Sole Survivor (4th post of 4)

One room in this very fine house has survived virtually intact. Located in the northernmost wing, overlooking what was apparently a small walled garden on 18th St., is the original dining room. Something about those swags of plaster fruit over the mantle makes me think "mealtime." This noble chamber is painted white, but the dark ceiling makes me guess there's rare (and probably dark) hardwood paneling under the paint. Maybe walnut? After all it's on Walnut St. The dings and bullet holes of modern commerce obscure neither the superb craftsmanship, nor the excellent proportions. The "tour de force," of course, is the ceiling, a remarkable depiction of the 94 doges of Venice, each in his own gilded frame, separated from his neighbors by electric lights. Venice under the doges would seem an appropriate theme for the dining hall of an early 20th Century American financier. Despite the zany decor and the light colored paint that makes the ceiling look heavy it's a beautiful room that makes the heart ache for the rest of the house.

Not Everything is So Perfect

We drove through Germantown yesterday which, contrary to expectations, was not exactly Georgetown. Germantown Avenue is pretty beat up all the way to Chestnut Hill which, when you finally get there, is full of WASPy shops, blossoming street planters, and stone Colonial Revival mansions. Actually, I've never seen that great a concentration of free standing, upscale stone houses in one place. We went back up there today via woodsy Wissahickon Avenue, to take a walk in Wissahickon Park. Deep in the woods, a crowd of young Spanish boys was jumping off a high rock into something called the Devil's Pool, while their families bar-b-qued nearby. We zig-zagged back to central city, admiring big houses in Mt.Airy and some unexpectedly nice parts of Germantown. Lunch was at the Reading Terminal Market where a million food vendors and restaurants are clustered on a vast street level concourse underneath the former Reading Railroad train shed. I've begun to notice (OK, belatedly) that not everything is so perfect in Philadelphia. "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs are everywhere, a fair number of shopfronts are empty even close to Rittenhouse Sq., and not every great house is in particularly great shape. The house in the photos above (it's somewhere around Locust and 22nd St.) is a case in point.

Fairmount Park

I had an epiphany yesterday while exploring Fairmount Park. Starting in the 1840s the city of Philadelphia began protecting the wooded banks of the Schuylkill River - immediately north of downtown - from the industrial blight and pollution that befell, for example, the shoreline of the East River in New York. Amazingly, Fairmount Park is still dotted with delectable country houses that have overlooked the river here since the 18th Century. I suddenly realized that this charming wooded riverfront - charming even taking into account the highways and the "iffy" public park maintenance - must look today very much like the East River bluffs on Manhattan's Upper East Side looked two centuries ago. Gracie Mansion would fit right in to Fairmount Park. So would Hamilton Grange, for that matter. There are an astonishing number of these old houses too. The first 2 images show my "hands down" favorite, Lemon Hill, built in 1800, and located immediately north of the Philadelphia Art Museum. I love the Palladian window on the entry facade. The 2nd image shows the exterior articulation of two divine oval rooms on the first and second floors that overlook the river. The 3rd image is of Mt. Pleasant, built a bit upriver in 1762 by a rich Scotsman named Macphearson. It was once owned by Benedict Arnold of all people. Image 4 is of Strawberry Mansion, named after an agricultural enterprise of a mid-19th Century owner. The original Georgian house is in the middle and dates from 1790; a judge named Hemphill added the Greek Revival wings. The eastern edge of the park is about the equivalent of 3 city blocks away. On the other side of it are boarded up stores, burnt out row houses, and a set of magnificent gates to the Mt. Vernon Cemetery whose lawns have degenerated into tangled hayfields.

Jazz and Dad in Philadelphia

Here's Jazzy on the stairs inside Lemon Hill, a country house on the banks of the Schuylkill River. It was built in the countryside in 1800 and is now located in Fairmount Park, just north of the Art Museum. There is a string of these old houses, miraculously preserved in the park, about which more later. The statue next to John doesn't just look like him, it IS him. It's part of a group of bronzes on the second floor of the National Constitution Center that depict in 3-D a painting of the Continental Congress debating the Declaration of Independence. Years ago, an actor pal told me I could get $100 for being a body model at a studio over in Dumbo. The statue is me as John Dickenson, delegate from Delaware. His hand probably even has my fingerprints.

A Philadelphia whimsey

I saw it, liked it, and took a photo. (Forgot to include it below)

A Philadelphia House, and a whimsical extra

I am really getting off on Philadelphia. How about this terrific old house on 20th and Delancey? (The address might be off a block, but I'm close). The building very much has the look of the late 1880s or early 1890s, at least to my eye. It's got heft, scale, and detailing as inventive as it is luxurious. How many decorative elements can you put on a front door design and still make it work? Answer: apparently quite a few. I particularly love the recessed bow window on the side wall. Who in the world even thought that up?

Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia

Jazzy and I are in Philadelphia for our 19th annual "Father-Daughter Vacation." We had a wonderful day. Lunch in Bethlehem before heading down to Philadelphia. Then lots of talk and catching up, and lots of walking around. How could I have forgot what a terrific looking city this is. Narrow streets, zillions of little alleys and cul de sacs, vibrant blocks full of shops and people, an amazing architectural inventory, great old houses everywhere. We're staying in one on Pine and 18th. Dinner was crab cakes and fried oysters at the Sansom St. Oyster House, then a movie, "The Kids are All Right" with Annette Benning and Julianne Moore as lesbian mothers whose kids seek out their sperm donor father. Very funny, and very appropriate for a day on which a judge in California ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Rittenhouse Square used to be surrounded by houses like the first two photos above. It's mostly apartment buildings now. The park was full of people and kids and flowers and fountains and specimen trees. The blocks around it are full of appealing buildings, like this one on 18th and Spruce.

Home in Millbrook

My daughter and I leave tomorrow on our 19th annual "Father-Daughter Vacation." We're going to Philadelphia, a recession-era destination perhaps, but one to which I'm truly looking forward. We're doing a "founding fathers" tour, with a quick trip to "Six Flags" to ride Kingda-Ka, a roller coaster with a 425-foot sheer drop. We're hoping it lives up to its scarifying reputation. Meanwhile, Daheim waits calmly in Dutchess County,as it has for over a century. Today's photos are photos of home: 1) a portion of the drive between the gatehouse and the main house; 2) a detail on the fountain in front of the house; and 3) an urn flanking the stair to the tennis lawn.

More row houses

It's a lot of fun - for me, anyway - to look at a block of apparently different houses and mentally reconstruct a row of vanished identical "builders' specials." Take this row on the north side of 62nd Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. When built, probably just after the Civil War, all 9 of them were absolutely identical. I'll bet the one on the far left was simplified sometime in the 1920s, when skirts were getting shorter, jazz was getting louder, sex was getting more obvious, and "smart" people were de-Victorian-izing old houses. The one next door to it may well have lost its stoop around the same time. Stoops are being put back on vintage houses today, but there was a time when they were considered hopelessly out of fashion, and better dispensed with. The facade on the 3rd house from the left is in original condition, except for being painted white. The 4th house has a sort of Ramada Inn Colonial thing going on, and the less said about it the better. The brick house in the middle of the row replaces 2 of the original houses, a verifiable fact because the same houses pick up again on the other side of it. It's a good chance that this place was built before the house on the far left. It's scale speaks more to the arrival of upscale social types, who were colonizing this part of town in the very early 20th Century, than it does to the scaled down taste of the sophisticates who were doing house alterations in the '20s. The house just past the brick mansion looks to be in completely untouched condition, at least on the outside. The one next to it had a recent, very upscale renovation that added an extra floor.

Row houses

I suppose you could call these houses big, or at least relatively so. Most passersby on Madison Avenue between 62nd and 63rd Streets don't realize that they are walking past a unified row of 6 identical speculative residential row houses. The original high stoops and elaborate front doors have all been replaced with the 2-story shopfronts we see today. Upstairs in some of them, wonderful old rooms with marble fireplaces and heavy plaster ceiling moldings still survive. It's easy to date these houses. The geometric patterns on the window surrounds are called "Eastlake motifs," in honor of a Brit named Charles Eastlake whose "Hints on Household Taste" was all the rage in the late 1860s and 1870s. The "Neo-Grec" style of New York townhouse, which enjoyed a fleeting fashion between the Italianate of the 1860s and the Queen Anne of 1880s, incorporated Eastlake's aesthetic. His signature motifs, seen in close-up on the window surrounds, make Neo-Grec houses easy to spot. There's a slightly earlier row of houses on the next block up, where one of the original entryways survives. My guess is a street widening precipitated the removal of the stoop. The inner foyer door is now the front door, reached by a new iron stair anchored at sidewalk level by handsome - and clearly not original - wrought iron newels.

Big Old Houses a Block from me

These two images are described below. I have now learned that I can post only 5 at a time.

Best Buy gets horrible online reviews, but I'm thinking only cranky people write online reviews. I was treated just fine, got a sexy Canon Power Shot camera, and have felt like that Russian tennis star with the little dog all week.

My first photo shoot - well, after my daughter's engagement party last Saturday - was this morning, all within a one block radius of my apartment. People call the Upper East Side sterile and boring, but how could anyone not swoon over these houses?

1) Here's my locator shot, my corner at 63rd and Madison. I'm actually in the middle of this block, half way to Park Ave.
2) Shot #2 is of 36 East 63rd St., a private house these days, but built in 1929 as the Hangar Club, for rich guys who owned their own airplanes. Now it's the home of a rich guy who keeps our block lined with hulking Escalades and guys in suits with plastic tubes in their ears. We all, as a result, feel extremely safe here.
3) Shot #3 is 11 East 62nd St., now owned by the Japanese Government. Too bad that tacky truck is right in front, but I had to get my shot and then get to work. If I recall correctly, this place was a wedding gift, built in 1898 for Ernesto Fabbri, a swell Italian with the good sense to marry a grand-daughter of William H, Vanderbilt. I was in it before the sale to the Japanese, at which time most of the original kitchen and bathroom finishes were still extant. Probably all gone by now. You should see the staircase in this place, and the big panelled room in front on the second floor. "To die," as they say.
4) Before leaving 62nd St., I figured I'd better sneak around that truck and get a shot of the front of the house. Heydel and Shepard were the architects, Shepard being Mrs. Fabbri's cousin (if I've got that straight).
5) Close-up of the gate at 11 East 62nd.
6) How about this one? 3 East 64th St., now the Indian Consulate, which is why all those people are lined up out front, waiting for the visa office to open. It was built in 1900 for Orme Wilson, the husband of "The" Mrs. Astor's daughter, Carrie. Wilson's parents were famous for contriving to marry their 3 children to the most fashionable society people of their day. Orme's sisters were married to Ogden Goelet and Cornelius Vanderbilt III respectively.
7) This is Edwin Berwind's house on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 64th St. If you've visited the Elms at Newport, you've been to his summer house. And you know he was a coal baron who never married and lived out his life with his sister.

How could I not love the Upper East Side with these kinds of houses within one block of my own?

A Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue

I did a few good deals this month and finally have some extra cash to buy a new digital camera. "Best Buy," here I come. For now, however, I'm going to use another couple of photos from my book, "The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age; Architectural Aspirations 1879 -1901," published in 1991 by St. Martin's Press in New York. Between 1882 and 1925 this house stood on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd St. The NBA Football store is on the site today, at street level in the office building called 666 Fifth Avenue. The house was built for William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of the Commodore, and designed by America's first Beaux Arts trained architect, Richard Morris Hunt. The project really belonged to Vanderbilt's wife Alva, a woman with an equal abundance of money and taste. Historians love to condemn Alva as a cold-blooded social climber, but she was in fact a remarkable woman whose remarkable life did not entail kowtowing to men. Her New York house at 660 Fifth Avenue started a craze for the "Chateau Style" that swept the country. The photo below shows the drawing room. This is no copy of a European room, but rather a careful interpretation of classic French interior design for a sophisticated (the Vanderbilts spoke French at home) American client. It was executed by a guy named Jules Allard, who back then was outfitting mansions all over the place with rooms like it. A critic of the time remarked on the "effortless elegance" of Alva's interiors, an opinion with which I heartily agree. OK, OK, so it's a little formal. What can I say?I have a taste for formality

when is "too late?"

This is Elm court in Lenox, MA, designed by Peabody and Stearns at the end of the 19th Century. It was built for Emily Vanderbilt Sloan and her husband, furniture magnate W.D. Sloan. I devoted a chapter to it in my book, "The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age, Architectural Aspirations 1879-1901," with an Introduction by Louis Auchincloss. My co-author, Robbe Stimson, and I sneaked up there one afternoon when Elm Court was in derelict condition. It was one of the most enjoyable days I can remember. We took photos showing the wreck the place had become for our book. They caused a local sensation in Lenox. The house was - and still is - in family hands but interestingly, our most notable supporter was a family member. Not long after "Vanderbilts" was published, the son of this family member took the house over and did an incredible renovation. Stimson thought it was "compost," but the new owner managed to transform mulch to magnificence. For a short period he lived there and operated a sort of ultra-luxurious bed and breakfast. And then....he moved out and the place was closed down again. I wonder what's happened to it now.

The tennis house

Any old country place worth its salt will have interesting ancillary buildings. Daheim, the estate on which I have lived for 28 years, has an abundance. In addition to the bowling alley (see below), the gatehouse, the Bungalow, the dairy barn, the farm house, the pump house, my house (it being the main house), the many greenhouses (all, alas, in ruins), and the gardener's cottage, we've also got a tennis house. It's located on what we call the tennis lawn. That lawn is directly in front of the main house, which I rented in December of 1981, moved into on June 2, 1982, and remain in today. The original clay tennis court "lawned over " years before I was born. The net and fencing probably biodegraded at least a half a century ago. Happily, the tennis house itself - a picturesque pavilion designed to store racquets, balls, cushions, nets and whites - is still standing. The hippies in the Leary period called it the "meditation house," although how much meditation actually transpired here is open to debate. Twenty years ago, I wrote "The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age" at my old desk from 81st Street, which is still inside. The tennis house has been kicked around over the years, and I confess that today I am barely keeping it weatherproof - and trying not to be too dismayed by carpenter bees. Every so often I still go out and sit at my desk. Old photos show crossed tennis raquets on the gable end facing the lawn. One surviving stained glass transome depicts crossed cricket bats. BTW, That stone staircase leads down from the south side of the tennis house to what was originally a walled orchard below. The last shot shows what it looks like from the orchard.

Delano & Aldrich

I'm a great fan of Delano & Aldrich, a firm that was, I suppose, the Robert A.M. Stern of the 1920s. William Adams Delano could have been a J.C. Leyendecker illustration (think: Arrow Shirt ads, ca. 1922) - urbane, well born, sophisticated, with a lot of taste and talent. I've never had the pleasure of living in a Delano-designed house. He was a big Georgian Revival guy, and a man who turned restraint into a hallmark of luxury. No easy feat. Here are a few good D & A houses - High Lawn in Lenox, MA; Oak Knoll outside Oyster Bay on Long Island; Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's studio in Westbury (view from the air); Willard Straight's house on Fifth Avenue and 94th St (recently returned to single family use); and one of theirmost famous clubs, the Knickerbocker on Fifth Avenue and 62nd St.