Who Kill-A Da Chief?

Come on in, the insane world of Louisiana politics, crime, punishment, lynching, looting, graciousness, rumor, and just plain interestingness is just fine.
It's the Beauregard- Keyes House on Chartres Street. Still there to this day. Fancy garden now. A museum to Pierre Gustave Toutant (P.G.T.) Beauregard and author Frances Parkinson Keyes. Here's the interior courtyard side:
The place is fascinating, and very New Orleans.

In 1826, wealthy auctioneer Joseph Le Carpentier hired James Lambert to build him an elaborate home. I don't want to know what or who exactly he got wealthy auctioning in New Orleans. It's not really straight up French; the building has been banged on and added to and changed quite a bit. The Greek Revival theme for the front is not French. But then again, like many things of that time and place, things change.

The house was built reversed from the original plan, for starters. All the outbuildings in the back, plus the back of the house was added later. The Greek portico and one of the flights of stairs in the front was a later addition. It's everything, like a place that washed back and forth in the wake of empires would be. But the bones of the wide center-halled house are still in there.
The little paired doors of the French style are everywhere.

And there's blood and sweat and refinement and conundrum all over the place.

Beauregard only lived there for two years, and never owned it. He was a big deal in New Orleans, and always was, so it's natural they'd play up the link. He took it over from a family of famous chess players, of all things, who had purchased it from Le Carpentier. The world's first chess champion, Paul Morphy, was born here. He was of Portuguese, Irish, Creole, and Spanish descent. Now that's New Orleans. He was a sensation, then he lost his mind. The coroner's report said Morphy died from taking a bath, after a long spell of wandering around the city talking to imaginary voices. That's pretty New Orleans, too.

So after the Civil War, Beauregard moves in, moves out, and a Sicilian family buys the place- the Giaconas. Wine merchants. Gangsters?

People thought they were. But people think everybody Italian is a gangster. There were all sorts of rumors about people being murdered in the house. But that's the essence of all secret crime societies. They don't announce themselves. Well, not exactly. They use barrels as a kind of semaphore.

There were a lot of Sicilians in New Orleans in the late 1800s, and the Black Hand followed them. What people never seemed to understand about the Black Hand, and other maffiyeh organizations, is that they existed mostly by preying upon honest Italian businessman. But many times the victims of the mobsters are simply assumed to be their compatriots by association, and end up on the wrong end of the backlash against the criminals. That's if they don' t end up stuffed in a barrel first.

In 1890, the Police Chief of New Orleans, David Hennessy, was murdered after he got to wondering why his men kept finding Italian-Americans strangled or shot or stabbed and stuffed into barrels, then left on the streetcorner. He was the first American to take on the association of mafiosi and their corrupt accomplices in the government. He paid for it with his life. His (likely apocryphal) last words were: "The Dagos did it."

They rounded up hundreds of people with a vowel at the end of their name, and indicted about a dozen for the murder. There was a riot, and a mob lynched the suspects, along with ten other Italians who were unlucky enough to be handy. For years after that, the local Italian-American children were taunted with: "Who kill-a da chief?"

After the Giaconas, the property was owned by a politician and his wife, Frances Parkinson Keyes, who wrote about Paul Morphy and the history of the house, among many other things.

The elegant home of a man with a triple barrelled name that fought like a tiger for the confederacy and then fought for the rights of blacks to vote; a lunatic genius chess player who died from taking a bath; a southern belle author that once occupied the Governor's mansion in New Hampshire; a wine merchant probably afraid of the Mob and the mob at the same time. Yup, that's one address in New Orleans.

And now it's a museum of sorts. But perhaps not of the the things they think it is.

Clouds On The Horizon

Today is very challenging.

I've listened to this piece of music for thirty years or so. It has a very calming effect on me. I like the pictures that this mashup has assembled to accompany the music. The music is elegant and simple, sorta; but then again sophisticated doesn't really mean "busy," does it?

Satie was a interesting weirdo. He didn't even want to be called a musician. He called himself a "phonometrician." I liked that he called some of his later musical sketches "furniture music." (d’ameublement) The term really doesn't translate well. In French, furniture is called meubles --the movables. I think the term furniture music is more to mean furnishings, or wallpaper. The setting for other things. Perhaps he is the world's first composer of movie scores. He'd have to be first. They didn't have movies then as anything but a sort of laboratory oddity.

Erik Satie. Gymnopedie Number 1.

The music has a strange resonance. It was written before WWI, and it reminds me of being out of doors on a pleasant afternoon, and seeing a cloud forming way off on the horizon. There were a lot of clouds for a long time in France.

Put your own sunshine or clouds in it. It's lovely musical furniture for your life.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

When I was wee, Saturday was for cartoons.

Our parents would sleep late, a little, and we'd get up an fashion our own breakfast, after a fashion. Toast with butter and sugar mixed with cinnamon, and a glass of milk.

There were 3 VHF channels, on a little black and white TV. Channel 2 was there, the PBS station, but it was kinda sketchy. All it had was MisterRogers anyway, and even when I was 5 that was too lame for me. I saw it in the TV listings and it was printed as one word: Misterrogers. I didn't realize it was a man's name. I thought it was some sort of mystery story by by an orthographically challenged pirate or something. That would have been a lot more interesting, now that I consider it.

There were 2 UHF channels after a while. They were the equivalent of a lemonade stand. They'd get their hands on whatever they could for next to no money and broadcast it. The TV for UHF required you to tune it like a radio. You'd sit there like a Kinchloe and try to hit the dial just right to banish half the broadcast snow and stop the sizzling on the audio. And we'd watch drivel.

Speed Racer and Jonnny Quest and The Three Stooges and Clutch Cargo and Thunderbirds are Go! and whatever else the management could use to sell a few used car dealer ads and keep the lights on. Much, much, later, the people that produced entertainment noticed that the audience actually liked crap more than they liked anything serious, and TV became all crap all the time, endlessly subreferencing itself until you wondered if there ever was any onion to start with, or peeling the onion was the exercise itself.

My little son's favorite thing is an advertisement in a language he doesn't speak for a product he is unaware of that we can't buy and wouldn't if we could from a country he's never been to: Pat et Stanley. And like his old man, he wanted to see it on Saturday morning. He's pushing on my elbow right now. Let's hear a few bars of that old Saturday morning polyglot non- sequitur pop-culture flotsam homesick jetsam blues, maestro. And look! A fresh Pat et Stanley today!


Kiwi!

And Crazy Frog!

Is it On Fire, Or Underwater This Week?

The Orleans Ballroom. It's very New Orleans. Bad luck and mojo are my only friends, as they say.

Henry Latrobe started building it in 1816 for a fellow named John Davis, to go along with Davis' theater next door. It burned to the ground, along with the theater and half the neighborhood, before he was finished building it. Very New Orleans, that.

Davis got busy right away and a year later he had it built. Um, rebuilt. Well, done, anyway. He rebuilt the theater next door, too. It was in that empty lot in the picture, attached to the ballroom. The theater burned down again in 1866, but the ballroom was saved. This grows monotonous, in an exciting kind of way. "Monotonous in an exciting kind of way" should be the town motto, if you ask me.

Like lots of things now considered authentic French New Orleans, the wooden balcony and screen are much later additions. Much of that ironwork you associate with the oldest part of New Orleans is not original equipment on the buildings.

They held grand balls in there, including one in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette, we are here! And not on fire for a change. Drop by.

Hey! In 1828, the ballroom was used as a meeting place for the State Legislature, when the government house --three guesses! --burned down. It's a good thing that New Orleans floods from time to time, if for no other reason than to give the fire company a breather every now and then.

For about a decade in the late 1800s, the place was used as the District Court, too. Lot of arson cases were heard there, I suspect.

There's a cryptic reference to a "sale" of the furnishings and fabrics of the place in 1836, which sounds like someone paid a few bucks for a few things and ripped out everything worth looking at on the interior of the building, so looting has a long history thereabouts too, I gather.

There are conflicting accounts of the use of the ballroom for what were called "quadroon balls." A quadroon was a description of someone who was of one quarter black ancestry. There was a dizzying assortment of social rankings in New Orleans based on ancestry, and the quadroon balls were one of a number of ways for a sort of common-law marriage to be arranged between white men, and women of African, Indian, and Creole ancestry. The arrangement was called "Placage." I much prefer the term free blacks used for it: "Left-handed marriage." That's wry.

In a marvelous turn of events, a young lady that had been destined for a left handed marriage rebelled against the idea, and became a nun instead. Henriette DeLille saw Placage as an affront to the Catholic sacrament of marriage. She spent her life in opposition to the practice, and in the aid and education of the poor of New Orleans. In 1837 the Vatican formally recognized her organization as what would later become The Sisters of The Holy Family.

The Sisters of the Holy Family, all African-American nuns, bought that ballroom in the 1880s and used it for a school for poor children until the 1960s, when they sold the property to a hotel.

There's a fad for advertising ghostly happenings in lodgings to get a kind of vibe going in the hospitality business. The ballroom is part of a hotel now, and they're trying to play up some supposedly ghostly happenings there. In New Orleans, that's superfluous. The whole town is a layer cake of haunts.

When it's not on fire, or sublime, anyway.

Down The New Orleans Rabbit Hole Again

The internet will make you a lot of friends you don't know.

Our friends we never met over at Maggies Farm have linked to my little riffs on American architecture. We like their boats, so we're going to put them in our blogroll. Anyway, they seem to like the odd and unusual building styles we've dredged up. And they had a question about the provenance of a building in New Orleans. I don't care if they were fooling; I'm going to answer it anyway.

We've lost our minds about New Orleans before here on this page.

Good Morning America, How Are You

Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

Crescent City Fais Do Do

At any rate, the picture of the building in the Vieux Carre in New Orleans on Maggies Farm is an example of another pre-Victorian style we need to cover: French Colonial. And if you're talking about French Colonial, you're basically talking about New Orleans. So let's. It's such an ancient and wonderful cock-up of a place. It's nasty and marvelous and sedate and wild and eternal and ephemeral and every other damn thing. And right from the get-go, it was French.

For the most part, French Colonial doesn't exist anymore. It's like New Orleans. Ancient, but burned, flooded, looted, neglected, and occasionally so overrun by attention that there's next to nothing of it left, unless you look for ghosts. I do.

New Orleans is full of the ghosts of French Colonial architecture.

The real thing doesn't look all that much like Bourbon Street: It looked like this:


That's the Olivier House. Its original owner was born in Lyon, France. That's French. It's being demolished when these pictures were taken 60 years ago. it was built in 1820, but the style was even older. It's a French Colonial Plantation house. You could probably find something similar in Vietnam or Africa somewhere.

The real estate under it was too valuable to keep it standing inside the city limits. Its ghost is underneath numerous houses over a number of city blocks now. Here's how the French did it differently than their English counterparts up north:

• Lots of doorways leading outside
• Stairways outside, not in interior stairwells
• Rooms enfilade, opening one into another without hallways linking them
• Double doors and windows and shutters
• Big gallery porches under a roof
• Interior courtyards
• Slave quarters and kitchens in outbuildings

They had a sort of urban version of it, too:

That's the Gaillard House. 1820s. Has that continental medieval look to it . Fronts right on the street. Skinny, paired doors and windows with shutters for privacy. Attached to its neighbors. It turns its back on the street and shelters a courtyard in the back, like many city properties do to this very day:
D'Artagnan, is that you? Not shabby inside:


The stories that come out of the mists for these buildings boggle the mind. We're running long, and late today. Tune in again and read about:

Friday: The ballroom that burned down before it was built.
Monday: The Confederate general and the mafia
Tuesday: Judge Wisdom, and Master Builder, Contractor, and Undertaker Charles Pride.

Now, Listen To A Story...

You think we're going backward in time, but we aren't. We showed you Dutch Colonial on the Hudson River, a style going well back into the 1600s, and over and done with except revivals by 1840 or so. Why go back one step short of Fred and Wilma and show me houses made from hewn logs?

Because someone was living in that log house when my own father was standing on the street corner in Boston selling newspapers as a boy, living in a 1920s style triple decker. And they didn't even build that log house until about 1876.

It's the Ehpraim Bales house near Gatlinsburg Tennessee. Ephraim bought the property and lived there from 1887 until 1930. Here's the plan:
I love the term for the open area under the roof between the two structures: The dog trot. I've heard people use this term right to this very day for what many people now call a "breezeway." The log home has a problem, and this shows it. You can't really expand it, because you need the four corners of any room to hold it together. All you can do is add more rectangles, called pens, and join them up as best you can.

They were smart, those sons of nature that built log homes, and made the sills from rot-proof oak timbers. The rest of the boles and poles are all sorts of stuff: poplar, pine, chestnut. The frames around the doors and window openings are held onto the fabric of the place with oak pegs pounded home. Two rooms; the kitchen, and everything else.

This one is from North Carolina:
Here's the chimney end. It's what's generally called wattle and daub construction. Sticks are woven together and smeared with clay. I bet that chimney caught on fire as often as whatever they burned on the hearth. That's why it's exposed on the end, so you could go outside and put it out. The roof shelters it a bit, to keep the rain from washing all the clay away.
Here's one near South Union Township, Pennsylvania; the Gaddis House:

The tires and the plaque are a nice touch. Not entirely inhospitable inside, even though it's falling to pieces while being photographed:

The joinery's pretty good, too, for such rough work with rudimentary tools. It's not really a log cabin. A log cabin is just notched logs, with the boles left round. It's devilishly hard to fill the interstices. A log house has the treetrunks hewn square:You can seal it up pretty well that way. People still build them. One of the most incongruous sights in my neighboring town is a three story seaside snouthouse log home, built less than a decade ago. Some people will settle for nothing else than treetrunks for horizontal wallpaper to this very day.

Here's the corner of the Gaddis House.
Here's my favorite log house, just for the story of it:

If you were an NCO in the Cavalry in 1877, at Fort Missoula, Montana, here's where you'd be living. President Grant sent the cavalry to annoy the local Indian tribe, and be annoyed in their turn. That's not the good part. In 1896, a certain Lieutenant James Ross decided that the cavalry would be much improved if it was on bicycles instead of horses. He started the 25th Infantry Bicycle Troop, which encompassed him and 23 African-American soldiers, and they rode bicycles through the grass and mud all the way to St Louis.

When he got there, someone pointed out to him that Gottlieb Daimler had invented a four wheel horseless carriage in 1887.

I can imagine Lt. Ross reading Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and being captivated by Twain's depiction of the Knights of the Round Table going into battle on the bicycles supplied to them by the time traveling hero of the book, Hank Morgan. It was published in 1889, so the dates make sense. I guess it didn't dawn on Lt. Ross that Twain was making fun of the knights, not the horses.

If there is a God, someone will contact me and give me an advance to write the book, play, television series and three motion pictures I could get out of the story of 23 African-American cavalrymen, and the Lieutenant that loved bicycles, riding all the way from Missoula, Montana to Saint Louis, Missouri in 1896.

They didn't have to fight the plains Indians. I imagine they all died laughing when the spectacle rolled by.
How I love America. How can you not?

Close The Window. Hansel Ain't Coming.

We need to go back before we move on to Victorians. We forgot some people. The Dutch, for instance.

It's intensely regional, of course. New York, New Jersey, a little bit of Connecticut, Delaware, and a sliver of Pennsylvania. The crowning achievement of Dutch Colonial architecture, the Gambrel roof, is everywhere now, of course, but that's about it. And that's Dutch Colonial Revival, not Dutch Colonial.

New Amsterdam is the original name of New York. Dutch Colonial was its urban style. It was very like what a medieval European city would have, but most of that's gone now. The real estate was too valuable in what's now Manhattan and surroundings to have anything too ancient. But up and down the Hudson River, out in the sticks, you can still find plenty of Dutch inspired farm houses. The whole style was gone before the Civil War started.

We used to call the style "stone enders." Like the house in the first photo, the ends of the house were of stone or masonry of some sort, usually with wood infill walls between them. The end walls were parapeted --project higher than the roof. Unlike the postmedieval British house, instead of a big center chimney with lots of flues, the end walls had chimneys in them, usually in both ends. The roofs would be very steep, as a rule. That goes back to when roofs were not very waterproof, sometimes thatched, and so the steeper the roof, the more likely you'd be dry inside.

Here's a signature item that's entered the lexicon: A Dutch Door. Open just the top, and let the fragrance from the garden, but not the livestock from the garden into the house. It's still makes a great secondary entrance door.
Here's a gambrel roofline. Multistory Dutch Colonials are pretty rare. They were most often 1-1/2 stories, and you'd live right under the roof. British colonial houses maximized space under the roof with dormers. The knee in the roofline in the gambrel pushed the stand up space in on the second floor out towards the exterior walls all along the eave, not just in the footprint of the dormers. This one needs painting or dynamite or something:
They'd flare the roofline at the first floor eave and kick the rain away from the sidewalls and add to the picturesque look of the thing:
Steep roof? Check:

The farmhouse version. Lower roofline, rambling a bit, flared eaves, gambrel roof:

The urban version. Masonry ends, parapets, wooden infill walls. Neat as a pin is another Dutch tradition. This one in Schenectady is:

Hey look, another term for the lingua franca: The Dutch Oven. It has a secondary, ribald definition now, but people used to call a brick oven using the preheated walls to cook things slowly a Dutch Oven. A lidded cast iron slow cooking pot is the most common word usage now, but here's what a Dutch Oven used to mean:And of all the common details of the Dutch colonial style, the one I like best is the benches flanking an entry door. What a pleasant place to shell peas or shuck corn and smell the flowers in the beds.
If you're going to steal anything from the Dutch, steal that. And sweep it ten times a day for the whole effect.

The League Of Nations Freakshow Deluxe

Come on in, the sepulchre's fine.

Between the period from just before the Civil War up until the"Gay Nineties," there was a bunch of what are termed exotic revivals. They were lesser known than the other Romantic Revival house styles we mentioned earlier like Greek, Italianate, and Gothic, but they were even more odd and exuberant and weird and strange and fantastic. I call them the League Of Nations Freakshow Deluxe.

Egyptian had a little flurry. The front door on the business shown at the top of the page is in Philadelphia. The style was suited mostly to public buildings, and since most of the buildings it's patterned after were tombs and toys for Tuts, it has a strange sort of funereal vibe. It had a bit of reignited interest around WW2, as well, when many public building in America integrated the motifs. Here's a VA hospital in Marion, Illinois in the style. I'm sure you've seen some Post Offices that look like this too:
Never really caught on. Hey, how about"Oriental:"

That's a store in Butte, Montana. Oriental in this instance basically encompasses anything east of Crete. It had lots of polychrome stuff and odd shapes all mish-mashed together. Sometimes the only vestiges of this sort of thing will be little touches like this reverse ogee window over this doorway in Pennsylvania. It's based on the "Onion" shaped roof of the east:

Oh heck, let's get a real onion shaped roof. Here's one from 1891, in St Louis:

They probably would have called that "Turkish" It was a mess, and became a mess of a mess in the picture. Of course you could go Swiss:


The Swiss Chalet had a big re-revival later on in the twentieth century, too, as the preferred crummy second house in the mountains. You'd find them often at the seashore, too, which is as visually disturbing as licking stamps in a sort of Imhotep's Post Office Tomb ever was.

These places could get plenty palatial. Look at this magnificent dustcatcher, Painter Frederic Church's house on the Hudson. He called it Olana:

He referred to it as "Persian," but that doesn't really do it justice. The vernacular of the period would have termed it "Moorish." It's everything thrown at the Oriental wall, and it all seemed to stick. The carpets don't fly, but they look like they ought to.

The same Architect that did a lot of the Marble Palaces for magnates in Newport, Rhode Island, Richard Morris Hunt, signed the plans, but it's really Church's doodling and tinkering writ large. The decoration is so dense as to look borderline insane to the modern eye. How would you like to eat in the dining room, made "cozy" with a fire in this fireplace:

Church was born rich, made a lot of money from his art, and still almost bankrupted himself building his house. How very American the Moorish style cottage is.

The Sippican Hot Club

It's Sunday. Birds are singing. Sun's shining. No architecture today. Something light, please.

Let's have music. Something pleasant, but not puerile. Hey, how about some hot jazz from Django Reinhardt, everybody's favorite zingari, and probably your favorite Belgian, too:

Django's left hand was burned badly when he was a young man, and he can only use the last two fingers as a sort of blunt instrument for barre chords. It's enough, ain't it?

Django is a rare thing in any walk of life. He was an originator of his own style. It's like Hemingway sort of making up his own method of writing. There's innovation there, and originality.

Like most people that do original things, it is possible for other people to lovingly imitate them, and you can notice right away the resemblance. It doesn't detract from it that it's an homage.Besides, no man makes up his entire persona from whole cloth. The truly original among us just seem to distill all the things that catch their fancy down to such a fine elixir that you can't really recognize it as an aggregation any more.

Is there any doubt who Joscho Stephan is playing like? I didn't think so. And it doesn't make it any less jawdropping a performance for being an imitation, does it?

American Gothic

The Bowen House in Woodstock Connecticut, could be the supreme example of American Gothic Revival Architecture.

I don't know; I'm like a little kid, or a crow, and can easily be distracted by something shiny. If day after tomorrow you discover me writing

Fred McGillicuddy's pigsty in West Treestump Vermont is the supreme example of American Gothic Revival Architecture

just smile and acknowledge it for what it is -- a form of enthusiasm conjoined to a disorderly mind.

But it's awesome, ain't it?
Hey look, there's Patsy's port cochere. Please note that the roof shields only the persons riding in the carriage. The man driving would have to get off his perch and get rained on to walk around the coach and open the door for the swells that were visiting Mr. Bowen. My own relatives were coachman and cook for a similarly wealthy family from Boston in the 1800s. These houses are museums for the amusement of the descendants of the servants now. I love America.

It's awesome inside, too:
Is that a Sippican Cottage Furniture catalog I see on the hall table there? Nice place to look it over. I imagine the internet connection's a little slow. It really was a series of tubes back then, and only went from the bridge to the engine room. The stairwell is handsome too:
The furniture is appropriate for the house, which is rare. Usually the last occupants of any notable house strip the place bare before they turn the place over to some foundation or another to get out of paying taxes and painting these places. You can visit the mansions in Newport, and half of them look like Minnie Pearl was the decorator.

The heavy oak furniture and the densely printed wallpapers are perfect. The white marble tops on some of the tables were very common.


This is one of the best things in the house. That's an oriel window. An oriel window is a window on an upper story that is built into its own projecting bay. What a lovely place to sit. And look on the right there. That dresser is the real item: Cottage Furniture:
In a way, I'm a terrible fraud. I have a business with Cottage Furniture right in the name, and I really technically don't make cottage furniture. The original term referred to a kind of inexpensive furniture, which was painted, or painted to look like a sort of stylized woodgrain. That dresser is the real thing. Real cottage furniture is fairly rare now because it mostly fell all to pieces. I capture the essence of the concept if not the precise details of it, I hope. The falling to pieces part we can all do without.

Don't look at this doorknob:I told you not to look at the doorknob, but you couldn't help yourself, could you? It's interesting, but it's the door that's really interesting. It's fake.

Faux, actually. It's painted to mimic the look of oak. Really well done too. Faux Bois, it's called. I used to do that for a living, and it's hard to do convincingly. It's not really considered ersatz. The interior millwork was made of pine (they'd call it deal, back then) or poplar or some other inexpensive, easily worked wood. They'd prime it, (sugar of lead, anyone?) then paint it a sort of dull, yellow color. A slow-drying glaze would be applied, and a series of unusual brushes and combs would be dragged through the glaze to give the appearance of the desired wood. Those silvering grains were probably done with a finger wrapped in a rag, nothing more. The whole thing would get a sort of varnish stain to get the right color overall. Intact, such painted millwork is often more valuable than if it was real. Hollywood set painters are about the last place on earth where anyone's any good at this. Everybody I've seen try it out in the general population makes a dog's breakfast of it.

And of course, as promised, ladies and gentlemen, your typical Gothic Revival bowling alley. Don't laugh, Playstations were hard to come by back then.

The place is open to the public, and you can rent it out if you're feeling like feeling like a Gatsby for an afternoon. They don't call it the Bowen House though, it's called Roseland Cottage.

And by the way, it isn't in black and white, either:

Theodoric Would Be Proud. And Confused

Didn't like Italianate? I bet you built one of these instead.

During the same period of time as the Italianate style, let's say between 1840 and 1880, the Gothic Revival was also in its glory. Like Italianate, it's considered a "romantic" style. Picturesque informal setting country houses were all the rage, and the Gothic style suited it too. Here's an example from Sinclairville, New York, that has most all the bells and whistles of the type:
Let's see-

• steeply pitched roofs
• steep cross gable roofs
• gothic or "saracen"arched windows
  
• decorative gable trim
• finials
• projecting bays
• open cornices and eaves
• vertical board and batten siding
  
• trail of breadcrumbs to door

Sometimes small things make a great deal of difference. There's a lot of elaborate decoration on Gothic Revival house, and it's the worst kind to make. It's got curved lines in it. Any architect will tell you that doubles the price of anything. But the introduction of the mechanical scroll saw at around that period that made all that gingerbread possible. Before that, anything like that had to be cut by hand with a fret saw. Not fun.

Here's another example from Tennessee:
That one is bordering on a subtype called "Stick." Let's move on. An excellent example from Essex, Massachusetts; the Brooks House:
That one has quoins on the corners, to mimic a masonry building. It shows the classic flattened pointed arch between porch supports. It's got the tiny diamond paned sashes for that medieval effect. Nice crenellation atop the porch roof. Everybody calls that dentillation. Everybody is wrong. Dentillation faces down. Crenellation faced up. If you called it castellation, I'm not allowed to flunk you. You've seen a million houses like that. All the filligree is removed, the windows are swapped out, the porch is in the landfill, and it's got clapboards or vinyl siding on it now. Look for the pointy cross gable in the center of the front. It's the giveaway for what you should still be looking at.

I'll build you that house for a million. I'll paint if for two million.

It's medieval in tone, but it's not necessarily rude and plain. Mar A Lago in Palm Beach is Gothic Revival, more or less, and it's not too spartan. Or Spartan:
But now I've found the greatest example of the type I've ever seen. The Bowen House in Woodstock Connecticut.
This place is awesome. It even has a gothic fence. I've got lots of pictures of it. I know you'll tune in tomorrow. It'll be worth it just to see the bowling alley in there. The gothic bowling alley.

When The Moon Hits Your Eye

After Greek Revival, there were a number of prominent "Romantic" styles fighting for the affections of the American architectural public. Let's go with the Ghibellines and leave the Goths and so forth for later. Let's see Italianate:

Yes, let's do, if it looks like that. That's the City Library in Newburgh, New York. It looks confectionery, like a lot of Italianate architecture does.

Italianate buildings were born of the "Picturesque" movement in the arts, a sort of reaction to the formality of the styles that had preceded them. They used rural Italian villas as a sort of paradigm for the style, and later had a variant that used Italian domestic city architecture as its basis. That is generally called "Renaissance Revival," but more or less it's all the same idiom.

It's exuberant, and lends itself to a certain extravagance of detail. Here's the Morse House, still in Portland, Maine. The tower is a popular feature in the style.
Two or three stories, low pitched roofs, wide eaves with lots of brackets and modillions, tall skinny windows, many with a curved top and variations of hoods over them. This is the first style in America that commonly featured a large piece of glass in the front door. Entryways were very elaborate, generally. Many elaborate porches were popular.

The interior of the Morse House shows how elaborate the whole thing could be, if you wanted.
For about thirty years, from about 1840 to 1870, it was probably the most common style in the United States. It is sparsely represented in the deep south, as the post-bellum zeitgeist didn't favor exuberance. Here's a lovely little example from Bellaire Ohio. The sled and the cooler on the stoop hints at a change in the seasons when the picture was taken. Lovely hooded windows in the flat brick facade.
Here's a more modest version being run into the ground in Cincinatti, Ohio. The fate of most of these more plebian versions was to have the brackets, porches, and prominent window trim removed and be covered with aluminum, and later, vinyl siding. You can just make out the tower with clerestory windows that likely brought sunlight into a center stairwell in this example.

There was a boom in the economy in the decades following the end of the Civil War, and people embraced the lighthearted approach and fancy decoration of the Italianate style. A financial panic in the 1870s brought an end to the attitude of frivolity, and when things got going again economically, popular taste had passed the style by. If you had dough, you'd build a Queen Anne house after that.

It had a very common iteration that you can see most everywhere to this very day. I give you: The Italianate Office Block: I never did get used to putting my money in banks in a strip mall. I wanted to walk into something like the Sprague Building, in Tacoma Washington, with its rusticated masonry and imposing solidity, and look for a bank.

Old Time Pagan Religion Part Deux

Man, that's Greek. Bucks County Pennsylvania Greek, that is. Doric columns with no base. Don't get no Greeker than that.
That's the Josiah Hayden house in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. That's not to be confused with Williamstown, Mass. The locals call Williamstown "Billsville," to avoid or add to the confusion, I'm not sure which. Williamstown in the northwest corner of the state. Williamsburg is in the center of the state. The Connecticut river valley used to be the center of manufacturing in Massachusetts, which was the workroom of the whole country at one time. The Haydens ran factories in Williamsburg, including a brassworks, until 1950. The industry moved on.
The Greek Revival style was perfect for the times. Absolutely dominant style from 1825 to 1850 or so, it was sometimes called the "National Style." Pretty much everything built east of the Mississippi River was Greek revival for those 25 years. San Francisco too.

I doesn't have to be really plain, either. Here's the Porcher-Simonds house in Charleston, South Carolina. Whoah:
There were pattern books for carpenters to follow to build in the National Style, but America started to have professionally trained architects designing buildings. And they gravitated to the very fashionable style of the times. It was hip, and it allowed for a great deal of improvisation.

What's this magnificent building? Courthouse? Mansion of a captain of industry? State Capital?
Nope, it's Pumping Station Number 1 in Louisville Kentucky. It's a little more Roman than Greek, really, but it demonstrates the desire for Americans to build in a sophisticated and monumental style during the period, no matter how mundane the project.

Why Greek?

The War of Independence of Greece against the Ottoman Empire captured the imagination of many Americans. After the War of 1812, there was also a backlash against anything that smacked of the British Empire. The Adam style of high style colonial went completely out of favor, and it was based on a sort of application of Roman details to colonial houses, and it seemed very British. People began to associate Greek themes with a kind of purity of thought. Greece was the mother of Rome, and it was kind of search for authenticity to revive it in sticks and bricks. London, seemed, well, Roman.

Greek Revival was everything everywhere in the United States for a while, only to be subsumed in a wave of Italianate and Gothic Revival styles in its turn.

Its enduring legacy is still with us all over, though, if you know where to look. It gave us the front gabled house. It's in there. Somewhere.

Shameless Commerce And Anecdotes

We interrupt our regularly scheduled foaming at the mouth about outdated architectural styles currently residing under vinyl siding to answer a question from one of our readers, Deb in Madison:

Oh, been meaning to ask, what's the story about that bench in your Sippican Cottage Furniture graphic on the right sidebar? I'm sure there's a story there...

Well, Deb, my kids gotta eat twice a day and once on Sunday, same as yours. So I've put a hyperlink to my furniture business right here on the page to tempt people into clicking on it in a weak moment and buying things. Preferably while inebriated and clutching your tax refund. Also, all this writing I'm doing is making my blog turn up in websearch engines over the furniture page, and people are getting confused looking for furniture and finding a gradeschool picture and a bunch of slapdash text.

But what of that bench?, asks Deb. Is it inneresting? Why yes, it is:

Harry Longbaugh's Bench

"Grampa, Mama says that old bench is special. It looks awful plain to me."
"Your mama's right, in a way, my boy, but like every thing a man can own, the people who use it are more captivatin' than the thing itself. That's Harry Longbaugh's bench. Well, not his bench 'xactly."
"Who in blazes is Harry Longbaugh? Is he that man mama went to grammar school with that put a frog in her bookbag? And why do you have his bench? And.."
"No, no, my boy. You see, your grampa used to work on Harlem and Long Island Railroad, back when the years began with 18's. I was a crack telegraph operator..."
"What's a telegraphs any ways, isn't that that guy who used to come to the door with the brushes and soap and get the door slammed in his face by pa ...?"
"No, no, my boy. The telegraph was a machine we used to send messages to each other, before you, your mama, or the telephone was around. We did manage okay then, you know."
"But who's Harry Longbow? Why did you steal his bench? Is he that man that came with the crooked stick to find a place to dig for the well, that daddy says "If he ever shows his face around here again, I'm gonna..."
"No, my boy, I didn't steal anything. You see, The telegraph operator had to keep busy all day, even when there was nothin' to do, so I was in charge of sweeping the station in Harlem, and lighting the lamps, and tending the Lost and Found..."
"But who's Harry Longfellow? Was he lost? Did you find 'em?, was there a reward...?"
"Harry Longbaugh! No he wasn't lost, but there was a reward, but I didn't get it, exactly, and if you'll let me..."
"Is the bench your reward, did Mr. Longshanks give it to you for..."
"I declare, young man, I'll be gone to my reward before I finish this story! Now keep still, and I'll unwind it straight through, and no more detours!"
"Now, people left the darndest things in that station house. And we'd keep 'em in the office for what seemed like eternity, because you never knew when they'd come 'lookin' for 'em. Of course there were the usual parasols and bowlers and such, but one day, the baggage boy brought me out to one the benches, THAT VERY BENCH you're sittin' on, to be specific, and pointed to a valise left on the shelf below, where I'd found many a forgotten item. It was a curious sort of bag. I found out later they called it a Gladstone Bag, after a Britisher, I think, and made from a Persian Carpet! Well, as a matter of good sense and manners, I keep my nose from other's business, and stick to my own, but I felt an overpowerin' urge to look in that bag, you see, and make out if there was something inside to tell me where I might find the owner. And what do you think I saw? "
"Henry Longchamp's unnerwear!"
"Harry Longbaugh, you little knothead! NO. As I was sayin', inside, what did I see but a big Colt revolver, the old army sidearm my daddy called a "leg of mutton." Now, you don't see that sort of thing in New York City much, but it didn't catch my eye as much as the money. Stacks and stack of bills, tied ever so neat with string, like little bricks..."
"Was that the reward...?"
"No, my boy, now listen. Along with the money and the pistol, there was a ticket, for passage on the "Soldier Prince," a boat bound for Argentina! and on that ticket was a man's name."
"Harley Limbaugh?"
"That's Harry, dear boy. Harry Longbaugh. Yes, it were. and I must admit, I was caught in a sort of reverie, thinkin' about that ship, and that money, and that gun, and Argentina, when easy as you please, a man taps me on the shoulder and says, "Excuse me friend, I think that belongs to me." He was a handsome man, with a big friendly grin, but there was something else about him, too, something hard and cold behind that smile."
"Well, he took that bag, and walked straight out of there, and joined another man and a lady on the platform outside, and no doubt went to Argentina. And I kept that bench, where I found that bag to remember it by."
"But with all that money, he didn't give you a reward for findin' it? What kind of story is that!"
"My reward my boy, is that I'm still here to tell the story. For I found out at the Post Office, not long after that very day, that Harry Longbaugh was known by another name too-The Sundance Kid."
Harry Longbaugh's Bench.

Gimme Some Of That Old-Time Pagan Religion

Isn't it Romantic?
Actually, technically it isn't. It's really just Adam style colonial. Nice. That one's in Vermont. It's the only exuberant thing there, maybe. Chastely exuberant.

But we want Early Classical Revival today. The thing that replaced colonial style. Think Roman. Our Founding Fathers did. Especially that Jefferson fellow. Architecture was an amateur thing, and he was the patron saint of getting old design books like Palladio's Four Books Of Architecture and grabbing stuff out of there. I still grab stuff out of that book. They thought the freshly minted United States needed something that bespoke an important civilization. Rome seemed to fit. There were classical elements all over the preceding colonial styles, but they were little bits and pieces added on. Early Classical Revival was the whole design, and wasn't shy about it.
Of course Jefferson's own home is a signature example: Monticello. The place shown above is a great example, too. Sabine Hall in Warsaw, Virginia. It's got what looks like a systyle full height Roman temple rammed right into the facade. Systyle means you the gap between the columns is two column widths. The house was older, 1730, but they later lowered the roof and gave it the signature portico and gable front and wings so common to the type. It's a southern style, really, very rare North of Philadelphia. The crib notes version to delineate Early Classical Revival from the Greek Revival that followed it and overlapped with it is this : if it looks like Elvis and Nero had a Bed and Breakfast together, that's probably it.

It's post-revolutionary Republican monumental architecture. It lasted until about 1820, when the newspapers were full of stories of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, and people got all hopped up on Plato and Socrates and that hopeless dead Romantic Lord Byron and decided their houses should look more like this:
Isn't it Romantic? Yes, that one is.

American Idol

Sarah Vaughan might have the loveliest voice in the history of the United States.

You know, the original hit with Judy Garland is excellent. Judy Garland could sing. But not like this. This is a person who has an enormous instrument at their disposal, and is using all their effort to determine what they'd like to sing, not what they can sing. Such cultivated ability is a rare thing indeed.

She won that old version of the talent contest, the Apollo Theater Open Audition Night. It's piquant that she just accompanied her friend on piano first, and then thought: "I could do that." Yes, you could.

She learned to sing in church, like so many good singers do. You are contemplating the divine and expressing devotion in church. Those things come in handy wherever you go. Her singing could help a man hunched over a tablesaw to think of the sublime and important and beautiful while working, for instance. The whole wide world is an altar to worship at, isn't it?

If you go looking for it, you can see some seedy patches in Sarah Vaughan's background. Why do it? There she is in the video, forever preserved in a glamorous amber for you -- elegant, assured; at the height of her abilities. Why go backstage and see the soiled back of the curtains; the dripping faucet in the shabby dressing room; the men that did not love her, really, just grubbed after her money, or loved her but made her life a shambles? It's not the face she tried to show us.

The people in the talent contests nowadays can't sing much. What singing they do is mindless melisma spittle learned in lessons suited to singing at strip-mall banquet hall weddings. And the shows they use to showcase these karaoke attention mongers are all about looking at the man behind the curtain. And the rarest of things in entertainment is any man behind the curtain that doesn't give you the urge to wash your hand in bleach after you shake theirs. Why go there? Real performers go there because they must, because it is the place the sap is collected to be boiled down to make something worthwhile. Why would you want to lick the tree? It the maple syrup you want.

Sarah Vaughan's singing is the syrup.

I'm Not Tired Of Tired Of Being Alone

I must be the worst blog correspondent on these here intertubes. I hardly ever point at anybody else's blog.

I'm not in the controversy business, really. Few pots are stirred here. Grenades are rarely rolled. But the real problem is that I'm in the content business. I'm generating text, not pawing over it much. I will leave dissection of ideas and vivisection of other pundits to the professionals.

Every once in a while I emerge from this torpor and throw a link in the right hand column to people I read. I'm about four years behind right now, I guess.

"Callimachus" writes for some sort of newspaper. Whatever newspaper that is, I wish I could read it, because all the local papers here look like Highlights or Grit, only the spelling is worse. He has a keen mind, and assembles text in a lively way on an odd assortment of topics over at the blog Done With Mirrors. I think he swears sometimes, but not so's you'd notice. He is aided ably in his efforts there by Reader Iam, who drops a comment here on this blog occasionally, and lives in one of those rectangular states somewhere I think.

Anyway, I was reading his blog yesterday and he had a list of people who share April 13th as a birthday. It was an odd and wonderful assortment, but if you know anything about me at all, you know I never got past the second entry before I went to YouTube.

Even on his birthday, he throws the party for us.

Lost In The Kerfuffle

It was the voice that would grab you.

He passed away yesterday, and he slipped below the horizon too quietly for his talents, lost in a media frenzy over a pointless kerfuffle. The fellow made me smile, and marvel at his talent. He made James Earl Jones sound like Lou Christie. Voices like that, in performance, are rare and wonderful.

What else would Sylvanus and Lovie Browne call their son, but Roscoe Lee? Roscoe was educated in literature and languages, and began his adult life as college professor. He was a little bit of a salesman after that, and then decided when he was in his thirties that he wanted to be an actor. He was always in demand.

Look at his imdb file. He has way over a hundred entries. He was a fixture on TV in the seventies and eighties, a voice over artist of the first rank, a Shakespearean actor. He won awards. He worked.

You can tell that there was a enormous backstop of cultivated talent there. The talent part only gets you so far. People who are really good performers work hard when no one is looking so it will look effortless when the lights hit them. It's the reason why so many people think they'd make a good entertainer if they just got the chance; really good performers make it look easy. You wouldn't. It isn't.

Roscoe Lee Browne could jape with Carroll O'Connor, hit his mark, and deliver his line in the French accent he didn't have to learn because it was catalogued in his head already. He knew from instinct and experience how long to pause before he delivered that final punchline for its full effect. It's a trifle, and I'm sure he knew it, like so many trifles he participated in. But he took trifles seriously. That is the true measure of the entertainer. It's easy to be serious about serious things.

Certain actors can walk to the edge of a stage, and stand there and hold your attention. They are often not beautiful. Roscoe was not a leading man type. He could weave a little story in the air better than most any actor I could name, really.

I remember him always as Mr. Nightlinger, the cook on a cattle drive, in one of the few John Wayne movies that is a real good movie. The Cowboys. He must share a bunkhouse with the pack of young boys that are all that John Wayne can find to drive his cattle to market.

Browne has many impish and serious moments in the movie, but the little vignette when the man, an exotic man, goes in among the boys and tells a wild tale of his heritage, --the boys spellbound, but no more than the audience-- is the best example of his craft I can think of. A man that knew Shakespeare and the Bible as he did knew how to say those lines. You cannot take your eyes from him, and yet you could close your eyes and let his rich, deep voice bring the tale just as convincingly. He was like Babe Ruth was; pitching or batting, doesn't matter.

He got kinda lost in the shuffle yesterday. Someone needs to wish him well. Someone needs to tell him that they watched him in a darkened movie house all those years ago and sat up bolt upright when he boomed in that mellifluous, stentorian voice; "Children, I feel your eyes on me!"

Yes, they were.

Not Knowing What's Not So

Well, we've been visiting old houses hereabouts. It got me to thinking. What's the oldest wood-frame house still standing in the US? It's hard, what with fire, termites, and Supreme Court Kelo decisions, to keep much of anything made of wood standing for a long time. As far as the oldest house of any kind, Saint Augustine Florida tries to pawn off a house made of a sort of seashell masonry, and New Mexico has some sort of mud hut I suspect is not really original equipment mud, but neither is made predominately from wood so let's ignore them anyway.

I found two houses, right here in Massachusetts, that claim 1636. The provenance of the one in Beverly is a little sketchy, and their website is dreadful, so I hereby bestow the claim to the Johnathan Fairbanks House in Dedham, Mass:
(By the way, the Beverly Yacht Club is about a mile and a half from my house, which is about an hour and a half from Beverly. Everybody knows this is where you want to be.)

Anyway, if you examine the floor plan, it was originally a linear plan, about 34 x 16 feet, two rooms, really, and then had a bunch of little additions put on. McMansion, colonial style.

The additions are really ancient, too so they're not cheating with the date. 1648, 1654. It's not all that spartan inside, when you get a peek in there:
OK, that bedroom is 16 by 8 feet. It's against the building code to build a room less than 7 feet wide in Massachusetts, including in a prison, so it still passes muster, barely. The building inspector wouldn't like that firebox; too shallow, not enough hearth, not enough clearance to combustibles over the opening, not fire brick... well, the house lasted over four hundred years and Dedham has probably buried 50 building inspectors since then, so maybe they should mind their own business more. If you've ever used a fireplace like that you know it draws well and throws a lot of heat and light into the room.

The kitchen has all the bells and whistles:
Lessee. You got your fire, some more fire, (a bread oven) a shelf, a plate or two for the shelf, some guns to fill the plate, a hook to hang the pot. Anything else would be extravagance, really.

It ended up a four bedroom house, with several parlors, and a real privy indoors. Two holer, too. Guy must have been rich. Oops, spoke too soon. They put four more bedrooms upstairs. Mrs Fairbanks must have been tired a lot.

I've been in many houses almost this old, and I can assure you they are quite pleasant to live in once you update the bathroom and get some electricity and heat going in there. I can't stand up in many of the rooms, and have to duck to get through the doorways, but that's a little thing. The builders didn't know what they were doing, so they relied on pattern books with everything based on classical themes. And classical Greek and Roman architectural proportions are based on the human body, and people instinctively respond to a facade that looks like a head, or a windowpane that is proportioned like a face, or a moulding based on a section of the Parthenon's columns, which is based on a man's stature, and so forth.

So in their ignorance, vernacular builders then knew many things that educated persons now do not, because they did not know what was not so. It strikes me, in architecture as well as many other things, we have come full circle, and must make a supreme effort to not know what is not so again.

Here's A Teaspoon. Dig A Canal

Well, we mentioned a saltbox plan yesterday, so you knew it was coming. The John Osborn House in Fairfield, Connecticut. Built in 1772, and still in the same family when these pictures were taken in the 1930s. Like every house on the northern east coast that was standing at the time, they claim George Washington slept... er, check that -- had a drink of water here.

The old Osborn well further down the road had a silver tankard hanging by its side, a vessel brought from England, and here neighbors and travelers were accustomed to quench their thirsts. Tradition has it that the silver tankard which hung by the well was preserved and that Washington refreshed himself by its service.

Hmmm. "Tradition has it" that Salma Hayek has been desperately trying to get my phone number, to attempt to woo me away from Mrs Cottage. A fruitless endeavor. I can neither confirm nor deny this. Anyhow, here's the plan:
The linear plan is still discernible, and the massive center chimney with all sorts of fireboxes. The saltbox form allows two rooms to be appended on the back of the linear form. The front stairwell is little more than a ladder in a shaft,with pretensions, at this point. There's two large chambers upstairs, along with two storage rooms under the long sloping back roof.

People were more attuned to their surroundings then, as they were at the mercy of their surroundings more than we are, and would generally turn the long, blank, sloping roof in the back towards the north or northwest, to shelter against the winter wind coming from that direction. The largest expanse of glass would be on the front facade to maximize winter sunshine getting into the house. They'd leave only deciduous trees out front, so they'd shade the house in the summer, but shed their leaves in the winter and allow the low angled winter sunshine in. They'd leave any evergreen trees only behind the house, so they'd block winter winds with their year-round foliage. Why doesn't your developer know that? Because you have electric lights and an oil-fired boiler, and can afford to be foolish and not shiver in the dark half the year. Still good advice. I took it.

I ask you without trying to be snide: Is there anything this elegant built into your home? Anything even close?
If you're like most folks, the answer is no. And this is work done by people with no formal training. But the wonder of this millwork, and the whole house, really is not just how elegant it is despite being fairly spartan. It might have been added a little later, but it's still really old. If you saw the toolbox the builders had to make this thing, your jaw would drop.

I could make that thing, and the house it's in. I've made both built-in and freestanding versions of that thing. And here's what I'd use, to do it, that the fellows that built this one didn't have:

• kiln dried dimensioned lumber
• power planer
• power jointer
  
• powered rip saw
• powered cut-off saw
• powered drill
  
• steel cutting tools
• spindle shaper
• aliphatic resin glue
• wire nails
• pneumatic anything
• modern sandpaper
• powered bandsaw
  
• an electronic calculator
• pipe clamps
• pre-mixed paint
  
• a library

I'd keep going but the internet might run out of pixels. Hell, something as mundane as light and heat would have been pretty sketchy then, too. And the Pequot Indians that were right down the street might interrupt your exertions, and they didn't just drop by to remind you to visit their casino back then. When they weren't bothering you, the British would drop by from time to time and burn this and that to the ground in Fairfield. George the Third was a fairly humorless fellow.

If I made that corner cabinet, with all the tools and information at my disposal, you'd marvel over it. Picture the fellows that made the one in the picture under the shade of the tree outside.

Time Marches On, Sorta

Reader and commenter Deb wondered aloud yesterday after reading about my Cape Cod fetish: "...I wonder if there are any authentic Cape Cods here in the Madison area?"

Well, the answer is no, I'm afraid.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are undoubtedly various revival versions of the Cape Cod style in Wisconsin, but the true Cape Cod style never even made it as far west as New York State. The first truly contemporary style I can come up with that isn't just a vernacular shelter that covered the midwest is Greek Revival. Civil War-ish.

Got me to thinking though. Here in Massachusetts, I can go right back to the medieval. Most of Europe can't find anything as old as what we've got right here. If they do, it's usually a big stone cathedral or palace. The home of a regular person, made from flammable wood, is a rare thing when you're talking just past the middle ages. Check this out:
That's the Peak House in Medfield, Mass, and it's still there. I've been in it a handful of times. I've driven past it many thousands of times. I've banged nails into the house next door, which might be even more interesting. It was the stagecoach stop on the Boston to Milford Post Road.

The Peak House is from 1680. Look at it. You can see the beginnings of a true version of American architecture there. Of course, you can picture a medieval European street there as well.

After hovel type shelters, this is the first sort of thing they built in America. It's called a linear plan. It's one room deep, two stories high (the second story is really just a loft) and the rooms are laid end to end in a linear fashion. Glass was expensive, and grew crazy expensive if you wanted big panes, hence the little leaded bits of glass for windows. Even that was a luxury.

Hey look, I've got the plans for the thing if you want to build one.
15 by 24 feet. Almost exactly twice as big as the shed I keep my mower and garden tools in. Cozy.

Anyway, the people crazy enough to brave the Atlantic Ocean, Metacomet, and Medfield mosquitoes built that little gem in the linear style, and eventually their collective children moved to Connecticut and stuck a sort of lean-to shed on the back, and extended the roofline. Et Voila! The saltbox:
Then followed all sorts of variations of two story things. And then someone, in the 1700s now, decided that a house two rooms deep, one story high, with an attic you could live in if you wanted might be just the thing. Think of it!

Hey, look, a 3/4 Cape. Lovely.

Eventually a furniture making maniac moved to Southcoast Massachusetts, and wondered what kind of house to live in. He built this thing in the swamp, and you can hear the table saw or the clicking of the keyboard if the wind's just right.

Reactionary

This house is exquisite. You might not think so at first blush.

If you've got a pulse you probably know this is called a "Cape" style house. That's short for Cape Cod. Cape Cod is a bit of a swim from where I'm typing this, or a very short sail.

Real estate people call every damn thing a Cape. They likewise have no idea what a Colonial or a Victorian is with any certainty. They also are confused about what "pristine" means. Their dictionary of adjectives is shredded and loaded into a blunderbuss, then shot at the listings, apparently.

This is what is called a Full Cape. It has five bays (four windows and a door) across the front facade. A Three Quarter Cape would have window, window, door, window. A Half Cape would have window, window, door. Cape Codders would often start with a Half Cape, and add on from time to time to get Full Cape goodness.

This is a Full Cape with Ell. The "ell" refers to the perpendicular addition jutting out of the back of the main house, also probably added much later that the original structure or representing a proper fitting out of an animal shed. It's got an addition on the addition, too, but it's not really a Full Cape with Two Ells, as that would generally mean the main house had two different ells coming simultaneously out of its rear. Some persons call the little ell at the end of the other ell the "Back House."

It's a Center Chimney Cape. That big pile of brick serves multiple flues, as the house was heated by fireplaces originally. They were likely very shallow fireboxes that drew very well, and threw a lot of heat. More modern ornamental fireplaces are much deeper. There might be a huge fireplace in the kitchen, perhaps with an oven right in the bricks.

These houses might have a shallow dirt cellar under them, but much of the house, and usually all of the ells are built right on the ground. They had a rubble stone foundation usually. They had rotted sills generally, too.

A house of this vintage would have been timber framed, ie: assembled from fewer, larger framing components instead of the smaller more numerous framing lumber we use now. The interiors would have been covered with wood lath, that is thin strips of wood with gaps between them, and then had plaster applied over the lath with animal hair put in it to strengthen the bond. There was probably no insulation in the walls, although they might dump a lot of construction debris in there. The reason old ceilings sag in these houses is that the portion of the plaster that had extruded through the lath breaks off over time, and the face coating's weight overcomes its modest adhesive strength. You can screw a sort of metal button washer through the plaster into the lath, and plaster over the button, to re-affix it. I have, many thousands of times over the years over many jobs. And I'm not even in the plastering business. All of that has been replaced first by wire lath instead of wood, and then by sheets of gypsum with a paper face. It is customary still on Cape Cod to put a full coating of plaster over these sheets of "Blueboard" - or "GreenBoard" if you're in a damp place. In most of the country they simply cover the seams and screw holes and call it Drywall.

There are clapboards on the front of the house, and cedar shingles on the other facades. It was sheathed with boards, as plywood was as yet unknown. I saw houses still being sheathed with boards when I was child in the 1960s, as some old-timers stuck to their old ways. Pretty rare.

Originally, only the front might be painted, and the rest left to weather to a soft silver if white cedar was used, or a blackish tone if red cedar. This picture was taken in the 1960s, and by that time, it was customary to paint the whole thing white.

The house would have low ceilings downstairs, and you'd live right under the eaves in the upstairs room. You can see the windows are 6 over 9. The top sash has six lites, and was probably fixed in place. The bottom, operable sash has 9 lites. They may originally have had no spring or counterweight on the sash, and earned their sobriquet of "Guillotine Window." They make fake muntins for the large sheets of glass in a modern window, to approximate the look of these panes, and 99 times out of 100 get the proportions wrong. A window pane is is approximately the size and proportions of a human face in a window this big, and that's why you like looking through them. They look OK exactly square, too. And it's a muntin, not a mullion. A mullion is a piece of wood between sashes, not between panes of glass. Even the spell checker is confused.

You can tell the shutters actually operate by the angle they sit at. The heel of the shutter at the window frame sits on pins well out from the facade, but the outer edge is pinned back to the siding. You can tell a fake shutter at 1000 yards because they are screwed flat to the house.

That's a real cedar shingle roof. Probably red cedar. It will last as long as an asphalt roof shingle, but has the three dimension quality and variegated color that asphalt shingles always lack. That's a wooden gutter, by the way, slopped with linseed oil every year and diverting the roof's rainwater into galvanized leaders and down into the ground into drywells. The ground is fine sand down just a few inches, and drains away the water quickly. The ocean is right down the end of the street. I lived on that street for several months in the 1980s while I was building something else. I passed by this house without noticing, probably, because there were so many more like it everywhere. They are beginning to seem rare now, though, as remuddling and vinyl siding takes it vigorish of the housing stock. These houses were routinely flattened to make way for a bigger house, too. Or they leave one wall standing to call it a remodel, and blast the rest to splinters. The ocean makes the lots precious and the house too small for the value of the lot.

Ladies and gents, a real Five Bay Center Chimney Full Cape with Ell and Back House.

The Easter Lily

Pater noster, qui es in coelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum: adveniat regnum tuum: fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo, et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem.

I've got to steal one. God forgive me. I've got to steal a flower from you. There are so many, God, and mother only needs one. I'll burn forever but mother needs her Easter lily.

"Child, what are you doing?"

"I need the lily for Easter, Sister. I have no money and there are so many."

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.

"It is a sin to steal, child."

" I know it is, Sister, but I can't help it."

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.

"You can always help it child. Where is your mother and your father?"

"Father is nowhere, Mother says, Sister, and I don't know where nowhere is. Mother is sick and I think she needs an Easter lily or she'll die."

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona nobis pacem.

"Where is your mother, child?"

"She's in the bed with the diphtheria, Sister."

"Is she alone?"

"Yes, as I am here, Sister."

"When did you eat last, child?"

Panem coelestem accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo.

"It's another sin I know, Sister, but I ate the heel of the bread this morning while Mother was moaning. She wouldn't eat it, and I needed it."

"I see. And before that?"

"I don't know. I was sick first, and Mother might know but she can't tell you. She is hot and talks of places I don't know and people that are dead, Sister."

"And she sent you for the flower?"

"It is my own sin, Sister. She said "The lilies, the lilies, the Easter lilies... " over and over until I promised I'd fetch her one. She would not have me steal, but she cannot come. Will I burn forever, Sister?"

"You will have your flower, child, and the kingdom of heaven besides, for to tend to the afflicted is the hallmark of the saint."

"And saints can steal flowers, and God don't mind?"

Indulgentiam, et absolutionem, et remissionem peccatorum nostrorum, tributat nobis omnipotens et misericors Dominus.

"No, God does not mind. Now take me to your mother, and we will give her the lily together.

No Admittance

What shall we talk about today?

By the time you are reading this, I'll be pushing wood through a saw. I have help occasionally, but for the most part it is a solitary thing.

Many people used to work in solitary endeavors, or in small groups. Those types of situations are becoming much more common again, and many more people are joining the ranks of the fractured work force, as I have. I think it's better in many ways.

There is an image I have in my head of the average denizen of the office building. It is not an imaginary image, as I have worked there myself. It occurs to me that it it is the office building filled with information workers that is old-fashioned, not me and my version of the work picture.

The office building is the text version of belching smokestack-noon whistle-timecard punching-id badge-break room-factory of my youth. The cubicles and the old CRTs and the in and outboxes are the assembly line of text now. That's the modern version of the old sepia colored photo of a humming factory. You nice folks with the boxy shoes and skinny glasses and the Blackberrys and ACT folders open are the buggy whip people now. You are the people who used to wear coveralls and carry a sandwich in a pail and grind it out until you get a watch and bed with a lid. Not me.

The idea that you'd all congregate in one place made sense when there was a smelter in the back. The smelter is a server now, and you probably don't even know where it is. There is little reason to congregate in one place between low-pile carpeting and drop ceilings just to think. It is unlikely people will continue to do so much longer.

I have a network of persons to help me when I need it. That pool is too small, but not inconsiderable. We congregate when it is necessary. We generally each have the tools we need available to us wherever we are, or go. We buy components and materials and machinery from people we will never meet, and sell the fruits of these constantly shifting associations to other persons we may never meet. In the past, I've even occasionally worked in occupied homes and never met the occupants. It's not always necessary.

The little shelf outside the HR office with the brightly colored forms. The vending machine. The bagels laid out before all but the most hardy clerk arrives by a contractor no one has ever met. It's all going the way of the dodo. You cutting edge old-fashioned people are going to have to learn to live in the world outside the office tower. The world is booming, and it's kinda scary if your sun is of the fluorescent variety. Be brave, and do not allow yourself to be taken advantage of by those that say they can put the workplace genie back in the bottle.

I bet you'll like it out here.

Poultry In Motion

If it walks, or crawls, or flies, or wriggles on its belly, it wanders into my yard eventually.

We had three huge turkeys by the kids' sandbox this morning. They startled a handful of Canada Geese that were cruising in the swamp just off the grass there, and the Tom puffed himself up nicely. I took this picture from my living room window.

There is not one worthwhile restaurant in the town I live in. No fast food, either. No movie theater. Not a lot of retail stores of any kind. There's only a couple of traffic lights in the whole town. One night, my old truck broke down maybe a mile from my house. It was as dark as the grave. Moonless, starless night. To find my way home, I had to walk along the yellow stripe down the middle of the road, as it was the only thing I could see at all. I walked all the way home, and never had to yield the road to a passing car. It was safer out there than along the road's shoulder with all the poison ivy and the critters. And I live on the busiest street in town, except for the lightly traveled highway that cuts through it.

There are other attractions in this world, that do not have a sign out front.

Happy Thursday

Sometimes,when there's too much talent, it turns into a lamebrain "Can you top this" kind of contest, instead of music. This is not one of those times.

Can you top this? They all can, until the clock makes them stop.
(Al DiMeola, Paco DeLucia, John McLaughlin)

Inside Outside USA

We're losing this knack, I'm afraid.

A proper entryway, I mean. This one is from Bristol, Rhode Island. With houses fronting right on the street, the builders would wisely elevate the first story a bit to gain privacy for the lower floor from pedestrian traffic. This also allowed larger plantings under the windowsills, and gave a sort of meaning and use to the stairs required to reach the front door.

That's a pleasant place for someone to wait for a response to the bell, or for the house's inhabitants to pause for a moment, set down a package, and reach for their keys. You're in out of any rain or snow, shaded from the sun; whatever the weather you're protected from it a bit.

There is a feeling of transition, which is an important visual cue for humans. Too many houses have something no more elegant or elaborate than a hatch on a submarine for the entry most used by the occupants. And visitors often are left with no visual cue as to where they should go about looking for a door to call at. A home represents a great deal of the values of the occupants and the society they inhabit. Going in and out of it like you're diving out of a plane is not conducive to a feeling of domesticity.

That's a traditional porch ceiling there, painted robin's egg blue. It's another small detail, the color of a clear sky, to blur the distinction between inside and outside, sheltered and abroad. It's like visually putting your toe in the pool before diving in.

Some one should get some trumpet vines going on the trellis, and make a bower to sit in and shell peas on a late summer afternoon, and wave to your neighbors as they walk by or drive past slowly. You'll know exactly what's on their minds, too: I wish I had a front porch like that.

Time Marches On

I found this video intriguing. The technology is not new, of course. It's not a breakthrough I'm reporting here. It's a kind of signpost, though.

I remember watching Geppetto dance with Pinnochio at the drive-in theater when I was young. My children watch it from time to time on a battered VHS tape. I look at it differently now. Not solely as entertainment.

Men conceived and drew that marvelous thing all by hand. That skill is dead now, more or less. No one needs it. It's the buggy whip of animation.

You can generate all sorts of things like those two figures dancing digitally now, and change them almost instantly into two fish, or Godzilla and Tom Brady, or whatever else comes to mind. There is painstaking work still, of course, but of a different sort than the ink and paint of Walt Disney. It's all ones and zeros now.

I know how to paint an oil painting. Not well, but how it's done is no mystery to me. And I know how to manipulate images on a computer screen, too. I've used MS Paint in particular before too. I found it interesting that the artist began by blocking in the Mona Lisa in the time honored fashion of the oil painting, just without the turpentine. Then they nudged the process 1500 years further along, and brought it to its completion.

We see so far because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Da Vinci, yes, and Walt Disney and Milt Kahl and Art Babbit; and some man or woman in a cubicle too.

Treasure

I sat for a long moment at the end of my little boy's bed last night. It struck me how much of the stuff he truly treasures is little more than trash. He struck me quite a bit, too, with many of the items he keeps at hand.

It's all marvelously bright and tasteless and kinda shoddy. It never was much, and now it's all mostly busted up and in a sort of exquisitely arranged jumble. He picks through it all in an exact manner, each thing his friend and companion. They talk to him, and he talks to them.

I don't think it would be possible to arrange his things beforehand. You could not go to a store and pick them out. The things he cannot live without are usually some off-handedly chosen present from someone who barely knows him, if they know him at all. How would you know he'd want to play with a two inch tall Spiderman figure that has lost his lower body? Forty people, me included, gave him stuffed animals when he was born, and out of all of them he chose a Winnie The Pooh and chewed its ear off, a little at a time, while he was falling asleep. His mother had to perform a radical earectomy on the little little bruin, and our son just sort of placed the spot where the ear used to be near his mouth and carried on falling asleep with it. The other thirty nine still have tags on them.

In a thousand years, I could never part with that ratty doll. My boy will lose interest in it altogether, as his older brother did with the things of his infancy. Any stranger would just see a mangled, dirty ball of stuffing and give it the heave-ho.

Like all treasure, it's buried.

The Boatyard

This is the time of year for the boatyard.

I got rid of my sailboat. Gave it away. I didn't use it, and I tired of it calling out to me all the time, reminding me that it was there and I wasn't using it. The reminder came, generally, in the form of a bill of some sort. If it just existed, that would be one thing. But it became a taxi to nowhere, up on blocks, with the meter running. No fun.

Don't get me wrong; it was marvelous to go out on Buzzards Bay in the high summer and trail your hand in the hissing foam along the gunwhale and feel the sun and the breeze on your face. But it was an awfully long run for such a short slide. I spent as much time painting it as sailing it the year before I finally pulled the plug on it.

I made another boat. It was my original idea, to make a boat with my own hands and get out on the water in that. It would take all the dilettante out of it for me. However modest it might be, no one makes sport of a boat you made yourself. People have all sorts of ideas about other people's boats at the harbor, most pretty catty, but there's a sort of respect that comes with the fabrication of the thing.

I made the little boat all from mahogany and mahogany plywood. I finished it about three years ago or so. It was in the way, half built, for more than half a decade before that. I finished it in a flurry in three weeks so I could get it out of the way. I never launched it.

I stuck it in an unused bay in a friendly garage, and only the dust motes drift by it. It calls to me, as the other one always did, but in a different way. There is no meter. There is no urgency. There is no feeling of foolishness of pouring cash into a hole in the ocean.

Whenever you're ready, it says.