Tag Archives: design

June 1, 2011

Gothic Salem

By daseger

Salem is quite Gothic in several ways, but this post is specifically about Gothic buildings.  I spent my early childhood in the picturesque village of Strafford, Vermont, the site of the Senator Justin Morrill homestead, a perfect pink Gothic Revival houses that made quite an impression on me as a child.  Surely you can see why. (Sigh)

As an adult, I think I prefer the austerity of colonial and Federal houses, but Gothic buildings have a lot of charm, and Salem has quite a few nice examples.  Even though Salem was decidedly urban by the time that the Gothic Revival style became fashionable in the middle of the nineteenth century, there are still some structures that are clearly based on the “bible” of the style, Andrew Jackson Downing‘s Cottage residences, or, A series of designs for rural cottages and cottage villas, and their gardens and grounds (1842). Several of these urban Gothic Revival cottages are in the previously pastoral North Salem, including these houses on and around Buffum Street, a lovely street that runs parallel to North Street/Route 114, one of the main entrance corridors in and out of town.

  I’m not sure if this adorable cottage is Gothic Revival or a later “storybook” style from the early twentieth century.  The proportions seem a bit different than those of the verified Gothic buildings, but it’s such a great house I wanted to include it anyway.

The cottage near the entrance to Harmony Grove Cemetery, in the later nineteenth century and today. 

Closer to downtown, there are two Gothic Revival houses facing each other on Broad Street:  The Pickering House and the William Brown cottage.  Actually, the Pickering House is only masquerading as a Gothic Revival house; it is really a “First Period” structure, indeed Salem’s oldest house, built in 1651. Successive generations of the Pickering family have lived in the house until just recently, including Timothy Pickering, Secretary of War and of State in the 1790s, and in the 1840s it was updated or “gothicized”.  The very distinctive Gothic Revival fence was added at that time as well.

The Pickering House and fence today and in 1940 (HABS, Library of Congress), followed by the William Brown House, built in 1847.


The gold standard for Gothic Revival houses seems to be the  Timothy Brooks House on Lafayette Street, built in 1851.  It is certainly a stately mansion, not a cottage, and the architectural details are incredible, including the entryway, windows, and trim. It also looks to be quite closely modeled on Downing’s Design no. II:  A Cottage in the English or Rural Gothic Style.  I believe that it was a single-family house until the 1980s, and then it was converted into condominiums, with additional built units in what might have been a carriage house or other outbuildings.

HABS, Library of Congress, 1953

The Gothic Revival style was suitable for both residential and institutional architecture, and ecclesiastical and educational institutions really embraced it in the mid-nineteenth century. Think of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Boston College, to name  just a few.  Two of Salem’s most influential churches, the Unitarian First Church and Episcopal St. Peter’s, rebuilt their very old churches in a remarkably similar (Normanesque) Gothic style at the same time:  the 1830s.  Perhaps friendly competition for the newest, latest (most inspirational?) style?  It is certainly ironic that nearly thousand-year old motifs were considered “new”!

  A Frank Cousins’ photograph of the First Church in the 1890s from the NYPL Digital Gallery and the First Church today; St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.

THE KEY DETAIL:  the quatrefoil.  Once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere…..

Quatrefoils from the First Church (above) and St. Peter’s Church (below), a quatrefoil bracket from the Brooks House, and the Pickering House quatrefoil fence.

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

May 22, 2011

Houses on the Move

By daseger

There are countless ways that our ancestors were more environmental than us, though of course they didn’t see it that way:  they just didn’t like to waste.  Anything.  The whole idea of  “tear downs” would have been repellent to most people (maybe not nouveau riche millionaires) a century and more ago; if they wanted a bigger house or a house in another location, they just added on or moved the entire structure:  with horses, with oxen, by rail.  This still happens; the huge new courthouse project that is now coming to a close in Salem involved the moving of a huge brick Baptist Church and the preservationist practice of selling endangered houses for a dollar with the stipulation that they be moved is pretty standard.  But it is far less common than it was in the nineteenth century, when one gets the impression that there were many houses on the move.

The First Baptist Church on the move, January 2009 and the moving of the Peter Green house in Providence last year.

This post is one of several that I could do on houses that have been moved in Salem.  Like many older cities in the east, both public and private motivations have resulted in lots of building relocations. I have excluded the houses that have been moved by the House of the Seven Gables and the Peabody Essex Museum, both of which created “museum neighborhoods” by moving historic structures.  The latter wins the award for the house that has moved the farthest distance:  its eighteenth-century Chinese house, Yin Yu Tang, came from halfway around the world!  But even excluding these institutions, there are lots of Salem houses that have been moved, in their entirety, or in pieces.

I’m starting out with one of my very favorite houses, the Robert Manning cottage on Dearborn Street in North Salem.  This adorable  Dutch Colonial cottage was built by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s maternal uncle Robert Manning for his widowed sister, and Nathaniel lived there with his mother after his graduation from Bowdoin College.  The cottage was then across and down the street from its present location, adjacent to Manning’s own house and famous nursery, orchard and garden.  After the house passed out of the Manning family in the 1850s  it was relocated, though its original ell remained behind.

Frank Cousins Photograph, 1901

A more challenging move, both in terms of bulk and distance,  involved the Mason-Roberts-Colby-Nichols House, which was transferred from the Common to Federal Street by 60 oxen in 1818.  The relocated house then underwent a Federal makeover and acquired several additions, including the “Beverly jog” seen below.

Relocation following redevelopment: many houses in Salem were moved because of street widening and other infrastructural modifications and larger institutional building projects.  The two Georgian colonial houses below were removed from St. Peter Street to nearby Kimball Court to make way for the St. John the Baptist Church complex at the turn of the last century.  The white house on Kimball Court (which acquired some interesting pillars after its move) is one of  several houses in Salem associated with the famed navigator Nathaniel Bowditch; the other Bowditch house (the present-day headquarters of Historic Salem, Inc.), where he lived for over a decade was moved (along with the Jonathan Corwin house) to make way for street-widening in 1944.

The Bowditch (Curwen) House in its original Essex Street location: a Frank Cousins photograph circa 1900

Bowdith house corrected

And here in its proper (past) situation–thanks to Mark Coughlin!

The Bowditch House today: around the corner on North Street

The sum of all their parts:  often houses were not moved in their entirety, but in pieces, and either reconfigured in a new enlarged house or attached to a pre-existing house in another location.  It is a quite a feat to figure out when and where and how precisely all this disassembling and reassembling happened in Salem, or any other similar town, but here are a few examples of  it:  another house with Bowditch connections, a portion of which was the Samuel Curwen house and store, an interesting house moved to a side street off Derby Street in 1856 which seems to consist of at least three, if not more, earlier houses, and the amazing Benjamin Punchard house on Federal Street, whose origins are somewhat shrouded in mystery but is believed to be a product of a colonial building moved to the site a decade before the American Revolution and later Federal-era additions.

The most interesting example of a partially relocated and reconstituted house is the Phillips House on Chestnut Street, now one of Historic New England‘s properties.  The house was erected (or assembled) in 1821 by Captain Nathaniel West, who moved part of  Oak Hill, the magnificent country estate of his deceased ex-wife (Elizabeth Derby West, daughter of Elias Hasket Derby, Salem’s wealthiest merchant and perhaps America’s first millionaire) in nearby South Danvers (now Peabody) to Chestnut Street and added additional rooms to create a new (late) Federal mansion.  Mrs. West had wanted the Captain to have nothing to do with Oak Hill, but after both her death and that of one of their daughters, he inherited a third of the estate and promptly removed his inheritance to Salem, creating a “spite house” of sorts just down the road!  A century later, the Phillips family commissioned architect William Rantoul to remodel the Chestnut Street house in the Colonial Revival style, and later still, sadly, Oak Hill was demolished to make way for the Northshore Mall.

The Phillips House in 1940, HABS, Library of Congress.  Frank O. Branzetti, Photographer.

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

May 14, 2011

Student Work

By daseger

It is the end of the semester and this week was all about grading–always a humbling process which exposes the strengths and weaknesses of both instructor and students.  Sometimes I wish I could just whip out a stack of Reward of Merit cards and fill in my students’ names!  These little ephemeral scraps illustrate the evolution of assessment in American classrooms:  from handwritten Sunday School tokens of moral behavior in the eighteenth century to nineteenth-century printed cards issued to encourage more secular standards of diligence, punctuality and “comportment” and ultimately to twentieth-century report cards.  Here is a sampling of reward of merit cards from the collections of the Library of Congress, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, dating from about 1830 through the 1880s.

A strikingly simple reward of merit card from the Rhode Island Historical Society via its delightful blog, A Lively Experiment:

This looks like a John Derian decoupage tray in the making! (Actually he’s already produced a reward of merit tray, available here).  While looking for some more examples in the online catalogue of the Winterthur Library’s Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, I came across the work of the New York Printer-Publisher Charles Magnus (1829-1900) and got quite distracted. Magnus came over from Germany around 1848 and soon flourished in New York City; his output included all forms of stationary and really beautiful birds’ eye views of North America’s major cities.  During the Civil War,  Magnus expressed his passionate pro-Union sentiments by issuing envelopes emblazoned with the seals of all the confederate states encircled by the Devil!  Well, as you can read, I’m going off on a tangent….here are two of Magnus’s rewards of merit:

While digitally digging around in the online archives of the Winterthur Library, I also found the image below, from a scrapbook of drawings, clippings, wallpaper scraps, and fabric swatches assembled by an anonymous young design student or interior decorator in the 1880s, maybe in Salem or the Salem area according to the stationers’ label:

I find this unbelievably charming–so much so that I’m gently forcing it into this post with only the Winterthur catalogue description that it is the work of a “young” decorator!  There’s something about (good) student work that is captivating; I think it is the recognition of potential combined with the lack of established, learned constraints.  Here we have the (giant!) bellows over the fireplace, a crazy-colorful rug, and somewhat strange scale and placement, all combined to create a really unique image.  The last stack of papers I have to correct are those from my research and writing seminar, our Department’s capstone course in which the students complete a serious research paper on whatever topic they choose.  You don’t have to imagine the diversity of topics; I’ve got papers here on Marblehead fishermen, New Bedford whalers, a mythical witch in central Massachusetts, the great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, the Viking occupation of England, the building of the US Capitol, advertising images of 1950s housewives, and several on the development of New England amusement parks (for some reason!) including Salem’s own Willows, all of which deserve much more substantive assessment than a cursory reward of merit.

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

May 8, 2011

Greenaway Mothers

By daseger

The British children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) created a distinct silhouette for her depictions of children, but “Greenaway Mothers” are immediately recognizable as well:  nostalgically attired in the same Regency cottons as their children, perfectly coiffed curls swept up in a seemingly effortless updo (always adorned with the appropriate hat),  participating in the scene rather than just looking on.  And husbandless–there are no “Greenaway fathers” to be found.

Greenaway grew up in the East End of London at the height of the Industrial Revolution, but she was able to spend precious time outside the city staying with relatives in the countryside, the setting for the perfect worlds she created in illustrations for over 60 books and countless serial publications, including The Girl’s Own Annual, for which the 1887 lithograph above was made.  Along with Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, Greenaway was one of the so-called “Nursery Triumvirate” who worked with color printer Edmund Evans to revolutionize the children’s picture book industry in the later nineteenth century.  Greenaway’s works included multiple editions of Mother Goose and ABC books, as well as “new” story books, and within a decade of the beginning of her career she was the author as well as the illustrator.  Among the most popular of her publications was the annual Almanack she published between 1883 and 1895.

The middle image above is the only one I could find of working Greenaway mothers, placed in a somewhat industrial setting, but they still wear the idealized costumes of at least a half-century earlier.  More characteristic in its bucolic background and floral motifs is Marigold Garden.  Pictures and Rhymes by Kate Greenaway, first published in 1885.

Kate Greenaway created not only lasting images, but also a lasting brand.  Her clothing was manufactured and sold to upper-middle-class mothers who wanted just that certain “handcrafted” look for their children while Greenaway-inspired prints graced textiles, tiles, and wallpapers.  An 1893 example of the latter from the Victoria & Albert Museum is below, along with a modern version of a “Greenaway dress” by British paper artist Jennifer Collier.

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

May 4, 2011

Old Orange Houses

By daseger

I went for a walk around Salem yesterday and suddenly noticed lots of orange houses.  I hadn’t realized there were so many; this is obviously another (old) design trend that has passed me by.  The orange houses of Salem are all on side streets and relatively small in scale, which is probably a good thing, as it’s a pretty powerful color.  No orange houses on stately Chestnut Street where Federal houses predominate and yellow is an exotic color, or on the main street of Salem, Essex Street, or on Washington Square, the street which surrounds the Common.  But if you look down any side street running off these broad boulevards, you’ll most likely see a pop of orange on a colonial or Victorian house.  Here is a sampling:  two orange houses right around the corner from our house, a mid-nineteenth century Gothic Revival cottage and a Georgian double house near the Common, a melon-colored house with Derby Wharf and The Friendship almost in its backyard, a wall of orange on a Derby Street triple-decker, and another gambrel-roofed later eighteenth-century house off Federal Street.

Surprising but true:  I could not find an orange house on Orange Street!

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

May 2, 2011

Timeworn Typewriters

By daseger

Vintage typewriters are having a moment.  I think they’ve been having a moment for some time but suddenly their images are all around me, everywhere I turn in both real and digital life.  Perhaps it is the ongoing impact of Steampunk (AllSaints Spitalfields stores feature many vintage machines in their displays, generally sewing machines and typewriters), or maybe it’s a sentimental  attachment that has grown stronger with their gradual disappearance from our lives.  Just last week I heard that the last typewriter had rolled off the production line of the last factory (in India) that still produced them.

I was thinking about typewriters even before I happened upon a charming old movie on television last week:  The Shocking Miss Pilgrim.  This 1947 musical (with music by the Gershwin brothers) stars Betty Grable as a young suffragette taking on Boston Brahmin society at the turn of the century armed only with her typewriter. After receiving her certificate from a business college in New York, she comes up to work in traditional Boston as the first female typist or typewriter (the turn “typewriter” is used exclusively for the person who is operating the machine rather than the machine itself).  Everyone is shocked!  She then becomes part of the very active suffrage movement (allowing us to listen to suffragette songs) and of course falls in love with her Brahmin boss, thus changing Boston society forever.  

The typewriter-as-liberation theme was also played out in the recent PBS series Downton Abbey, in which a young parlor maid in Edwardian England surreptitiously acquires typewriting skills in order to escape from domestic service. There was a commercial school here in Salem at around the same time, providing young women with the skills necessary to get them out of the factory.  From The Virtual Typewriter Museum, I have also learned that the first portable typewriter was produced right here in Salem in 1881 by the Hall Type-Writer Company.  Who knew?

Most of the nostalgia for typewriters is focused on dark and bulky models from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but colorful mid-century models have their fans as well:  the Olivetti portable typewriter seems to be particularly in demand.  But for me, if you’re going to go back, you might as well go way back.  This print (click on the image to get the link to Etsy) should suffice.

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

April 30, 2011

Doorways (and wreaths) around Salem

By daseger

For architectural photographers of the early and mid-twentieth century, the doorway shot was a stock image.  Frank Cousins issued many doorway postcards and compiled a portfolio of images in 1912.  A decade later, his fellow Salem photographer Mary Harrod Northend issued Historic Doorways of Old Salem and Samuel Chamberlain included many Salem doorways in his popular New England Doorways in 1939.  As a frame itself, the doorway is an easily framed image, and can serve as the epitome of the architectural style of the entire house.  In the forward to New England Doorways, Chamberlain identifies the doorway (and the fireplace) as “focal points of interest in the early houses, where the builder might forget stern necessity for a moment and indulge in his distinctive desire for ornament.”

Two of Chamberlain’s photographs are below:  the Phillips House doorway on Chestnut Street and the pedimented “shutter door” of the Clark-Morgan House on Essex Street (a great Georgian colonial house which is currently for sale).  The caption below the Phillips House reads:  “Salem is the supreme New England setting for doorways of this formal pattern, which seem to reflect the opulence of Salem’s 19th century clipper ship owners and merchants.”  So here the doorway is not just representing the entire house, but also its location and era.

Indeed, these classic collections of Salem doorways generally include the more opulent mansions of the city, along with older houses and those with literary connections.  My own “harvest of a good many doorway hunting expeditions” (to quote Chamberlain again) therefore includes images of the doorways of smaller, lesser-known, but equally beautiful houses around town.  I was also looking for color and contrast on my expeditions, which are provided by both paint and the springtime wreaths on many Salem doors.

First, two eighteenth-century doorways on either end of Essex Street, with an updated version of the Clark-Morgan house (above) sans its shutter door.

Next, a sampling of doorways (and wreaths) in the vicinity of the House of the Seven Gables and Derby Street.

From the other end of town, a rather random sampling of doorways in the McIntire Historic District. I’ve always been partial to the brick house in the middle photograph, and its entrance its particularly beautiful.  Lots of external embellishment today, including a traditional Massachusetts golden cod.

I can’t resist throwing in a few Chestnut Street doorways:  the dual threshold of a Greek Revival double house, and the elaborate entrance of one of many brick Federal mansions on the street.  I wanted to showcase another shutter door, because there are many in the city, serving as excellent examples of how our predecessors created environmental air conditioning.

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

April 28, 2011

Wedding Flowers

By daseger

 Yes, flower bells rang right merry that day,        

When there was a marriage of flowers, they say

In honor of the royal wedding, I’m featuring a charming Art Nouveau picture book, Walter Crane’s A Flower Wedding.  Described by Two Wallflowers.  Originally published in 1905 by Cassell & Company in London, the book has recently been republished in a facsimile edition to mark the Victoria & Albert Museum‘s current exhibition The Cult of Beauty:  the Aesthetic Movement, 1860-1880 (and perhaps another big occasion?)  I snatched up a first edition years ago, long before I knew what I had.

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was a well-know children’s book illustrator as well as an Arts & Crafts designer of wallpaper, textiles and other decorative arts. I suppose that A Flower Wedding is a children’s book, but it is quite a sophisticated one.  There’s a simple plot line narrating the wedding of “Lad’s Love” (another name for Sweet William)  and “Miss Meadowsweet” in which all the participants and guests are flowers drawn in human form .  Here are the bride’s attendants and mother, along with a very prominent guest, “Good King Henry” (one of my favorite herbs).

And before all of London, they were wed.

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

April 17, 2011

A New/Old Boston Print Shop

By daseger

Just in time for Patriots Day here in Massachusetts, an eighteenth-century print shop has opened up in Boston:  the Printing Office of Edes & Gill, located in the Clough House adjacent to the Old North Church in Boston’s North End.  Named for the Revolutionary-era publishers of the Boston-Gazette and Country Journal, John Gill and Benjamin Edes, the print shop will be open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through mid-June and then every day for the summer.  Pictured below are images of printed matter past and present, including Paul Revere’s masthead logo of Britannia with liberty staff and cap, freeing a bird from its cage.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History

April 15, 2011

Diminutive Dwellings

By daseger

Salem is primarily known for its grand Federal mansions, but there are lots of amazing smaller houses in the city as well.  I’m fortunate to live in quite a big house, but it has a small apartment attached to it, and at various times in my life when things were chaotic or complex or troubling I just wanted to shut the big house up and seek sanctuary in the tiny flat, where everything is small-scaled, compartmentalized, and manageable. There’s a whimsical, dollhouse-like, Alice-in-wonderland quality to the apartment, but of course I’ve never lived there, and as we have a very nice tenant I can’t just take up residence on a whim.

There are several small houses in Salem  that evoke similar feelings of simplicity through scale, and they have lots of charming (primarily Dutch) details to boot.  The first house below, built around the time of the American Revolution, is located just off Federal Street in the McIntire Historic District, and the other two nineteenth-century houses are located off Derby Street.

These are pretty tiny houses, with a very small footprint and perhaps one or two rooms on each floor (I cheated a bit with the last one, which has an addition).  In some future post I’ll showcase small old houses (which Salem has in abundance, particularly Georgian “urban cottages”), but these are really small old houses.  Lots of older cities in America and Europe have tiny, narrow rowhouses, often called “spite” houses, built to fill gaps in the existing streetscape, like these two Virginia houses:  the Spite House of Alexandria and the adorable little (again, Dutch) cottage built adjacent to the Old Stone House at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond.

But there’s just something about a tiny freestanding house, like the Salem houses above and Mark Twain’s boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri below, that is particularly appealing.  These houses are so self-contained and self-sufficient, but on such a small scale.  Of course the small house movement, and its even more environmentally correct tiny house movement, have been gathering steam for some time now.  An exemplar of the latter is below, from the Tumblewood Tiny House Company.

Mark Twain House in Hannibal, Missouri, 1933. HABS, Library of Congress

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