington” House) that looks like it has fallen upon hard times on the outside, but relatively well-preserved on the inside.  The first two exterior views show appendages growing out of both front and back, and a missing balustrade, but the interior views show an empty but still elegant interior, with woodwork which is often attributed to Samuel McIntire.  I think that the second-floor landing between the front and rear stairs is particularly impressive.

A sketch of the house; you can see all the stuff that has been built in front of it.

HABS photographs by Arthur C. Haskell, 1937:  Ward House front and back exterior, first-floor parlor mantle, second-story landing, and the room that George Washington slept in on the second floor.

It’s so interesting to see a city–the world–grow and change from the perspective of one house, bearing silent witness.  Things will get worse for the Joshua Ward house before they get better. In that horrible time of urban renewal, the 1960s and early 1970s, a developer approached the Salem Redevelopment Authority (which has planning jurisdiction over downtown) to tear down the  “junk” in back of the Washington Street storefronts at no. 148, meaning the Ward House!  In the ensuing uproar the way was cleared for an extensive restoration supervised by Salem preservation architect Staley B. McDermet, revealing the elegant mansion of Washington’s time–and ours.


17 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History, Houses, Salem

February 5, 2012

Downton Abbey Double

By daseger

I like Downton Abbey as much as the next person (woman), but I must admit that I tune in as much (or more) for the setting and costumes, the general ambiance, as I do for the plot and the acting.  The real star of the show for me, so impressive that it even upstages Maggie Smith, is the “abbey”, or Highclere Castle.  Highclere has been the seat of the Herbert Family, the Earls of Carnarvon, from the eighteenth century.  In the 1830s, the third Earl, Henry Herbert, commissioned Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, to dramatically enlarge and remodel an existing Georgian house into the grand Elizabethan Revival castle that it is today.  It seems to me that the Herberts were a bit nouveau riche; their peerage was of relatively recent vintage and so was their house, so they hired the  neo-Gothic architect to build them a ne0-Elizabethan house.  It’s a very Victorian story.

Highclere Castle circa 1850s-70s by photographer Francis Frith. Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Sir Charles Barry’s 1842 Study for a Highclere tower from the Christies archives; Highclere Castle today.

Apparently Downton Abbey saved Highclere Castle.  In a 2009 Daily Mail article entitled “Can Highclere Castle be Saved? Historic Home is Verging on Ruin as Lord Carnarvon Reveals £12 million Repair Bill”, the 8th Earl reveals not only the imposing estimates for the repair of his ancestral home but the dilapidated (and moldy) rooms upstairs, which contrast sharply with the ground-floor state rooms that we see on Downton.  There was even talk of subdividing the Capability Brown-designed grounds (perhaps this is still on the table). Shortly after the article was published, Andrew Lloyd Webber offered to buy the castle to house his art collection but was rebuffed by the Earl and Countess.  Then the producers of Downton came in to save the day.

Highclere upstairs bedroom, downstairs saloon and library.

From an interesting “country life” publication entitled The Field, we can see Highclere’s silk-wrapped drawing room in Downton’s time, and contrast it with a photograph from the present. Like Downton, Highclere was used as a rehabilitation hospital during the First World War and here is Downton’s Lady Sybil in the same drawing room.  After the war, the Castle underwent a “modern” redecoration, but not too modern, apparently, if this “Highclere” Liberty fabric is any indication.

"Highclere" fabric by Liberty & Co., 1931. Victoria & Albert Museum, London

I particularly like the dining-room scenes on Downton Abbey, as we can get a glance at the 1633 equestrian portrait of King Charles I by Anthony van Dyck behind Lord Grantham’s head.  Below is the dining room as set, with the Van Dyck in the background, from the Highclere Castle website.  Finally, the weathered front doors of Highclere, which are really getting a workout these days, I should think.

11 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses

January 22, 2012

Salem’s “Japanese House”

By daseger

Ample evidence exists to demonstrate the varied connections between Salem and Japan, both in the past and the present.  Just last week, my next-door neighbor was hosting a group of Japanese filmmakers, here in town to shoot the childhood home and environment of Salem native and Japanese cultural minister Ernest Fenollosa (1858-1907).  The Peabody Essex Museum has wonderful Japanese collections and a beautiful Japanese garden, no doubt due, in large part, to the advocacy of its long-term director, Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925).  Morse was also responsible, in a way, for another tangible symbol of the Salem-Japan connection:  the so-called “Japanese House”  on Laurel Street.

This house was designed by the prominent and prolific Boston architectural firm Andrews, Jacques and Rantoul for a young man named Bunkio Matsuki (1867-1940), who arrived in Salem as a teenager, accompanied by a friend and armed with his acquaintance with Morse, whom he had met during one of the latter’s earlier trips to Japan.  Matsuki knocked on the front door of Morse’s house (which is located right next door to the Japanese house; I’ll write about it in a future post once I figure out a bit more about its equally distinctive architectural style) and began a new life in Salem:  graduating from Salem High School, setting up an import business, marrying his landlord’s daughter, and ultimately building his distinct house in 1893.  Below is a photograph from the 1903 publication Prominent Americans interested in Japan and Prominent Japanese in America, and an advertisement for Matsuki’s shop in Boston from the same year.

I imagine that the architects at Andrews, Jacques and Rantoul must have relied on Morse’s 1888 book Japanese Homes and their Surroundings for their design of the Matsuki house, as it is full of plans and detailed drawings.  I know that a Japanese carpenter was employed for its construction; even though he trained to be a Buddhist monk back in Japan, Matsuki was apparently from a family of craftsmen, whose contacts would serve him well over his long career.  His roles as a cross-cultural ambassador, entrepreneur and preservationist of sorts is highlighted in this 1903 auction notice from the New York Times, describing objects which belong to Mr. Bunkio Matsuki, a descendant of the Tategawa family of artist-artisans and builders of temples, who has had the advantage of being a Japanese and a lover of curios.  He has been able to collect objects from dismantled temples and those which were reorganized when an attempt was made from governmental sources to change the religion of Japan.  The Boxer troubles in China have also thrown things his way, and the result is a very curious and interesting lot of things.

The house yesterday, during our first serious snow.

20 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Houses, Salem

January 16, 2012

McIntire for Sale

By daseger

On this day in 1757 Samuel McIntire, the architect and woodcarver who laid and built upon the foundation of Federal Salem in its golden age, was born–or at least baptized.  Upon this anniversary last year, I featured some of McIntire’s commissions in and around my neighborhood, the McIntire Historic District.  This year, I want to focus on an orphaned McIntire mansion on the other side of town (and the tracks, really) in the emerging Bridge Street Neck Historic District.  The Thomas March Woodbridge House is the most remote of all the McIntire houses in Salem, built around 1809 or 1810 on the main northern thoroughfare leading in and out of the city, Bridge Street. The house served as a single-family residence for more than a century, and in 1939 it came under the stewardship of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England), primarily to protect the impressive interior woodwork of McIntire, which remains intact even after the long institutional occupancy of the venerable Salem charity, the Children’s Friend and Family Services, from 1955 until about 5 years ago.  The Woodbridge House went on the market at that time, and it is still for sale today.

Woodbridge House exteriors from yesterday and a century ago; the Frank Cousins photograph is from the Peabody Essex Museum’s microsite, Samuel McIntire:  Carving an American Style.

Despite its obvious magnificence (and really low price), the house is a difficult sell for a couple of reasons, first of which is location, location, location.  Bridge Street is a tough street, and probably a tough sell.  As a principal entrance corridor for several centuries it developed commercially rather than residentially, creating a streetscape of lots of ugly buildings (but there are some great houses located on the side streets that form the adjacent neighborhoods).  With the construction of the new Beverly bridge and bypass road in the past decade, plans and possibilities for a more aesthetic environment have been explored, but it’s going to take a while.  The house is large and institutional, and those developers that have been interested in condominium conversion have been put off by the preservation easement overseen by Historic New England.  This house needs a really special buyer, one that is primarily motivated by the interior McIntire woodwork.

The “incomparable interior woodwork” of McIntire is certainly recognized by this 1919 advertisement for silk upholstery and drapery fabric.  Here the very spirit of this Salem “super-carpenter”seems to be for sale.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Houses

December 5, 2011

Scenes from the Tour

By daseger

Unseasonably warm weather and enticing houses created crowds in my neighborhood this past weekend, as the 32nd annual Christmas in Salem holiday house tour transpired.  I took a short walk along most of the tour route in the virtual footsteps of Boston (and Salem) architect William G. Rantoul (1867-1949), whose work was showcased on this year’s tour.

This Federal house was Rantoul’s residence from 1907 to 1939.  According to Bryant F. Tolles’ Architecture in Salem, he added the entry himself, based on the period design of that of the house two doors down.  The colonial and Federal houses of Salem must have been a constant source of inspiration for Rantoul, who worked primarily in the Colonial Revival style.  The Christmas in Salem Committee placed these red flags on sites associated with Rantoul.

Lines on either side of Chestnut Street.  Around the time of World War One, Rantoul made significant additions and alterations to the Phillips House (above), which is now owned by Historic New England.

This great gambrel-roofed house at the end of Chestnut Street appears to be Georgian but is in fact the newest house on the street, built in 1909 by Rantoul for philanthropist Caroline Emmerton.  It is an adaptation of the eighteenth-century Richard Derby House on Derby Street.

Walking, walking…the top house has nothing to do with Rantoul and was not on this year’s tour, but is great nonetheless and this particular shot shows how fall-like the weekend was.

Rantoul’s major institutional commission in Salem:  the Salem Athenaeum, built in 1907, this weekend and in a 1910 postcard.

A great triple house designed by Rantoul and built in 1918 after the great Salem Fire . The decorated entrance, and 1918 Christmas cards displayed on a 1918 mantle.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Home, Houses