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

FROM NOW ON....

...each week's new "Big Old Houses" post will appear on Thursday or Friday, instead of Sunday or Monday. Thanks for reading....JF

Obscure Poughkeepsie

Poughkeepsie, NY, like most old cities in our part of the world, is full of mysterious stone retaining walls. I often wonder what used to be behind them, before today's mini-marts, parking lots, office buildings, subdivision houses, and (usually funky) "garden apartment" complexes. The one in the image above borders a short street called Dongan Place, located a block east of the Poughkeepsie Amtrak station. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so Poughkeepsie's city fathers have abhorred the emptiness of the space that miraculously survives behind this wall. Since 1949 they have repeatedly tried to fill it, first with low income housing projects and, more recently, with a proposed mix of retail and (presumably) higher income housing.




They have failed so far because it is a public park, destruction of which requires state level legislative approval. To date this has not been forthcoming. The beleaguered patch of lawn in the image above was once a small estate that still contains its original Italianate mansion. Called Hill House, it was built in 1859 for George and Charles Pelton, a pair of rich Poughkeepsie carpet manufacturers. Charles got married; George never did. They all lived together at Hill House, dying one by one, until family heirs sold it to the City of Poughkeepsie in 1910. A $4000 bequest to the city from a deceased believer in what at the time was called the American Playground Movement enabled the municipality to put together the $10,000 purchase price. The posthumous donor's name was Mrs. Charles Wheaton, and it seemed appropriate to rechristen the place Wheaton Park.




Oh, the indignities old houses suffer. Old people too, if you think about it. Those of us in our sixties may find it sobering indeed to gaze upon Hill House, with its awful screw-on shutters, flaking paint, filled-in porches, macadamized lawn and brutal fire escape affixed to its facade like a giant carbuncle on the nose of a beloved aunt. OK, OK, I'm overdoing it. More important than aesthetics is the fact that, for the last one hundred years, this house has been of invaluable service to the neighborhood as a day care center. Since its founding in 1907, the Poughkeepsie Day Nursery has helped legions of young parents who might otherwise have been in grave difficulties. It's not the Nursery's fault that neither they nor the City of Poughkeepsie has the funds to properly maintain Hill House.





This of course was once an open porch affording sweeping views of the Hudson.




Those view, alas, have been compromised by an Amtrak parking lot and four elevated lanes of roaring traffic on Route 9. The bridge in the distance is the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge, opened in 1889, derelict and dangerous by the 1990s, but restored recently as a pedestrian walkway that is terrific fun. It's our local High Line.




My heart goes out to the Day Nursery for those eaves. I have so been there.




Here's the other side of the house, showing how the porch wraps around. I can well imagine it with awnings and wicker and potted palms. The upper deck looks to me like early 20th century work - basic ideas intact, but details simplified. In 1951, Day Nursery Director Josephine Talbot described the view from this porch as an education in itself for the children. "There is the river with the mountains in the back. The leaves are turning now and they'll want to know why. Ships come up the river now and then and we imagine where they're going...to China or Europe or South America. Of course with the railroad station just below, it's a virtual utopia for the youngsters seeing the engines slow down right outside their window."




I liked the look of all those brackets.




It's hard to get much sense of the past here, but somehow this angle of the porch columns and the glimpse of the river beyond do it for me.




This path leads out of Wheaton Park to a little street called Davies Place, once a rather distinguished place to live.




That's Hill House hidden in the distance behind the big tree on the left. The building in the foreground is currently used as a community house by the Church of the Holy Comforter, a neighborhood landmark at the other end of the block.








You know money is short when broken windows are repaired with plastic drop cloths.




This beautiful iron railing - beautiful in spite of its damaged condition - runs between the church house and a mansion next door. The latter was built in 1860 for a prosperous local builder and one-time Poughkeepsie mayor named William Harloe.










The Harloe house has been divided into three apartments and is currently for sale for $159,000.




Another house on Davies Place. People are trying very hard in Poughkeepsie, a city brimming with terrific old houses. Many are in neighborhoods where nothing at all is run down and a grand old house will still cost under $400,000.




There must have been a building frenzy on Davies Place on the eve of the Civil War. Both the Pelton and Harloe houses were either still under construction or only just finished in 1860 when this church went up on the corner of Davies Place and Main Street. Called the Church of the Holy Comforter, its designer was none other than Richard Upjohn, architect of New York's Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall. Holy Comforter has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972.








Holy Comforter seems in pretty good shape, all things considered, even though the chain link additions to its wrought iron gate are a little alarming.




Looking north on Davies Place with the Church of the Holy Comforter on the left.

Back to that president

This is where I started to go two weeks ago, and then got sidetracked by the house next door (see the post below). The image above shows the east facade of Springwood, the family home of Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park, NY. I don't want to go through the whole National Park Service tour here, but the highlights that stuck in my mind include the following: FDR's mother owned the place until 3 years before the president's death; it's the only house where an American president was both born and buried; the property still covers 900 acres; and with very few subtractions, the interior looks exactly the way it did the day FDR died.




I once wrote that for me blogging was like keeping a diary and leaving it on a bus for strangers to read. Who reads it (or why) is a mystery, since what interests me doesn't always interest other people. In the case of Springwood, I find the manner of its transformation - from ho-hum Victorian country house to swank society mansion - to be really fascinating. In 1915 the distinguished firm of Hoppin and Koen simply tacked the classical fieldstone and stucco facade you see above onto a friendly, kind of pokey, not very impressive, balloon-frame, Victorian structure from the mid-19th century. What looks like a fine early 20th century mansion is a stage prop. Only the southern wing is as grand inside as its exterior suggests.







The southern wing contains an elegant library and enjoys a distant view, which no doubt looks better in the summer. In Roosevelt's day I doubt the trees would have been allowed to obscure the river to the extent they do now.






Here are 2 more direct views of the southern wing. The ground level library opens onto that superb porch. Three bedrooms are on the second floor - FDR's on the right, his mother's in the middle, and his wife's on the left. Much has been written about the president's peculiar private life, and you can read it someplace else. The second image is a closer view of an exterior stair erected by the Parks Department - and being reconstructed at the time of my visit - as an exit route at the end of the house tour. I don't know who came up with this nutty idea, to welcome visitors through the front door, and shoo them out through a window upstairs. More to the point is the shape of the original house, visible on the left.




This photo was posted in the carriage house and shows - or strongly hints at - the former look of the place.




Here's a better look at that exterior exit stair. I'm sorry, but there must be a less insane way to end a house tour.




Here's the river facade of the original house, looking pretty much intact - which it pretty much is.








These vintage interior views are quite accurate today. Mrs. Roosevelt Sr. - we were reminded repeatedly that this was her house - had a Victorian love of clutter. The interior finish of the parlor in the first image above - scale, moldings, fireplace, flooring - was no Hoppin and Koen design. The architects enlarged the entrance hall (second view above), but left the Victorian staircase, probably at the insistence of the president's mother. The big library is another story; its fashionably luxe look goes completely with its exterior.






The stable is intact, although I understand a part of it was rebuilt after a fire. The date on the tower says 1886, when the future president was four.






Stable details.








The Park Service has been a wonderful steward of the Roosevelt place but, like many other historic house operators, it has insisted on depriving modern visitors of the original approach to the house. FDR didn't scuttle onto his property via a side road; he drove through the original main gate and we should too. A great deal of the impact of a big old house stems from the approach. The Roosevelt Cinema, across the street from the (now closed) main gate, admittedly lends a piquant touch.




The drive to the house, flanked by an allee of immense trees, has been allowed to lawn over. The Park Service keeps it passable, although why the traffic lane is now off center is one more institutional mystery.




I don't know if the Roosevelts were always this happy, but it's a nice note on which to leave them.