The Daheim Barns

Here are the Daheim barns, seen from the air in 1982. Twenty-five years after I snapped this picture from a friend's plane, a catastrophic fire destroyed 60% of the complex. A remarkable reconstruction project has ensued. It was the subject of a luncheon lecture delivered today by yours truly to 300 guests at the 20th annual Dutchess Land Conservancy's Patrons' Lunch, held at the Barns. The centerpiece of the project is a facsimile of the ornate main barn, constructed within the compromised stone walls of the original.





Here's a contemporary view of the barns from earth. Like the main house, Daheim's barns are so complicated you don't notice the new metal roofed equipment shed (light green roof on the left) that replaces the grand old hay barn. When built during the first decade of the twentieth century, this farm was a model dairy. For the last half century it's seen a lot of hard use as a beef cattle operation'





This is the roof of the molasses barn, taken before the fire. Admittedly kicked around for years, it was still essentially intact.





The barn complex is "U-shaped." The big barn - or corn barn, or feed barn, depending on who's describing it - is at the bottom of the "U," flanked by the molasses barn on one side and a small stable on the other. The arms of the "U" are formed by a cattle barn on one side and a new equipment shed (formerly a hay barn) on the other. Each arm ends with the old dairyman's cottage on one side, and the original dairy office on the other. The image above is a detail of the dairyman's cottage.





This is the old hay barn, the farm workers' dormitory and dairyman's cottage at the far right, seen before the fire. The hay barn was completely destroyed, the roof of the dormitory burned off, and the cottage was spared.





Here was the scene at Daheim on the night of November 15, 2007. It was the largest fire in the history of Dutchess County - 8 fire companies responded; 80 firemen struggled until dawn the next day to control it. They managed to save the cow barn, the dairy office, the dairyman's cottage and part of the dormitory.





The next morning it looked like Warsaw or Berlin after the Second World War. Those white clumps on the ground are the remains of fire retarding foam. Still smoldering hay bales had to be hauled away and spread out on a nearby burn site. The heart of the fire was 350 tons of recently delivered corn that burned with a white hot intensity - and continued to burn for another ten days.





When this ghostly image was taken, the corn and hay were still smoldering.





The barns on this estate have always been part of a working farm and there was no question that something would be reconstructed. The new equipment shed went up rapidly. There was talk of replacing the big barn with something similarly functional. Instead, my landlords have built an elaborate facsimile of the original. The image above shows a new poured concrete foundation and steel beams being constructed within the old walls. That's American-made steel, by the way, from Benson Steel in Saugerties, New York.





A local lumber firm, J & J Lumber, has to date cut 57,000 board feet of lumber for the project. J & J couldn't cut anything longer than 16 feet, which is why the portable sawmill in the image was purpose bought. A hundred a thirty spruce trees, planted a century ago on the property, have provided all needed lumber.





The big barn's original floor was made of wood. The new one is constructed of 68 "spancrete" slabs, each 4' x 18'. Spancrete is a sort of cinderblock on steroids, used frequently in parking garages. Here's one being hoisted into the sky.





And here it is being fitted onto the new floor.





The roof trusses are tied to vertical steel beams anchored in poured concrete. There is no weight on the original stone walls.





Here is the restored interior of the big barn, notable for its magnificent system of embellished trusses. This is surely one of the great interior spaces in Dutchess County. It might have been lost forever, but here it is, intact for generations to come.





Here's detail of the new sliding barn doors. Steel verticals visible between wooden wall panels support the new roof. When the doors are closed, the unfinished interior of the original stone envelope is visible.





Even the scrolled rafter ends have been reproduced in this reconstruction. Although not yet mounted on the roof, replicas of two louvered lanterns complete with over-scaled copper finials, were on view at today's luncheon.




And here they are, poised for positioning on the new roof. The tops of the finials are removable for installation. Beneath each is an iron "eye" which the dangling "hook" on the crane in the background will link under, then haul the cupola to the ridgepole. Once the hook is disengaged, a worker will reattach the top of each finial. Although it's unlikely any of us on the estate today will be around to see it, in thirty years those copper finials will have turned a heavenly green.

Aches and pains

Here's Daheim, my home in Millbrook for thirty years, in a photo taken yesterday afternoon. It's a complicated looking house by any measure, and if it isn't huge, considering others I've blogged about, it ain't small either. Daheim was in ruins when I signed my first lease in December of 1981. It's taken a lot of work, time, sweat, love and money to get it looking like this. Remember Sisyphus? Well, probably you don't, but he was a mythological Greek king condemned by the gods to spend eternity repeatedly rolling a huge stone to the top of a hill, only to watch it roll back down again.





You probably didn't notice in the photo above that the eaves on my porte cochere are a mess. Actually, they look better since Eddie, my in-house construction man, pulled off the rotted wood in preparation for repairs. The explanation for the leaking eaves, while long and dull, can be summed up in two words that bring knowing nods from any old house lover, to wit: "flat roof." This one was resurfaced fifty years ago with tar and white pebbles. The desirability of this system completely eludes me, since it makes finding a leak virtually impossible.





The porch - sorry, "piazza" - at Daheim has fifty-two columns and probably five times as many decorative brackets. This pair is resting on the parapet until Eddie gets the porte cochere back together.





There are no longer so many houses like mine, in part because so many of them have burned down. The builder of Daheim had extensive interests in gas illumination companies, which must have made him more aware of fire danger. Shortly before World War I, he built this stone addition to house modern kitchen and servants' facilities, and to encapsulate a mammoth coal fired steam boiler in a steel and cement basement chamber. The exterior walls aren't veneered with stone, they're built with a two-foot thickness of it. The interior floors are supported with steel beams. My kitchen could probably survive direct mortar fire with only minor damage. The boiler room originally wasn't even accessible from inside the house. During the winter of 1982, my first caretaker, Noel, and I decided to open an access door from the basement corridor. Who would have thought the interior non-bearing wall would be a foot and a half thick and made of block and cement?




You probably didn't notice in the image above that some miscreant has made off with my copper gutters. When Daheim was new, and doubtless for many succeeding salad years of maintenance, those scrolled eaves and joist ends glowed under multiple coats of dark shiny varnish. But...not happening now.





On the ground floor, the kitchen wing is connected to the wood frame section of the house with a flat-roofed serving pantry (don't even ask). On the second floor the connection is via this utterly charming "Bridge of Sighs." I can only paint Daheim in sections, but we got around to this side recently enough for it to still look pretty good.





Well, "pretty good" unless you notice that dormer on the fourth floor. I'll get to it, after I re-point the chimney. Jeez, it doesn't look half that bad from the other side.





The chimney looks deceptively fine from this view of the east facade. Daheim's exterior envelope is so visually complicated you tend not to notice the warts.





Speaking of warts, some benighted hippie from the Leary days - you do know Timothy Leary lived here, right? - managed to remove this attic window entirely. Noel and I temporarily boarded it up thirty years ago and it's still on my very (very) long "to do" list.





Here's the south elevation of the house. The mulberry tree and the gigantic yew bushes were deer-ravaged stumps in 1981. I have tended and protected them for thirty years and were they children, they would long ago have left home to make their own way in the world. Since they're plants, they're not going anywhere. I used to keep the yews trimmed as spheres, but that plan lost traction years ago. Now they're way too big for me to tackle. Last spring a landscape service gave me an estimate....$2400. Not going to happen.





Nowadays I'm just trimming the yews to avoid actual contact with the house, but this is not the look I intended.





Daheim really is charming. I had the local historical society here for a tour and a tea last weekend, and everyone loved the place.





You probably didn't notice this hole in the image above. Alas, it's but one of a number made by aggressive squirrels whom I simply cannot keep out of the piazza ceiling. Were it not for my cat, they'd rampage inside the house as well. As soon as we plug one of these up another appears, although it can take a while to notice.

Hudson

During 30 years in Dutchess County, I haven't had many occasions to visit Hudson, a small Columbia County city on the river about an hour north of Millbrook. I had lunch there on Sunday, after a morning in nearby Hillsdale writing captions with the photo editor of my upcoming book. After lunch, I took a drive around. Heretofore, when I have thought Hudson, I have thought 19th century skyline, gay antique shops, gay art galleries, gay gentrifiers from New York, and a lot of locals on welfare. Well, of course it's much more than that. The view above is of Warren Street, the main drag that runs from the railroad station on the river bank to the top of town at Route 9. It's lined with an altogether appealing inventory of low rise commercial buildings, many of which were vacant for years before a recent renaissance, which must have been in swing now for about fifteen years.





These houses are on Union Street, which parallels Warren a block to the south. Much of Hudson has a sort of "Hello Dolly" look to it, architecturally anyway. Hudson dodged a bullet recently when a villainous multi-national called St. Lawrence Cement attempted to plonk down on the riverfront a cement plant only slightly smaller than the principality of Liechtenstein. Besides befouling the air with smokestacks taller than the Empire State building and poisoning the river with runoff, this highly automated installation would have added a grand total of only one job to the local economy. Having watched Union Carbide get kicked out of Bhopal, St. Lawrence probably figured defenseless little Hudson might be worth a shot. Some of the locals actually supported this absurd plan, although whether from ignorance or other reasons is unclear. Kick around those transplanted New Yorkers all you will, but without them God only knows what Hudson would look like today.





Hudson is full of places like this appealing little house on Union St.





Interestingly, as you move away from the river, the architecture gets grander. Hudson was chartered in 1785 and pioneered by of all people, whalers from Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard. By 1820 it was the 4th largest city in New York State, and center of a thriving whaling industry. This house on Allen St. speaks to Hudson's mid-19th century prosperity with an architectural accent that's part Greek Revival and part Italianate.





Pa could be around back getting his pitchfork right now, while Ma gives her bun one last twist. This Gothic Revival board and batten house on Allen St. must have been an architectural "dernier cri" when it was built, which I'm guessing was sometime in the late 19th century.





You have to love American Victorian architecture. Whoever designed this little house threw literally everything in the pot.







Engaged dormers, a mansard roof, Italianate brackets under the eaves, a Greek porch with Ionic columns... what did this architect forget? Apparently nothing.





The little house above faces a park presided over by a very fine 1909 Beaux Arts courthouse. I couldn't resist taking a few shots. The City Beautiful Movement of the early 20th century reached up the river and blessed even Hudson with this fine building.





Here's an exterior detail of the courthouse. The building appears to be relatively intact despite modern day accumulations of aluminum replacement doors, handicap entrance ramps, and security barriers. At the beginning of the 20th century Hudson was famous for whores and gambling, its riverfront red light district attracting visiting firemen from far and wide. One imagines the courthouse got a lot of use back then... or, maybe it didn't.





This elaborate late Victorian concoction faces the courthouse on the west.





Here's a detail of the north facade of the house above. Not one, but two Palladian windows, the lower no doubt overlooking an elaborately paneled stairway, enliven this elevation. A happy disregard of symmetry governs the placement of chimney and stair window alike. And who would have thought to put Adam swags under the bracketed eaves? Taken together - and disregarding for the moment that whoever designed this house created a maintenance monster for future generations - the architectural composition is as interesting to the eyes of passersby as it is no doubt endearing to the heart of its owner.





Here's the house next door. Hudson's old house inventory is nothing if not full of variety.





Speaking of which, how about the Egyptian columns on this Allen St. house? If we didn't know better, we'd suspect the owner pirated them from the Luxor in Las Vegas. No doubt there's an interesting story here somewhere.




There's a lot I like about this house, located next door to the Egyptian porch, including its handsome old-fashioned fence (complete with anthemia finials) that appears to be quite new. To my eye, this is a scholarly architectural essay on the Greek Revival done by a local architect in the 1920s. There's just something about it that doesn't look old - at least, not 19th century old. I wonder if I'm right.

Montgomery Place

Among this weekend's mail was an invitation to "Experience the Splendor of the Season" at a benefit cocktail for Montgomery Place in nearby Barrytown, New York. The first time I saw Montgomery Place, which must have been over 25 years ago, it looked like the image above. This was a house as full of treasure as it was of history, and it had (for me anyway) a most appealing veneer of slightly rundown shabbiness that comes of actual use. What educated restoration expert would tolerate for a nanosecond that ad hoc screen porch sitting on top of the piazza? Answer: not one. And yet, this was doubtless a pleasant place to sit - or probably sleep, on hot summer nights. It is just the sort of thing old WASPy aristocrats slap onto family manses, heedless of the effect on architectural purity.





Here's today's restored Montgomery Place from the air, illustrated on the cover of the invitation for the cocktail on October 8th. If I can muster $200 from my beleaguered horse budget, I'll go. Its preservation is certainly a good cause. These old river places are redolent with an almost aromatic atmosphere of a vanished time. Oh, the river views and mountain vistas are in many places still intact, but the original sense of being in a gracious home belonging to sophisticated people and located in the middle of a tractless wilderness is no longer acute in the era of the internet and the Interstate. The original remoteness of a house like Montgomery Place once put a delicious edge on its luxury.





Here's the front of the house today, which is not at all what it looked like when Janet Livingston Montgomery built it in the late 1770s. She took occupancy in 1805 and, in the Francophilic style of haute monde Americans like the Livingstons, named it Chateau de Montgomery. This probably caused some amusement among visiting Frenchmen, as your basic European chateau at the end of the 18th century was a sight grander than Mrs. Montgomery's house. Nor was the building remotely as ornate as it appears in the image above. Its builder died in 1828, leaving it to her brother Edward Livingston, who died in 1836. He calmed the name down, rechristening it Montgomery Place, but it was his widow, Louise, who in 1844 hired the famous Alexander Jackson Davis to tart the place up, with entirely beguiling results.





Here's General Richard Montgomery himself, the namesake of Montgomery Place, killed by a cannon ball on New Year's Eve, 1775, at the battle of Quebec. One hopes he was a man of more substance and, well, grit, than this image would have us believe. My, but he looks vacuous. I am no student of the American revolution, but it is troubling to read of Montgomery's unsuccessful attack on fortified British positions at Quebec, in the middle of a blizzard. It was America's first major defeat in our war of rebellion. Many men died at Quebec, and for some reason Montgomery is remembered as a hero.





Old portraits are not always dependable likenesses, but I suspect the painter of this one captured Janet Montgomery. She looks to me like just the sort of woman who will declare her dead husband a hero, and dare anyone to contradict her. Unfortunately, a reader's comment below has established that this is not Janet Livingston at all, but rather her mother. (Drat! There's always someone who ruins good story!)





The restored interior of Montgomery Place is like... I was going to say "a page" but it's really like an entire issue...of Architectural Digest. The curtains, the antiques, the wallpapers, are all exquisite. It is beyond improbable that the Delafields, they being the last family members to occupy the house, lived in anything quite so well maintained. The views are equally wonderful, and the estate still encompasses over 400 acres of woods, historic gardens, charming outbuildings, and a producing orchard of some scale.





The family sold Montgomery Place in 1986 to an organization known today as Historic Hudson Valley. In the early 1990s, after a multi-million dollar restoration, it was opened to the public.