Tag Archives: Architecture

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

March 4, 2012

Botts Court

By daseger

I think it’s time for a simple, literal streets of Salem post, so today we have some photographs of a small “street” that runs between Chestnut and Essex Streets in the McIntire Historic District:  Botts Court.  This charming little way is named after the Bott family, who settled here in Salem in the eighteenth century, but the possessive is never used:  all streets lose the possessive over time.  As you can see, it’s quite narrow, so it is one-way and that’s the way I’ll present it. On the corner of Chestnut and Botts Court is one of my very favorite Salem houses (there are so many):  the Bott-Fabens House, built before 1800 and before Chestnut Street:  the entrance that you see here was moved from the west (Court) side to the south side in the 1880s by the Faben family, presumably after Chestnut Street became the street on which to live. The bay window over the entrance was added at that time as well, when there must have been a bay window-building boom in Salem (and elsewhere, I’m sure).  I think the entrance’s window tracery is beautiful, and there is a very patriotic eagle as well.  This is one of several houses in Salem associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne; he lived here for a time while he was working (unhappily) at the Custom House.

Turning the corner, we’re on Botts Court, which was clearly laid out from Essex Street (Salem’s main street, dating from the seventeenth century) rather than Chestnut (developed as a very early example of “tract housing” by Salem’s merchant princes after 1805). This is very evident because of the presence of the three Georgian houses on the right-hand side of the street: great houses which still look like they’re in their 18th century milieu because of their protected Court location. On the other side of the street there are great houses too, but they were built much later. The owners of the houses on the next street over (Hamilton) must have sold parcels of property in the later nineteenth century, and Botts Court experienced a flurry of building that must have changed its character rather dramatically. I first came to Salem about 20 years ago when I was in graduate school studying English history, and as I really wanted to learn about the history of my new city, I started doing plaque research for Historic Salem, Inc.  Several Botts Court houses were my first assignments, so some (not all) of my speculation about the development of the court can be confirmed by this research.

Georgian houses on one side of Botts Court.

The best example of the late nineteenth-century development of Botts Court is the charming Tudor Revival building below:  an “automobile house” (that’s what it said on the building permit) built by the owner (then the Mayor of Salem) of the large colonial revival house on Hamilton Street, behind it. In the next century, it was conveyed to the owners of the adjacent Botts Court house, along with a particularly charming garden.

The “automobile house” of changing ownership.

I’m losing my sun, and we’re at the end of the very short but very charming Botts Court.  As you will notice, there are front porches on both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses on the court; a rarity in downtown Salem but not on this little protected path.  The last (early) Georgian house below, located on the corner of Botts and Essex Street (right next to the Salem Athenaeum and its expansive garden) used to be painted a bubblegum pink, marking the transition from the serious main street to the more whimsical Botts Court.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, 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 29, 2012

Adapted Armories

By daseger

I read an article yesterday in the current issues of Preservation magazine about adapted uses for armories that made me feel sad and regretful, sad because the Salem Armory was lost and regretful that I didn’t do more to save it. I wrote about the armory story in a previous post, along with other preservation losses in Salem, so I won’t bore you with the details now, but I was on the Redevelopment Authority during the early stages of the battle to save it and wish I could have done more.  The fire-ravaged armory was just such an eyesore, and the “demolition by neglect” policy of the Peabody Essex Museum, seemed to make its eventual demolition inevitable, a fait accompli.  But once a building of that stature is gone, the streetscape is never the same.

The Preservation article, by the wonderfully-named Margaret Shakespeare, focuses on two Portland armories on either ends of the country.  The Portland, Maine Armory has been turned into the  Portland Regency Hotel, while the Portland, Oregon armory has been transformed into a theater for the Portland Center Stage Company.  These building look amazing, but perhaps more importantly, their environment is lively:  so different from that part of Essex Street in Salem where our armory once stood.

The Portland (Maine) Regency Hotel in its first incarnation as the State of Maine Armory, and now.

The Portland, Oregon Armory exterior and interior mezzanine.

The Salem Armory was demolished  in 2000, leaving its rear drill shed reconstituted as a Visitor’s Center for the Salem Maritime National Historic site and an always-empty “Armory Park” in its wake.  In the intervening decade between then and now, both a new hotel (The Salem Waterfront) and a new theater company (The Salem Theatre Company) have come to town.


4 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Design

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

January 12, 2012

Steam Power

By daseger

I’ve been doing some research on Salem manufacturers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for an upcoming fundraising event at the Salem Athenaeum with a steampunk theme (lots more on this later) and am a bit overwhelmed:  there were so many.  America was certainly a country of makers a century ago; now it seems like we’re mostly sellers. Anyway, since I’m taking the steam in steampunk literally I have found myself focusing on all sort of machinery makers in general and the Locke Regulator Company of Salem in particular.  This company, founded by two New Hampshire brothers, Nathaniel and Alpheus Locke, who came down to Salem to make their fortune, grew from a back-of-the-barn operation in the 1870s and 80s to big business after its incorporation in 1902.  The large Locke factory, pictured on the first piece of “industrial ephemera” below (from 1910), was located on the banks of the North River in Salem, now the site of a junkyard and a car wash.  According to the claims of the last advertisement below, by 1913 the Company was the largest Manufacturers of Steam Vehicle Parts & Fittings in America.

The Company experimented with automobile manufacture in the first decade of the twentieth century (that’s another dynamic industry at this time; it seems like every town or city of a certain size had several small automobile makers within its midst), building a little “runabout” called the Puritan, but I think they must have soon realized that their future was in parts.

a 1902 Puritan steamer from the Early American Automobiles website; Locke shears from the same year.

The Locke Regulator Company appears to have been a family business, both before and after its incorporation and period of dynamic growth.  Alpheus retired from the business  in the 1890s, but Nathaniel continued on, with his brother-in-law, son, and son-in-law all working for the company at one time or another.  Their factory was in North Salem, as were their residences, primarily on or in the vicinity of Dearborn Street, very close to the threatened homestead of another prominent family that I wrote about in my previous post.  The Ropes family and the various Lockes were neighbors, and perhaps friends.  At the turn of the last century, Nathaniel and his wife Sophronia were living on one side of Dearborn Street, in a “new” house built for them in 1874, while their son Albert was living almost just across the street, in an even newer (and bigger) house built for his family in 1896.

Dearborn Street just before World War One; the Albert N. Locke House yesterday.


13 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

January 10, 2012

The other Ropes House

By daseger

In my last post I showed pictures of the barren and brown (white this morning!) garden of the perfectly-preserved and well-protected Ropes Mansion in downtown Salem, but yesterday also brought sad news of another Ropes Mansion in Salem, presently in imminent danger of demolition.  This is the Ropes house in North Salem, which has belonged to another branch of that eminent Salem family (original seventeenth-century land grantees) since its construction in the later nineteenth century.

Here is the house and its outbuildings yesterday afternoon, before the dusting of snow that arrived last night.  The cupola-topped carriage house–also threatened–is particularly charming, so I took another photograph from the vantage point of a neighbor’s well-manicured lawn.

As many of the older houses in North Salem (Northfields) once were, the Ropes house is situated on a large lot with mature trees, including the magnificent copper beech you see above.  The wrap-around porch on the house evokes the earlier era of the “garden estate”, when prosperous Salem families established “rural” residences (both year-round and seasonal) across the North River from the busy city center.  The 1820 map below, drawn by Jonathan Saunders based on late eighteenth-century census materials, illustrates the relationship between North Salem and Salem proper in the nineteenth century–I placed a big star on the present location of the Ropes house.

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

For as long as I’ve lived in Salem, everyone has had their eye on this house, coveting its graceful presence and large lot.  It remained in the Ropes family until this past fall, when it suddenly appeared on the market and sold relatively quickly despite the fact that the city of Salem had revoked an occupancy permit a while ago.  Now the present owners have put forward plans to demolish the buildings and build three houses on the lot, but perhaps save some of the trees.  These plans are now before the Historic Commission, so we’ll see what happens.

 

21 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

January 9, 2012

In Winter Gardens

By daseger

Winters are great for assessing the “bones” of a garden, especially when you have no snow.  That’s certainly the case this year for New England:  lots of bones, no winter wonderland.  When I compare the glistening photographs from last year with those below, there’s obviously a stark difference, but there is also a certain kind of beauty in the stark brown landscape.

My garden looks pretty dreary except for a few bright spots captured on a 60-degree January day and the boxwood “balls” and germander border, which looks like it’s still alive (but is certainly not).  The brightest spot by far is the scarlet cardinal who spends a lot time back there, but I’ve given up trying to capture him on film.  The minute I pick up my camera, he flies away.

The Ropes Garden looks very bare, but if you’re not distracted by the flowers and colors you notice other things, like this amazing tree close to the house. I included a postcard from 1910 taken from the same vantage point, so you see the dramatic change, as well as a close-up of the texture of the tree.

A few more images of January gardens around Salem: on Warren, Beckford and Pickering Streets, in my general neighborhood, and across town at the historic herb garden behind the Derby House on Derby Street, on the grounds of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.

Vincent van Gogh found beauty not only in sunflowers and blooming gardens but also in barren ones, as illustrated by his drawing from March, 1884:  Winter Garden (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), one of several pen (black iron gall ink, now decayed–and decaying–into a sepia tone) drawings of the bleak landscape of Nuenen he made at that time.

For beautiful photographs of winter gardens–and gardens all year long and in many places–visit one of my favorite landscape (and travel!) blogs from across the Atlantic:  terrain.

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