Category Archives: Houses

November 27, 2011

Wilderstein

By daseger

I spent the last beautiful day of my Hudson River Valley Thanksgiving weekend visiting some of the region’s grand estates:  the Vanderbilt Mansion, Clermont, Olana and Wilderstein, all within a hour’s drive of one another. These are just a few representatives of the area’s rich legacy of past wealth and present preservation. Having been on the boards of historic structures here in Salem for the past couple of decades, I am very aware of the immensity of collective effort (and the piles of cash) it takes to preserve just one property; I can’t imagine how the Hudson River Valley community manages to maintain so many.

The Wilderstein estate in Rhinebeck  is referred to as the “stepchild” of the Hudson River Valley mansions in a 2007 article in the New York Times because it was the last to be transferred from the family that built it—the Suckley family, cousins to the venerable Livingstons who seem to be the foundation of all the great families of the Valley–to trusteeship.  The fact that the Suckleys ran out of money about 80 years before this transfer occurred in 1991 created a considerable preservation challenge for the non-profit organization that runs the mansion today.  When I first visited the house about a decade ago, it was a dreary dark brown, having received its last paint job in 1910 with very “good paint” according to the recorded remembrances of its most famous, and last, resident, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, some 70 years later.  Miss Suckley was the very close friend, correspondent and confidant of her sixth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who lived right down the road in Hyde Park when he wasn’t in the White House.  It was she who gave him the famous dog Fala, namesake of one of Wilderstein’s most popular annual fundraising events, the “Fala Gala”.

A lot of improvements have been made to the exterior of the house in the 20 years following Miss Suckley’s death, the most striking of which are shingle and siding repairs and the return of the original polychrome paint scheme.  The mansion is an elaborate Queen Anne confection, complete with a five-story tower, and it demands bright, contrasting colors!  You can see the dramatic change in the house’s appearance from the images below in which my photographs from yesterday are followed by those of HABS photographer Mark Zeek, taken in 1979.  I approached the house from the woods below, so it was neat to see that looming bright tower, followed by the gradual appearance of the entire facade.

The dramatic appearance of the Wilderstein mansion is accentuated by its situation, on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, and its surrounding grounds, designed by Calvert Vaux.  On these same grounds, close to the river’s edge, is the estate’s carriage house/garage.  As you can see from the photographs below, including mine (sepia and color detail) from yesterday interspersed with the HABS images from 1979, this building has been in decline for some time.  Another great challenge for the overseers of Wilderstein, but I have no doubt that they are up to it.

Addendum:  a still image from the upcoming film (summer of 2012) Hyde Park on Hudson, starring Laura Linney as Daisy Suckley and Bill Murray (!!!!!) as FDR.

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

October 19, 2011

Past and Future in Ipswich

By daseger

This past weekend we went up to Ipswich, about 12 miles north of Salem, to take a look at some very old houses and a very new wind turbine.  There is discussion of installing a turbine on Salem’s Winter Island so we wanted to check out the one in Ipswich, and there are lots of other attractions there:  cider doughnuts, beautiful beaches and farms, and the largest collection of First Period houses on the North Shore, perhaps even anywhere in America.  Here are some pictures of the largest and most famous one, the John Whipple House, built by 1677, moved to its present location off Route 1A in 1927, and owned and operated by the Ipswich Museum.

I love the very colonial clam-shell paths to the house and around the period “housewife’s garden”, the super-sloping roof and the windows–all of them.

And now for a contrasting view of the future in Ipswich:  the wind turbine, located on a large coastal DPW lot well out of the center of town.  Though both graceful and green, the turbine is indeed huge; it’s really difficult to see how it could possibly fit on the much smaller lot here in Salem.  There are a couple of shots here for perspective, including one across the marsh from the turbine.  I did not find it very noisy, however, which seems to be the other major issue with its potential siting.

On our way home (well sort of) we stopped at our favorite place in nearby Essex for friend clams:  J.T. Farnhams.  You eat your fried clams sitting on picnic tables overlooking the marsh looking back at Ipswich, and the house below, which I always think is going to be claimed by the marsh but never is.

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

October 13, 2011

Peirce-Nichols without Paint

By daseger

Last weekend the absolutely beautiful weather and the Halloween season combined to make Salem a very busy place.  There were crowds of people on the streets and sidewalks, even in the McIntire Historic District, away from the tacky witchcraft sites.  In the midst of it all was an oasis of peace and tranquility:  the Peirce-Nichols House on Federal Street.  To my untrained eye, this early McIntire house looks similar to the house I referenced in my last post; like the former Derby Mansion on Washington Street, it is a transitional Georgian/early Federal house (built in 1782) that received a high Federal makeover (1801) by the iconic Salem architect.  But fortunately for all, this house is still standing, owned and maintained by the Peabody Essex Museum since 1917.

The first thing you notice about the Peirce-Nichols house is not the house itself but its fence, topped with hand-carved wooden urns carved by McIntire and restored by Colonial Revival architect William G. Rantoul in the 1920s.  As I was walking by, dazed as usual by the urns, I noticed the gate was open and walked around back to take a few pictures of the terraced garden, which used to extend all the way to the North River, but shrank considerably (like the river) over the nineteenth century due to the infrastructure needs of the city.

The garden, though peaceful, really is a shadow of its former self so I spent more time in the courtyard between the house and the stables.  Outbuildings are interesting anyway, but as the house is being painted it was also a place and a time to examine the unveiled, unpainted work of McIntire.  Unlike the fence urns, the master architect probably didn’t carve the wide pilasters himself, but looking at their scraped surfaces was an engaging way to take in a rather imposing house.

The photographs: a stable door, looking back at the house through the garden and stables, the back of the house, and unpainted details.

Front facade:  the  Peirce-Nichols House in  a 1920s “City” Maynard Workshop postcard.


12 Comments   |  tags: , | posted in Houses, Salem

October 7, 2011

Salem Staircases

By daseger

Staircases are one of the most interesting features of older homes as what could be a very utilitarian detail is often not.  Given its history, Salem has tons of really interesting stairways, in both private homes and public buildings, dating from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.  This post contains a rather random selection of some of my favorites, but certainly not all.  I put in one shot of our staircase, although it’s really not all that impressive, as the original simple Federal-style railing was ripped out in the 1850s and replaced with a rather bulky (though solid mahogany) “improvement”.  I didn’t want to bother all-my-Salem-friends-with-nice-staircases (because they all do) but I did bother one, as I wanted to feature one of my very favorites:  look at this beautiful suspended spiral staircase unfold.

This is the amazing staircase of the Jabez Smith House, built around 1806 on upper Essex Street and now the home of my friends Dan (an architect), Betsy (an interior designer), and their two young daughters.  Besides this elegant entryway, this house has a living room that extends the width of the street, with fireplaces at each end, and you can see the rest of the first floor (along with 12 other decorated historic buildings) in early December when it is featured on Historic Salem’s 32nd Annual Christmas in Salem tour.

Below is another spiral staircase, in the Saltonstall-Saunders House on Chestnut Street.  The next succession of photographs were all taken by Mary Harrod Northend (1850-1926), the Salem-born photographer, author, and Colonial Revival aficionado, a colleague and contemporary of Wallace Nutting and Frank Cousins.  The first photograph is from her 1911 book Colonial Homes and their Furnishings and the rest are from Historic Homes of New England (1914).  After the Saltonstall staircase, there is a rather grainy photograph of the staircase in Samuel McIntire’s Cook-Oliver House, also built in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and the staircases of the seventeenth-century Pickering House and two eighteenth-century houses (left is an unidentified Norman Street house, right is the John Derby Mansion of Washington Street–neither survive).

You can see that the owners of the Cook-Oliver House have simply draped a hall runner on their stairs, which strikes me as a great example of “Yankee thrift”.  Another example, which I have seen on many second-floor Salem stairs, is provided by these upper stairs in another McIntire building, the Peirce-Nichols House (1782 and after 1801).  Painting a runner on the upper staircase to mimic an expensive carpet runner on the first is a neat trick, and as you can see below,  I did the same thing on my second-to-third-floor stairway and saved quite a bit of money in the process.

Peirce-Nichols Second-floor Stairway. Photograph courtesy of Jim Steinhart, 2011

Two last photographs of more of my favorite Salem staircases:  a HABS shot of the elegant central stairway in the Joshua Ward House (1784-88) from the Library of Congress, and the front hall of the Brookhouse Home for Aged Women, with an interesting lattice detail on its stairs.

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

September 18, 2011

End-of-Summer Gardens

By daseger

I love muted tones in gardens anyway, so late summer gardens are just my thing.  Here are some photographs of two very different gardens:  my own humble garden and those of Glen Magna Farms in Danvers, the summer home of Salem’s Derby Family.  I was in this part of Danvers (originally called Salem Village) yesterday, getting some images for upcoming posts on the Witch Trials (beware:  next week is a very important week in the history of the Trials), and so I took a detour to Glen Magna.  Though the property came into the Derby family in 1812, the estate as it exists today is largely the vision of Ellen Peabody Endicott, a Derby descendant who significantly expanded and redesigned the house and its gardens after 1892.  Her grandson moved Samuel McIntire’s magnificent summer house (1793) from Salem to Danvers in 1901.

My garden:  including a close-up of a squirrel (I think it’s the same one) who climbs up and down a dogwood tree all day long knocking off and burying its red berries.

And now for the magnificent Glen Magna:  the house, Mrs. Endicott by John Singer Sargent (1901), McIntire’s summer house, and surrounding gardens.

Ellen Peabody Endicott by John Singer Sargent, 1901

Second Floor Interior of Derby Summer House, HABS, Library of Congress, 1960

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

September 12, 2011

Cape Contrasts

By daseger

We were on the outer Cape this past glorious weekend for fishing, biking, and looking around.  In Provincetown, I was immediately impressed by the renovation of the new Public Library (the former Center Methodist Church), which is nearing completion.  It looks really beautiful, and provides a striking contrast to another Provincetown building, hopefully just beginning its restoration (there’s an architect’s sign out front).

Some more weekend shots:  a Provincetown pilgrim, piping plover tracks in the sand (looks like a secret code to me!), and the amazing sunset from Race Point on Saturday night.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Houses

September 9, 2011

An Abandoned House

By daseger

I find old abandoned houses captivating, and there is one in Salem that is particularly so.  The 1807 house off Federal Street has so much going for it:  its size, scale, and elegant transitional stature, its generous lot, its location, on a shady traffic-free court bordered by the Ropes Mansion Garden, and its overall sense of (faded) grandeur.  But it is abandoned—or is it?  This summer, the garden was cropped for the first time I can recall, and a building permit appeared in a dusty downstairs window.  Signs of hope for this old house.

I don’t know much about the history of this house, but almost from the moment I came to Salem I heard an interesting anecdote about it.  In the late 1970s, while the Merchant-Ivory film The Europeans was being filmed in the adjacent garden over which the house overlooks, its owner placed anachronistic twentieth-century electronic items in each window in a rather overt protest against the disturbances of filming the mid-nineteenth century period piece.  This story has become an urban legend and it is just that.  Last night, Turner Classic Movies aired The Europeans and I saw it for the first time, including the radio-free and television-free windows of our abandoned house, behind Lee Remick in the garden.

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

August 23, 2011

Ivy House

By daseger

Just a quick post today: a stately brick house in the winter, on a street not far from Salem Common, becomes a lively ivy house in the summer.

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

August 19, 2011

Urban Cottages

By daseger

Inspired by one of my favorite blogs, An Urban Cottage, the relative popularity of one of my posts, “Diminutive Dwellings”, as well as by the houses themselves, I’ve gathered some photographs of  some Salem cottages, most of which were built in the early and mid-nineteenth century.  One of the best things about living in a small city is the sheer variety of architectural styles, as well as the presence of buildings of very different sizes, sometimes even adjacent to one another.  Salem is renowned for its grand Federal mansions, but it certainly has its share of smaller-scaled houses, many of which are equally impressive, in an altogether different way.  In fact, it was difficult for me to narrow down my choices; I think I will need at least a part two, and maybe a three and four.  I tried to include structures from a variety of neighborhoods, but have left some notable ones out, at least for now.  It was also difficult to discern exactly what a “cottage” is, beyond just a small house, so basically I just chose small houses that I liked in a very arbitrary manner.

First up, some “mini mansards”.  There are lots of big Victorian houses with mansard roofs in Salem, particularly along Lafayette Street, but there are also several cottages with these roofs, located primarily outside the city center, in North and South Salem.  This first house is impressive down to the smallest detail, including its great flower boxes.

Two South Salem mansard cottages are below.  The first is a favorite of nearly everyone I know, for its prime harbor-front location (which you unfortunately can’t see from my photograph) , its cupola, and its overall cuteness. It was also featured in the early 90s Bette Midler-Sarah Jessica Parker film Hocus Pocus quite prominently (if I remember correctly).

In the historic center of Salem, there are lots of Georgian colonial cottages, most with gambrel roofs.  These little houses are colonial in style, but several of them were built well after the Revolution, as late as 1830; they must have looked quite antiquated when the Greek Revivals started popping up.  The houses below are all located on streets running off the Common and Derby Street.

This last group of cottages cannot be tied together by a common architectural style; they represent the variety I referenced above and are all just adorable.  There are Greek and Gothic Revival cottages in North Salem, a pair of shingled cottages on Derby, both former stores and connected by their owner by landscaping and paint, and an eighteenth-century cottage moved to its present location on Orne Square after the great fire of 1914.

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

August 15, 2011

Cars on Chestnut

By daseger

From two wheels to four: another annual event tied in with Salem’s Heritage Days in August is the Phillips House‘s Antique Car Meet, held yesterday right here on Chestnut Street.  Though not as large a gathering of antique automobiles as that sponsored by its sister Historic New England property, the Codman House, earlier this summer, the Phillips Meet is a bit more intimate and engaging because the cars are parked on the street,where they belong, as opposed to out in a field.  The first floor of the house was open for tours, as was the carriage house out back, home to two rare and HUGE Pierce Arrows and a nice assortment of horse-drawn carriages.

The last car above is a powder pink Edsel!  Below, what looks like a surrey with a fringe on top in the Carriage House, and peaking through at one of the Pierce Arrows.

Just another old car parked on the street, yesterday, and one of similar vintage traveling down (or up) the street in its own time, below.  Chestnut Street is one-way in the other direction now, so this car looks odd to me:  I want to say, turn around, you’re going to crash into someone to the long-dead driver.  Finally, an amazing photograph courtesy of my friend Martha, a North Shore caterer extraordinaire (Lantern Hill ) with deep Chestnut Street roots who has been making some of her old family photographs available to the public.  Pictured is Mrs. Mary Northey Wheatland out for a drive on what looks like nearby Essex Street, in the winter of 1904.

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