Tag Archives: Architecture

August 17, 2011

New Life for an Old Salem Church

By daseger

Salem has been the scene of almost-continuous construction projects since I’ve lived here; some have changed the streetscape for the better, some for the worse (in my humble opinion).  One of the largest is nearing completion this summer:  the construction of a brand new “Judicial Center” on Federal Street adjacent to the previous courthouses, all sadly decommissioned.  This location is certainly appropriate, as this stretch of Federal Street is judicial Salem’s legal row, but it begs comparisons between the new center and the older courthouses.  Probably the architects (Goody Clancy) knew this, and certainly they received pressure from the preservationist community to retain something of what was on the site, especially as three nineteenth-century domestic buildings were taken down to make way for the HUGE boxy central building.  Consequently one building was retained and moved to serve as a link between old and new and a reminder of those days when architectural proportion ruled:  the former First Baptist Church of Salem.  Here is the church (now reconfigured as a law library) on the corner with the new complex behind and beside it.

The original location of the church was to the right and back a bit, where you see the large curtain wall now.  When it was moved several years ago (there’s a picture in an earlier post), it was not only moved forward but repositioned on a slight angle, following the lines of Federal Street.  This is one of the few concessions the entire project has made to the pre-existing streetscape.  Though the jury is still out for me on the entire complex, I think that  church/library is an important component, not only filling a gap but softening the transition between old and new, human-scaled and HUGE.  Below is the current streetscape on a recent rainy day.

From the foreground to the background we have the church/library, the new judicial center, which is comprised of the huge building behind the curtain wall (very imposing as you come into Salem along Route 114; I’m going to spare you a view for now) and the adjacent building with glass and columns, which (I guess) is supposed to effect another transition to the former Colonial Revival Probate Court, and then the Romanesque and Greek Revival court houses beyond. Below are some century-old shots of these court houses from the Library of Congress.  I’ve always found the Greek Revival one in the second picture to be really beautiful, and its the Romanesque neighbor has an amazing interior, including (of course) a law library.  I worry about these buildings’ fates.

It’s quite a succession of architectural styles, and then you get to the new complex, anchored by the old church/library.  The contractors not only repositioned the building, they repointed it and repaired its trim, revealing some beautiful details that I had never noticed before.  When I did look at this building before its big move, it did not strike me as particularly church-like, which is understandable given that it was stripped of its impressive steeple some time ago (in 1926, according to Bryant Tolles, Architecture in Salem).  Fortunately there are lots of accessible images of the church in its earlier form, making it all to obvious that this is a structure that has gone through several transformations in its two-hundred-year lifetime.

Photography credits:  a beautiful Frank Cousins photograph in the Urban Landscape collection at the Duke University Library, two undated postcards which I believe are from around the turn of the twentieth century, and two nineteenth-century stereoscopic cards from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

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July 30, 2011

Late July, Downtown Salem

By daseger

For the last weekend in July, a few photographs taken during a leisurely stroll downtown on an absolutely beautiful day; the heat had broken and everyone was out and about, thankful to be out of their air-conditioner-enforced seclusion.  I started on Front Street, where there are so many great shops, and then made my way towards the House of the Seven Gables off Derby Street and then back to the McIntire Historic District along Essex Street.  It was not supposed to be an architectural excursion, it was supposed to be a day for flower boxes and streets scenes, but (as usual, in Salem) I couldn’t help myself.

Front Street window boxes, and fabric topiaries in the window of MarketPlace Quilts.

Work on one of the gables at the House of the Seven Gables, a much-photographed entrance with its summer louvered door, two window boxes on Turner Street (I like the nautical ropes supporting the second one), and one of my favorite houses, a Greek Revival cottage across from the Gables which looks like it has its own adjacent summer house.

Speaking of summer houses, the ultimate:  the Samuel McIntire-designed Derby-Beebe summer house in the center of the Peabody Essex Museum campus.  Amazing McIntire detail lavished on single-room seasonal  structure!  I was trying to be creative with the last shot and capture three windows, but I got a car and the house across the street as well.  The other McIntire/Derby summer house, larger and even more ornate, was originally situated at Elias Hasket Derby’s farm on Lafayette Street and moved to Glen Magna Farm in nearby Danvers in 1901.

Random scenes on and around Essex Street:  a very patriotic window and a very classical border, a Salem pedicab(by) takes a break, lunch in the Japanese garden of the Peabody Essex Museum. 

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July 21, 2011

Early Evening in the Ropes Garden

By daseger

I was reserving a post on the garden of the Ropes Mansion, built in 1727, considerably altered (especially the interior) in the nineteenth century, and under the stewardship of the Peabody Essex Museum since the late 1970s, for a bit later in the summer, but when I walked through it the other night I felt that it should be captured NOW.  The house and the garden are on upper Essex Street, just a few doors down from the misnamed “Witch House”, and the garden gate is almost always open to the public.  The garden was laid out in 1912 by the prominent Salem horticulturalist John Robinson, whose own house and garden were only steps away on Summer Street (now sadly subdivided and hardtop).  It is always referred to as a Colonial Revival garden, meaning that it is characterized by the use of “old-fashioned” flowers from the Colonial era (hollyhocks!) bursting forth from defined beds, accessed by axial paths, and all enclosed by at least one (hopefully brick) wall.  Indeed, the Ropes Garden has all that and more:  22 garden beds, a nice mix of traditional annuals (for color) and perennials, a wisteria arbor-bench, a pond, lots of gravel paths, and older shrubs and trees, adorned with helpful zinc labels.

A few photographs of the house, today and in the early and mid-twentieth century, to set the scene.  I really do think that the Ropes Mansion is one of the most beloved of all the older Salem house museums, because of its accessible Essex Street location, its “haunted” reputation, and the fact that it narrowly escaped serious damage only a couple of years ago when a malfunctioning heat gun started a fire during  a paint-removal process.  The quick and effective response of the Salem Fire Department earned them a historic preservation award from Historic Salem, Inc. last year.

HABS, Library of Congress

And now for the garden.  It was quite renown in the first half of the twentieth century, owing to the popularity of the Colonial Revival and “Grandmothers’ Gardens”, so I’ve included a few hyper-colorful postcards as well as contemporary shots, taken in the early evening.  The backdrop of the garden when looking north is a wonderful Federal brick house that has been virtually abandoned for 20 years or so, but is showing signs of life lately.

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July 18, 2011

Cars at the Codman Estate

By daseger

I went out to Historic New England’s Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts this weekend to view what must have been hundreds of antique automobiles parked in its surrounding fields.  As all of you in this area know, Sunday was a hot and bright day, and all that chrome seemed to make it hotter and brighter!  I liked the juxtaposition of the twentieth-century cars with the eighteenth-century house; the Codman house, alternatively known as “The Grange”, was built around 1740 but considerably altered in the 1790s, so that it looks like a proper (though a bit boxy) Salem Federal house to an amateur architectural historian such as myself.

I am sorry to disappoint antique automobile aficionados, but I arrived a bit late and wanted to take as many photographs as possible so I didn’t gather that much information about the cars.  This is really a shame, as their owners (all men, as far as I could tell) were extremely eager to tell onlookers all about them—both the history of the car and their history with the car.  I wish I had had more time to hear every car tale.  For the most part, except for a few Jaguars and MGs, this was an American car meet-up:  all models of Fords, Studebakers, Hudsons, Packards, Cadillacs. Lots of trucks!  I did see a few original Beetles, but the only older BMW was decidedly late for the party and turned away.

Not a great picture, but very representative of the day:  great variety and gleaming chrome.

I kept checking back, but I never saw this guy, only his legs.

  For some reason, I was particularly taken with all the trucks on display. Vintage trucks are so much more attractive than the behemoths on the road today! This early REO truck got a lot of attention (I liked its wheels).


Lots of big, LONG mid-century American cars, both convertibles and hard-tops.  The Thunderbirds seemed particularly numerous and beautiful, both inside and out.

My very favorite (despite Mr. Nader), the Corvair, and a perfect Packard.

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July 16, 2011

A Grand Garden Estate in North Salem

By daseger

A century ago, North Salem (still sometimes referred to by its colonial name:  Northfields) was a horticultural hotspot, with several large private gardens, the “garden cemetery” Greenlawn, and the remnants of the Manning Orchard in its midst.  On Dearborn Street, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s uncle Robert Manning had established his nursery earlier in the previous century (and where Hawthorne himself briefly lived) there was a grand garden estate that was connected to some of Salem’s most prominent mercantile families:  the Dodges, the Bertrams, and the Emmertons.

The house around which this garden estate was created still stands on Dearborn Street but its garden is gone, divided up into house lots in the 1950s and 1960s.  A circular street now exists where once paths lead from the house to the North River through a meticulously landscaped garden.  According to Bryant Tolles, author of Architecture in Salem, the house’s origins are somewhat shrouded in mystery.  Its columns give it a Greek Revival appearance but apparently the date 1790 is scratched on an interior plaster wall. The documented history of the house begins with Pickering Dodge, Jr. in the 1830s:  the son of  wealthy Salem merchant with a Federal seat on Chestnut Street, he apparently wanted a “country house” (a mile or so down the road) where he could engage in horticultural pursuits.  He purchased the pre-existing Dearborn Street house, probably added the columns, and began laying out the garden.  Over the next century, the garden was expanded and embellished, probably most dramatically when the estate was in the possession of Jennie Bertram Emmerton, the fabulously wealthy daughter of Salem’s great merchant philanthropist Captain John Bertram and mother of House of Seven Gables Settlement Association Caroline Emmerton, in the 1880s.

In back and on both sides of the house was the lush garden, revealed by the photographs and plans produced for the Works Progress Administration’s Historic American Building Survey around 1940. From what we can see of it, the garden still looks pretty good, but there is an evident sense of neglect about the place, probably best represented by the “leaning” octagonal summerhouse.

All historic photographs from the Library of Congress’s Built in America collection.

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July 12, 2011

After the Duel

By daseger

I’m a day late to commemorate the infamous duel which took place on July 11, 1804 between sitting Vice President Aaron Burr and the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, resulting in the latter’s death.  Better late than never, however, as this was a shocking and momentous moment in the new nation’s history.  If you just run a cursory search in a digital database such as Early American Imprints, you can easily uncover a litany of literary tributes to the martyred Hamilton, in the form of eulogies, sermons, letters, poems and accounts of the dreadful event and its aftermath published in newspapers all over the country in the summer of 1804.

With time came more deliberative reactions to the Duel and attempts to memorialize it, in the form of historical accounts, prints of the scene (Weehawken, New Jersey) and even souvenir plates and historical romances (after all, what is more romantic than a duel?).  The first marble statue to be produced in the United States, sculptor Ball Hughes’ Statue of Hamilton, was erected in the Grand Rotunda of the New York Merchants Exchange in 1835, only to be destroyed six months later in the Great Fire that swept the city later that year.

Print illustration of the Hughes Hamilton Statue, NYPL

1830 Print of Caleb Wheeler Etching, NYPL

Booth's History of New York, 1886

Duel Souvenir Plate, Collection of the New York Historical Society

Cover of Blennerhassett, or the Decrees of Fate. A Romance founded upon Events in American History by Charles Felton Pidgin, 1901

Salem was no exception in the expressed immediate outpouring of anger and grief at the killing of Hamilton, but the most lasting tribute the Federalist icon was built of bricks, not words:  the soon-to-be completed “new” Assembly House on Chestnut Street, designed by Samuel McIntire, was named Hamilton Hall in his honor.  For me, this building is quite literally the monument next door.  I enjoy seeing the aged russet bricks and McIntire’s spectacular carved eagle and swags every day, but I must admit that I don’t immediately think about Hamilton when I do so.

Hamilton Hall in 1940, HABS, Library of Congress

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July 8, 2011

George Washington Dined Here

By daseger

Of all the Georgian houses in Salem, the house that reminds me the most of the Lady Pepperell House up in Kittery is the Assembly House, formally known as the Cotting-Smith Assembly House, which has been in the possession of the Peabody Essex Museum since 1965.  It’s probably just the pediment and pilasters, because these are two very different houses in two very different settings.  The Assembly House was built in 1782 by an unknown architect commissioned by Salem’s Federalist-leaning merchants and shipowners, who financed its construction by selling shares.  In the 1790s it was substantially redesigned by Samuel McIntire for its transition to a private residence.  And just before that, President George Washington stopped by for a reception in his honor in October of 1789.

President Washington was on a grand tour of New England in the Fall of 1789, and he came to Salem after four days in Boston and a day trip up the North Shore.  His general impressions of  everywhere he went and everyone he met are all recorded in his diaries, which are easily accessible at the Library of  Congress.  It is so obvious that Washington was a farmer first and a President second from these diaries:  his longest observations are reserved for the landscape and the potential fertility of the soil.  He arrives in Salem after a short stop in Marblehead, where he observed that the houses are old—the streets dirty—and the common people not very clean.  Salem, by contrast, is deemed a neat Town, said to contain 8 or 9000 Inhabitants.  Its exports are chiefly Fish, Lumber & Provisions.  They have in the East Indies Trade at this time 13 sale of Vessels.  At the Assembly House reception on the evening of October 29, the President observed the attendance of at least an hundred handsome and well dressed ladies.

Nearly ten years after Washington’s visit, McIntire was commissioned to transform the rather plain building into a fashionable residence, and the house was expanded and redesigned and considerable surface detail was added, though the elaborate entrance was added several decades later.  I’m not sure when the carriage house out back was added, but it certainly lacks any McIntire-ish detail.

There are some great photographs of the Assembly House from the turn of the last century, as well as some taken by Walker Evans in the 1930s which I showcased in an earlier post.  Certainly the popularity of Frank Cousins’ works and those of other national photograph publishers raised the stature of the “Old Assembly House”, as did the whole “Washington Slept Here” movement.  As you can see  below, the house and its story even served as copy for a 1915 advertisement for (lead) house paint, though the history is wrong:  the Marquis de Lafayette dined at the Assembly House 5 years prior to General Washington’s visit, not with him in 1789.

Photographic Sources:  Andrew Dickson White Collection  of Architectural Photographs at Cornell University Library, The New York Public Library Digital Gallery, the Library of Congress.

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July 6, 2011

Lady Pepperell and Her House

By daseger

On our way up to York Harbor last week we stopped at one of my very favorite houses, the Lady Pepperell House in Kittery Point.  I can’t remember when I first saw this house, but by my teens I was biking over from York to gaze at it and sneak around the grounds.  It just seemed so effortlessly elegant and graceful, when compared to both the colonial architecture of York Village and the Victorian cottages of York Harbor.  We didn’t have to sneak around this time, as the owner graciously let us walk around the grounds and take some photographs.

Dolphins over the front door!

The house was built in 1760 by the newly-widowed Lady Mary Hirst Pepperell, and its architectural history has already been carefully recounted by The Down East Dilettante.  Actually I find myself a bit more interested in the lady than the house at this point in my life, for some reason.  Lady Mary appears to have been a woman who was surrounded by very powerful and ambitious men all her life, until the latter part, when she clearly lived life on her own terms.  She also had solid Salem connections:  her paternal grandfather William Hirst was a prosperous Salem planter and her maternal grandfather, the diarist and Judge Samuel Sewall, was on the bench during the Witch Trials.  Her father, Grove Hirst, apparently made a fortune as a Boston merchant, making her a very good catch for her husband, the up-and-coming William Pepperell, also a successful merchant (out of Kittery, then part of Massachusetts) who would go on to reap military and noble honors after he organized and led the New England expedition that captured the French garrison at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745 and became the first colonial Baronet shortly thereafter.  And so Mary became a Lady, although many references establish that her privileged Boston background and education had already made her one.

Two of Mary’s and William’s four children died in infancy, prompting her to write the poignant poem A Lamentation &c. On the Death of a Child.  Their son Andrew died in early adulthood, leaving only one surviving child, Elizabeth Pepperell Sparhawk.  Shortly after Sir William’s appointment as acting Governor of Massachusetts and Lieutenant General in 1759, he too died, leaving Mary a very wealthy widow.  She left the older Pepperell family homestead in Kittery to her grandson (who was made heir to the residue of the Pepperell fortune with the condition that abandon the surname of his birth, Sparhawk, for Pepperell) and promptly built her Georgian mansion.  When the War of Independence began 15 years later, the conspicuous Tory William Sparhawk Pepperell fled America for Britain (where he was rewarded with a new Baronet title) but his grandmother “weathered the storms of Revolution” at her home.  Mary Hirst Pepperell died in 1789, with the New England Gazetteer noting a few years later that her natural and acquired powers were said to be very respectable, and she was much admired for her wit and sweetness of manners.

A few images of Lady Pepperell and her house from Everett Schermerhorn Stackpole’s Old Kittery and her Families (1903), and two early nineteenth-century views of the house from the Detroit Publishing Company (Library of Congress) and Illustrated Memories of Portsmouth, York, York Harbor, York Beach, Kittery, Isles of Shoals, New Castle, and Rye (after 1900):

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July 5, 2011

Independence Day Idyll in York Harbor

By daseger

We spent the long holiday weekend in my hometown, York Harbor, Maine, with family and friends. Part of the larger and older town of York, the Harbor is a former Gilded Age “summer colony” where wealthy families from Boston, New York and Philadelphia whiled away their summers in 20-room shingle “cottages”, most of which still stand.  I grew up in one of these cottages, only partially winterized then and now, even though we lived in there all year long and my parents still do.  Like much of coastal York, York Harbor was and is a very different, much livelier place in the summer, and it seems to have been specially created for a warm, sunny and celebratory time such as this past weekend.

Some very random views of York Harbor, past and present, beginning with displays of the weekend colors, on a meticulously restored building on York Street, our family house (front and back, morning and early evening), and in our neighbors’ patriotic garden:

More color, and more cottages:

The first (real) cottages in York Harbor, built in the early eighteenth century, today and in the 1920s.

Historic New England’s Sayward-Wheeler House (1718), where I interned in college.

Lots of antique cars were out and about this past weekend, including a BMW 2002 which I have long coveted.

The York Harbor Reading Room, built in 1910 as a place for men to read newspapers, smoke cigars, and generally escape their families, and some men doing just that from the New England Magazine of that same year.

Artistic impressions from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries:  Martin Johnson Heade’s luminescent painting and small bronze beachcombers in the park overlooking York Harbor Beach.

Martin Johnson Heade, York Harbor, Coast of Maine, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago

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June 29, 2011

After the Fire: Fairfield Street

By daseger

Another street in Salem that was completely rebuilt almost immediately after the Great Fire of 1914, and which reflects both the architectural styles that were then popular and fire safety concerns, is Fairfield Street, just off Lafayette Street.  With its landscaped front lawns and designated driveways, Fairfield looks like a suburban enclave in more urban central Salem, and its stately architecture reinforces that impression.  With the exception of the  charming Dutch Colonial cottage which leads off below (with its substantive slate roof–I can only imagine what a boon the Fire must  have been the slate roofing industry, and of course fire-retardant asphalt shingles were just taking off too), most of the houses on Fairfield Street are Colonial Revival or Arts and Crafts Foursquare Houses built of brick, concrete or stucco: they are fortresses against future fires.

The doorway of the newly-built house above, from Frank Cousins’ Colonial Architecture  of Salem (1919).  Cousins singles out Fairfield Street as an example of the ongoing popularity of Colonial architecture, and particularly praises those architects who include details from Salem‘s old houses in their plans.

Cousins particularly liked these last two brick houses, which he found evocative of Chestnut Street’s Federal mansions in  terms of both details and composition, more so the former, I think; it was all in the details for him.

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