I was browsing through the Flickr photographs of the Salem State Archives and Special Collections the other day, when I came across several photographs of crowds in and around the Gardner-Pingree House on Essex Street. This is one of the Peabody Essex Museum’s houses, and it is seldom open, so these crowds caught my eye. It’s also one of my very favorite houses in Salem, so every time I see it, in reality or in print, I stop and look. The photographs were from the Salem Evening News, which is my new favorite collection at Salem State, and they were part of the coverage of the reopening of the Gardner-Pingree after a substantive, source-based restoration in 1989. I didn’t live in Salem then, but I moved here not too long after, and one of the first things I did was go into this recently-restored house which I had heard, and read, so much about. It was absolutely stunning to me; I can still remember being shocked by the colors and patterns and detail. At that point in my life I was finishing my dissertation, then starting my teaching career, but at the same time I was increasingly obsessed with historic interiors. I had all the magazines and books, and they were like carrots that got me through all the work I had to do. My obsession is part of the reason I moved to Salem, and seeing this house just reinforced my instinct that it was the right place for me. After my first tour I bought a poster in the gift shop of the Essex Institute, and it still hangs on the wall: in my first Salem house it had pride of place, and now it dwells in a third-floor bathroom, but I still gaze upon it from time to time. I remember thinking when I bought it: this will be the inspiration for my own decoration–high standards indeed!
Unattainable standards obviously. If the colors above look blueish, be asssured they are not; there are layers of the most beautiful greens in that photograph. There must be 100 different shades of green in that house! I was impressed immediately, and my first instinct thereafter has always been to paint a room green. Our present house is north-facing, and green is not really the best choice, so I’ve used what I always think of as “Gardner-Pingree yellow” in several rooms. I tried to use what I think of as “Gardner-Pingree pink” in the double parlor but my husband objected so we have a compromise peachy salmon pink (although he would object to the label “pink”.) It wasn’t only the colors–it was the slipcovers, the cream painted “fancy chairs,” the Brussels carpets, the fire buckets in the back hall: I could go on and on and I’m kind of ashamed to admit that whenever I’ve been in this house I notice the decoration more than McIntire’s woodwork. And I’m not the only one: this restoration certainly received acclaim from curatorial and preservation professionals but it was also featured in a cascade of shelter magazines and decorating books. Chalk paint pioneer Annie Sloan focused intently on one Gardner-Pingree green and that perfect pink, which is in the kitchen.
Just a few books which feature the Gardner-Pingree House.
It was a very important and influential restoration, and not just from my personal perspective. In several articles discussing its process and inspiration, then Essex Institute Research Curator and Project Director Dean Lahikainen (who later wrote the definitive book on Samuel McIntire, Carving an American Style) always seems slightly (though politely) appalled by the preceding restoration of the 1930s in which all the woodwork was painted white according to the dictates of the Colonial Revival style which was so prevalent at the time. Fifty years later, Lahikainen and his team took their cues from historical sources rather than contemporary preferences, creating an interior that seemed both “refreshed” and restored. The house was reopened this very week after a five-year restoration, and all the recorded visitors’ reactions run along these lines.
Stories from Lynn Daily Item and Boston Globe, June 1989 and 1990; photographs from the Salem Evening News, June 1989, Salem State Archives and Special Collections. The “formal English garden” photograph is of my garden! (Now not quite so formal) The last photograph above is of the small exhibit on the house which was in its carriage house, I believe.
You can see my photographs of the house from the last time I was inside, in 2017, in this post, and also here. Below are a few more, but I really don’t have very many good ones: every time I’m in this house I’m kind of overwhelmed and aware that I have this rare opportunity and I don’t focus on what I want to capture. On my past two spring break road trips, I thought that the Read House in New Castle, Delaware, and then Kenmore in Fredericksburg, Virginia might have supplanted the Gardner-Pingree as my very favorite house, but looking at these pictures again, I think not.
