Thursday, February 16, 2012

A Tale from the Old House Crypt


Twenty-or-so years ago, during a fluid period in my career, a girl I knew suggested we rent a mansion together in Stockbridge, Mass. Had we done so, either a single or a double homicide - depending on whether, or which, of us escaped - would surely have ensued, so it was a lucky thing we dropped the plan. One of the places we looked at was a fantastically decrepit pile in nearby Lenox called Ventfort Hall. When I moved in to where I live now, it didn't look a lot different than Ventfort did then. However, Ventfort is about 14,000 square feet bigger.

Ventfort Hall was constructed between 1891 and 1893 for a man named George Hale Morgan and his wife, Sarah Spencer Morgan. Like FDR and Eleanor, the Morgans were distant cousins with the same last name. Nowadays we rarely think of carriage accidents as potentially fatal - I mean, how fast could they be going? However, they killed our forebears with depressing regularity. Morgan's prosperous father-in-law, Junius Spencer Morgan, died in a crash outside Monte Carlo in 1890. The accident provided his daughter Sarah with a big inheritance, and her husband with sufficient cash to build Ventfort Hall. Sarah's brother also prospered in the world; his name was J. Pierpont Morgan. Rotch & Tilden, a Boston firm responsible for five of what we like to call "important" Lenox houses, designed Mr. & Mrs. Morgan's summer place in a style that might be called Edith Wharton Elizabethan. This was a "look" in Lenox, a resort once known, notwithstanding the wreckage in the image below, as the Newport of the Hills.


You think it looked bad outside? You should have seen it inside, for example the dining room. Why are we looking up in the image below? Because the entire floor has collapsed. The whole house wasn't as wrecked as this, although at the time of Carole's and my visit the more intact areas were in the process of being diligently scavenged for woodwork and fireplaces.


Here's that same room today, restored to what is very nearly its original condition. Credit for the rescue of Ventfort Hall belongs to a group of local residents called the Ventfort Hall Association. In 1994, with the backing of a few deep pocket individuals, the Association offered to buy Ventfort for $650,000. The owner was a nursing home operator whose demolition plans had been stymied by adjacent property owners. The offer was rejected. The next year, the Association offered $500,000. Still no deal. In 1996, they offered $350,000 (Hello? Donald Trump?), after which a deal at last took shape. If the operator would agree to suspend further interior demolition, the Association would raise the price to $400,000. The property closed in 1997, with a $250,000 loan from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and $150,000 cash from friends.


Here's Ventfort in 1998, minus the Vietnamese jungle that had formerly engulfed it. What's wrong with this picture, aside from a monstrous house in severe distress? If you compare the gable in the foreground with the one on the left, you'll see that its original Flemish silhouette has been ham-handedly altered. Probably the bricks were falling off, prompting the kind of cheapjack repair that afflicts many an aristocratic old house.


Here's Jeffrey Gulick, the man in charge of stone carving and decorative plaster repair at Ventfort (now you'll recognize him on the street), completing the brownstone finial destined for the uppermost part of the restored gable.


The stone itself, supplied by Portland Brownstone Quarries of Portand, CT, came from a demolished Connecticut prison. Jeff's work is done and ready for mounting.


Champlain Masonry of Pittsfield, Mass. did the installation.


Here's the finished product, good as new.


While you contemplate the vintage view below of the salon at Ventfort, let me give you a precis of how the place got so run down. Morgan's wife died three years after Ventfort was finished, but he and a second wife continued to use it for the Lenox season until he died in 1911. During the First World War, Morgan heirs rented Ventfort to Margaret Vanderbilt, wife of Lusitania victim Alfred Vanderbilt, and later to Roscoe Bonsal. The Bonsals eventually bought the house in 1925 for $103,000, and twenty years later, in 1945, the heirs sold it for $22,500 to Arthur Martin. The new owner converted the mansion into a dormitory for Tanglewood students and subdivided the perimeter of the property into small building lots. (Ouch). In 1950, Bruno Aron turned Ventfort into a hotel called Festival House. The Fokine Ballet Camp came along next and continued to kick the old house around, in the manner of dormitories everywhere, until 1976. Then an outfit called The Bible Speaks inflicted yet more dormitory abuse until a spectacular bankruptcy at the end of the 1980s. Enter nursing home operator, intentional neglect, and threatened demolition.


This was the salon in 1997.








Ventfort's elaborate ceilings were falling down all over the place. The one in the image below is located in the corridor to the billiard room. The darker colored original section was used as a model for reproducing missing areas. The light colored work is all new. Jeff Gulick, the man who did the exterior carving, was also in charge of interior plaster restoration. Pretty amazing.


The glory of Ventfort Hall is its paneled double height stair hall. Before the Ventfort Hall Association was able to stop it, someone with a crowbar did extensive shopping for rails, paneling, moldings and the like. Fine carpenter Michael Costerisan of neighboring West Stockbridge painstakingly replicated missing pieces which, when stained (if that ever happens; more later) will become indistinguishable from the original work.






Things were awful upstairs too. Here's the Blue Room, before and after restoration.




Ventfort Hall opened to the public in 2000, but not many of its rooms were finished, leave alone furnished. This master bedroom was an exception. Tjasa Sprague and Steve Baum took me around a few years back, when Ventfort looked like it did in the images so far. Tjasa was Association treasurer and prime mover behind the whole undertaking. She decided on projects; Steve managed them. The closed door behind her goes to one of two master bathrooms. That gizmo on the wall above the tub in the vintage view was part of a burglar alarm system. (Why in the bathroom? I have no idea).




Here's the same view today. The new marble replicates vanished original slabs. Heaven only knows who made off with the tub. A bit of original wall covering hidden behind the alarm box provided a template for the restored walls.


The Morgans supposedly slept in the same room, even though their house had the traditional his and her owners' bedrooms. Here's the other one, still unfurnished in this view. Only the top half of the fireplace mantle was here in 1997; the bottom half represents an educated guess of what the missing section looked like.


This is Tjasa and yours truly in the billiard room. Why am I wearing a hat and a down-filled bomber jacket? Because it was February and we were in a 28,000 square foot house. Whatever else befell Ventfort Hall, the stained glass remained intact.








There have been no end of projects, inside and out. One of the most ambitious was rebuilding the grand porch that overlooked a sweeping lawn above Kemble Street.












Here's what the porch looked like during the Gilded Age, and how it looked after restoration. Since buying Ventfort in 1997, the Association has spent over $4,500,000 on restoration projects.






Last week, after a 3-year hiatus, I drove to Lenox for what my late father would have called a "look-see," to check on how - or what - had changed. I discovered that Ventfort Hall has a new partner, to wit: the Town of Lenox. Wonder why that replicated paneling is still unstained? Because the entire basement, according to Town orders, had to be clad in fireproof wall board if Ventfort Hall wanted to stay open. OK, you can't really argue with fire code (much as you'd like). What about the plans to restore the elevator and make the second floor more accessible? Not happening, at least not until the shaft is made twelve inches wider (for ADA compatibility). This would mean disassembling an entire exterior wall, which again ain't happening. The list goes on, the gist of which is entangling regulations, while not stopping improvements, have channeled them into invisible locations. Walking through the place remains enormous fun, however, rather like catching up with a favorite aunt. She is a big aunt, as you can see.


The vintage view below was taken in front of the porte cochere on the day of the annual Tub Parade. This was an end-of-season ritual wherein society battered-fried its equipages with, apparently, everything that was still left in the greenhouse, then tooled around Lenox basking in the "oohs" and "ahhs" of dazzled townsfolk, visitors and servants. Today's porte cochere is clotted with a tangled switchback of overlapping ramps - a nightmare from M.C. Escher - which does, however, allow a person in a wheelchair to get to the front door.


Ventfort was finished in 1893, a time of growing interest in the Colonial Revival. It was out of step with fashion from the start - from the Flemish/Elizabethan/Richardsonian-ism of its ponderous brick exterior, to the (at times) fussy Victorianism of its interiors. That said, it does pack a visual punch.



Not much has changed in the white and gold reception room, which they call the salon, or in the rest of the main hall.





The library and dining room are looking good. That silver dining room sconce, by the way, belongs to a set that was in the house when it was built, disappeared during the bad years, was found again and purchased back by the Association. The silver safe in the hall outside is in typical rescued-big-old-house condition. The double interior doors survive; the single exterior door is gone.





The billiard room is unchanged. The fireplace is a reconstituted pastiche of rescued architectural fabric which, while totally inauthentic, manages to look pretty good. The sconces (surprisingly) are original.




Let's have a look at the main family and guest rooms on the second floor. The mezzanine level musicians' gallery is a showy architectural touch, but an acoustically lousy place for projecting music.



Neither the hall to the owners' bedrooms, nor the bedrooms themselves, have changed much since my last visit. Well, the second of the bedrooms is currently interpreted as a dining room, which provides a stage for gorgeous dishes and silver from Bellefontaine (now Canyon Ranch). This is good, even though furnishing a bedroom as a dining room doesn't completely work for me. The other bedroom, big as it is, has an appealing coziness.



In fact, odd as it sounds, coziness is a leitmotif of Ventfort Hall, at least on the second floor. The asymmetrical bedrooms with their homey fireplaces and inglenooks were doubtless originally awash in bric-a-brac. Ventfort's interiors are an unexpectedly romantic period piece from the 1880s, lurking behind the social armor of its exterior walls.




The high tide of restoration laps against a temporary wall a the eastern end of the second floor hall, and there it stops. Beyond that point, and indeed throughout the entire third floor, Ventfort appears frozen at the period of its rescue from the nursing home developer. Large, pleasant guest and family bedrooms occupy the western end of 3 accessed by the main stair. The eastern end of the third floor was your typical warren of servants' cubicles. There's been a good deal of stabilization work up here, but not much else.








Could I leave Ventfort without bushwhacking through the jungle for a look at the FABULOUS former stable? That would be a no.

Ventfort Hall is short on furniture, only partially open, has scuffed floors, and a lot of missing pieces. For all of that - and quite aside from its value as a cultural artifact - it is a spectacular object. You just want to climb all around the place and marvel at the fact that it still exists. This was Ventfort Hall then...

This is Ventfort now. It's open all year long and supported entirely by donations, plus any and everything they can think of to raise money - dances, tours, concerts, lectures, dinners, mystery nights, exhibitions, theatrical presentations,etc., etc. Here's the link: www.gildedage.org

31 comments:

  1. Absolutely amazing. Thank you for sharing!

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    1. I was one of the summer 'guests' of Fokine Ballet Camp for 6 glorious years of my life.

      'Ms. Fokine and Mr. 'B' HARDLY 'kicked the old house around. You obviously didn't do any in depth research about this period. We had maids that cleaned. We were proper young ladies who wore white gloves to Tanglewood and were never permitted to 'kick the old house around'.

      Instead, we revered her beauty and charm and grace.
      Ronnie Bernard Lazarus

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    2. Does anyone know what Mr. B's full name was? I went to ballet camp there in the 70's? Thanks for this post, it was nice to see the house again.

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    3. I went to Fokine Ballet Camp in the early ‘70’s. I don’t remember Mr B, but I do remember a wonderful teacher named Oleg Sabine.

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  2. John, great pics of the darkest days and the rebirth. I visited in 2001 when maybe three rooms were open to the public.

    On the edge of the relatively small footprint the estate retains today there was a lovely old carriage barn with Jacobean accents. It was surrounded by thorny brush and looking as poorly as the main house did upon your first visit. Hopefully it hasn't collapsed, but I could understand it going untouched while priorities were set on the manor itself.

    The injection of some money, labor (and publicity) when Cider House Rules was shot there along with a Walgreen's ad I'm sure were welcomed events.

    Sadly the cycle of neglect by some non-for-profits being over their heads with owning a Berkshire Cottages still goes on. The former DeSisto School (2-mi away from Tanglewood on Route 183) one of the original Cottages was acquired by a speculator in a bankruptcy sale in 2009 yet has never been occupied. The 220-acre estate and 25,000sq ft 1880 mansion quite possibly will be razed from neglect.

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  3. Thank you for another great post. So interesting to read about this house. So thankful that it has been saved and restored!

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  4. A labor of love by those craftsmen to bring this beauty back to life.

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  5. Have always admired the dedication, determination and volunteer spirirt clearly evident here in the rescue of this mnansion and others across the country, like the Lockwood Mathers home in Conneticut, the Elms in Rhode Island, Carolands in California and Oheka in New York to name a few. They all had more than one appointment with the wrecking ball. A great post and a great inspiration to get yourself involved in preserving your local heritage

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  6. What a thrill to see that this amazing building was saved!

    Elizabeth

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  7. What an amazing revival! I somehow found my way to your blog and I love these old homes, grand or small! Thank you for sharing this story!
    Perhaps one day I will visit!

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  8. This is wonderful! I love to see the restoration work. It is remarkable what skilled artisans can do!

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  9. These pictures are helping me to write a historical fiction, it's so much easier to write something you can more or less see. Thank you!

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  10. Lovely views of a lovely old house coming back to life. But I want to know: why did they install a burglar alarm over the bathtub?
    jim of olym
    olympia, wa

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  11. I lived here in 1979 from 2 months old to 15 months old, altho i have no memory of it as i was to young my Mom sure does and i like looking at my first Home makes me smile. looks great by the way really beautiful, i would love to come visit one day with my Mom.

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  12. This was a great trip down memory lane. I went to Fokine Ballet camp and lived there during the summer. I remember it very clearly.

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  13. So beautiful! Thank you for sharing the photos and history!

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  14. Fantastic to see the old house. I also went to Fokine ballet camp, and although we may have abused the house, all the girls loved it and appreciated its many charms, including the wide back lawn with its graceful hill. I remember swimming in a huge puddle in the back during a heavy downpour along with 30 or so other girls!

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  15. Just went here yesterday and had a fabulous tour of the mansion! So glad they were able to save it! She is a lovely old lady!

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  16. I attended Fokine Ballet Camp in the late 60's (1966-1971). I cannot remember any details. Can people post activities or schedules of camp?

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    Replies
    1. I did not attend all five years, just one summer of those years.. Cannot recollect which one though!

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    2. I was a college student that would come to the Fokine Ballet Camp,during my summers to work in the kitchen along with my dad. He was the chef during 1967- 1971. We would come up from Virginia to work at the camp during the summer. My dad's food was so good, that often times Mr. B and Ms. Fokine would be caught in the kitchen asking my dad to fix a special meal for them. The girls attending the camp, rehearsed in very spacious carriage house. Those were some great summers. As young college men working there at the camp, we had to always make sure not to leave our car keys laying around because the girls would try to take the car to go into town. Mr. B caught them and put an end to that.lol Best summer job I had! Glad to see the place restored!

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  17. My late husband grew up in Lenox and worked at Fokine on the "moving" days, hauling trunks & luggage up the stairs (don't think the elevator was working) for tips from grateful fathers. I also worked there, briefly, as the "receptionist" in the summer of '69. So glad to see that the building has been saved! Wasn't there a swimming pool?

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  19. I was a counselor at the camp summer of 1971. Mr. B's name was Biddleman (unsure about the spelling). It was a surreal summer with New York City children who worked hard to become fine dancers. We also had lots of fun. This was a great experience for the children to enjoy the outdoors in the country.
    The house was in great shape when I was there in 1971.

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  20. I worked as a maintenance/caretaker for Miss Fokine and Mr. B. for about 8 years and helped close the camp in 1976. Each year we would begin repairs in early May about 6 weeks before camp opened. The building was left empty and unheated during the winter, and sadly - was falling apart. Our mandate was cosmetic -- patch, paint, stop gap carpentry, whatever - just enough to make things presentable for the campers and parents. When the campers arrived we -- "the townees" - moved the campers in - carrying trunks etc. to their rooms for tips and change. While camp was in session we did routine repairs, errands, and watched the house while the campers were at Tanglewood. We (four 16 year olds) even got bused to Manhattan to paint the Fokine school there. Miss Fokine and Mr B. were remarkable characters who have given me a lifetime of entertaining stories. Not to mention the ones I heard from Vitale Fokine, Christine's first husband during his occasional/infrequent visits. Although I am now retired from what some might call a successful professional career I can say without reservation -- "I loved those people, I love that place! Best Job I ever had!"

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  21. I went to camp here for 3 summers in the early 70s. I remember going up and down those stairs, movies in the barn, tennis courts. Strawberries growing on the grounds. One of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been in.

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  22. I also had the pleasure of attending Fokine Ballet Camp. I spent 8 weeks there for 3 years ( 1974, 1975 & 1976)and I remember the house being in great shape. It was beautiful and well taken care of. I also remember the carriage house down the road from the main house and a park bench off the road leading to the carriage house. We all believed that some of JP Morgan’s family was buried by that bench ( not sure if there was any truth in that) Thank you for sharing the restoration with us.

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  23. Wow, what a great article. Love it when these old mansions can be restored.

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