It's pronounced "winter-Tour"

The name of this place falls into an oddly foxy category. Like "Alma-Tadema" or "imprimatur" I have mangled it for years. Its stewards today are quite forgiving, even to their own employees, many of whom haven't really got it right. Winterthur, the Wilmington, Delaware mega-mansion built (well, really rebuilt) for Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), is pronounced like "Summer vacation" if you follow my analogy.

Although it's been enlarged over its 63-year career as a museum, 80% of what you see in these images was completed in 1931 as a private residence for Mr. du Pont, his wife Ruth Wales, their daughters Pauline and Ruth Ellen and 29 servants. Winterthur, at least to yours truly, is just as interesting as the famous collection of Americana that is displayed within it.

Incorporated within the western facade in the image above, lurking behind the two-story columned conservatory, is the ghost of a 12-room Greek Revival country house built by Antoine Bidermann and his wife Evalina du Pont. "Ghost" is a literal description. The shape of the old house may persist but every vestige of its original architecture has been replaced. Mr. Bidermann bought the land in 1834 from the estate of his wife's late father, gun powder king Eleuthiere Irinee du Pont, then started on the house 5 years later. If I were to name a house after my ancestral village, I'd just have to call it New York. Antoine Bidermann named his house Winterthur, commemorating an undoubtedly more authentic ancestral village in Switzerland. (P.S.'Preserved in Amber,' recorded here on 10.22.13, records my visit to father-in-law du Pont's house, now called Hagley).

After Evalina Bidermann's death in 1866, her son sold Winterthur to his uncle, Henry du Pont, who didn't live there, but continued to operate the farm and rented out the house. In 1876 he made a present of it to his newly married son, Civil War Colonel and future Delaware Senator Henry Algernon du Pont (1838-1926). In 1884 it got a high hipped roof with faintly frenchified dormers.

By 1904 Winterthur had been mansionized - fetchingy, I think - to the designs of the Philadephia firm of Elliston Perot Bissell (whose first wife was a du Pont) and his cousin, Robeson B. Perot. In 1902, with the alteration well underway, the senator's wife Pauline du Pont suddenly, prematurely (she was only 53) and rather mysteriously died. The senator and his 22-year-old son, Henry Francis (a.k.a. Harry), saw the house project through to the end, not that there was much else they could do. Fourteen years later, upon his 1916 marriage to Ruth Wales, Harry du Pont brought her home to Wilmington, where they shared the house with his widowed (and famously difficult) father. By the early 1920s the young Harry du Ponts had houses in Southampton, Boca Grande and Park Avenue, but Harry's center of gravity was, and always would be, Winterthur.

Now enter Albert Ely Ives (1898-1966), a devilishly good looking architect who, among other commissions, built a house in Boca Grande for Harry's cousin, Isabella du Pont and her husband H. Rodney Sharp. Everybody had a crush on Ives, with the notable exception of available du Pont daughters. Fleeing bursting Florida land bubbles, Ives landed on his feet in Wilmington, where he made stylish alterations to the Sharps' local manse, called Gibraltar. He also got a contract from Pierre du Pont to build a house for Bessie Gardner du Pont, whose vindictive former husband Alfred had demolished his ex-wife's house on a week's notice. That, however, is a story for another time. In 1926, Senator du Pont died and left Winterthur to Harry, which, together with the spate of du Pont family commissions, was "Kismet" for Ely Ives.

Ives had a distinguished CV, working at various times in the '20s for Theodate Riddle, Carrere and Hastings, Trainor and Fatio, even Addison Mizner. His enlargement of Winterthur, designed in 1927 and built between 1929 and 1931, included virtual demolition of the existing house. Winterthur's new steel innards look to be surrounded by some of the original fabric, but not much.

Besides rebuilding what was already there, Ives added an enormous wing. The engaged columns seen on the extreme left of the second floor on the elevation below were originally part of an open porch on the back of the older house. "He was always sniffing around my sisters looking for a wife to put him on easy street," Irinee du Pont observed to Winterthur historian Maggie Lidz. "Well-dressed, smooth, pushy, 'Don't Burt Ives me' became part of the family lexicon. He would highly approve of you giving a lecture about him."

The rooms in my house have names as well (at lest, some do), but nothing like this. There were 74 telephone extensions at Winterthur.

Here's the house today as seen from the south. The shape of the older portion is readily discernible on the left. If you look closely, you'll see the aforementioned back porch, now subsumed by the Ives addition of 1931. On the far right is a museum office wing built in 1957.

Here it is from the north, seen from across a divine swimming pool, which would be more divine if the museum hadn't painted it black and pretended it was a pond. du Pont was as engaged in the development of his gardens and grounds as he was with his house, and involved himself intensely - his MO in everything he did - with both Marian Coffin and Ely Ives.

The service courtyard (the kitchen was 4 floors up, accessible by elevator) was located at the eastern end of the building. It's been replaced by new museum construction. In the image below, exhibition space occupies a 1992 addition on the left; the museum entrance is inside the glazed pavilion in the middle; on the other side of the pavilion is the 1957 office wing, distinguishable by its roofline from the earlier Ives addition; the low Crowninshield Library and Conservation Building on the right, built in 1969, plays a valuable preservation role but no aesthetic role whatsoever.

Visitors to the museum enter the building on the south side of the entrance pavilion, seen below. The bus shuttles back and forth from parking fields. It's hard to imagine a house as big as Winterthur being obscured by anything, but from this vantage point, you can't see it at all.

I like to think of myself as a front door kind of a guy, so let's forget the museum entrance and imagine ourselves entering as guests. Ives' 1931 addition, as Ms. Lidz describes it, is an "idealized cast stone version of an 18th century house." The specific model was Port Royal, built outside Philadelphia in 1763 and demolished in 1928 - not before Harry du Pont salvaged some of its woodwork. Maggie calls Ives' front door a "jazz-age riff" on Port Royal's original, which is true, although putting it that way might confer more aesthetic virtue than is warranted. The disconcerting stare of Winterthur's facades is partly a function of sun-blocking plastic membranes that obscure the 12 over 12 windows. Removal of these is planned for the near future.

Here is the master of the house, Henry Francis (Harry) du Pont, painted in 1914 by Ellen Emmet Rand. When the senator died in 1926, Harry inherited not just the house but a huge block of DuPont company stock. The shares were worth $177 apiece in 1926, $322 in 1927, and $500 each by 1928. During the '20s, E.I. du Pont de Nemours had metamorphosed from a manufacturer of gunpowder into an immensely profitable chemical company. It made the already prosperous du Ponts hugely rich, and allowed Harry in particular to pursue his passionate collecting of Americana with no financial restraints. Winterthur was a museum from the beginning, albeit a private one, it's salons and hallways, guestrooms and dining room, drawing room and library all "historicized" with priceless antique art and furniture.

Mrs. du Pont, nee Ruth Wales (1889-1967), seen below at the time of her wedding in 1916, moved with her family into the new Winterthur in April of 1931. Over the next 3 months she and Harry entertained 113 overnight guests, while the world outside slid inexorably into Depression. Harry was a micro-manager, focusing on everything from guest lists to seating charts to flower arrangements to table settings. His wife was a contented passenger.

What could better complete this apotheosis of American aristocracy than two beautiful debutante daughters, Pauline (the future Mrs. Alfred C. Harrison) and Ruth Ellen (who married George deForest Lord Jr.). 835 guests attended Pauline's wedding breakfast at Winterthur in 1938.

If we'd walked through the door to Winterthur in the 1930s, the Port Royal Hall, as it's called, would have looked like this.

Today it looks like this.

Winterthur is a labyrinth and even I, who never gets lost in big houses, am not entirely sure how many levels it actually has. So many antiques, so much glitter, so many hallways and so many levels. Maggie and I started our tour turning right out of the Port Royal Hall into the Port Royal Parlor. Funny, isn't it; you can leave all the family's furniture behind, but if the family's gone the room just does't look lived in. There are 50 fireplaces (non-working these days), 175 display rooms (with names like Nemours, Patuxent, Empire, Hart, Essex, etc.), two elevators and a trunk lift. There used to be a badminton and a squash court, plus a bowling alley, billiard room and a movie theatre too, all of which have been converted into display rooms. One thing there isn't, is a single surviving vintage bathroom - out of an original 39. Not surprisingly, the kitchen and pantries are all gone too.

East of the Parlor is the Hall of Statues, seen below in the '30s and today. From there we circled through the Blackwell Parlor (with the nifty fireplace detail), crossed the Port Royal Hall to the Readbourne Parlor, and took a surprisingly intimate stair up two landings to the second floor.

The view below looks west down the long axis of the house, from the top of the stairs towards what used to be Bissell and Perot's front door and porte cochere. I couldn't possibly photograph every room in this place; you'd expire from antique overload. Besides, I didn't bring breadcrumbs and am not even certain, despite Maggie's indefatigable helpfulness, that I saw everything. The highlight en route to the old front door is the Chinese Parlor.

The vintage view below shows Bissell and Perot's Edwardian entrance hall of 1904, complete with grand marble stair and classical columns. The door leads out to the porte cochere.

The views below show the same floor space, now called the Montmorenci Stair Hall, as reinterpreted by Ive's 18th century "jazz-age riff." The door to the porte cochere now leads to a double height glazed conservatory, presided over by marble busts of family founder Pierre Samuel du Pont (1739-1817) and his wife Nicole Charlotte Marie Louise. Born the son of a commoner, the clever du Pont became an intimate at court, and was ultimately ennobled by Louis XVI in 1784, rather late given events at the time. He and his family emigrated - or perhaps escaped - to America in 1800, and went into the gunpowder business.

On the south wall of the Montmorenci Hall is the door to Bissell and Perot's old drawing room, elegantly colonialized and reborn as the Marlboro Room.

Let's wander east to the dining room and be dazzled by treasures in every direction.

Alas, no more pantries and kitchen; just more treasures.

Outside the dining room is a grand double height porch overlooking lawn terraces, stone stairs and Mrs. Coffin's elegant swimming pool complex.

And then rooms, and more rooms, and more gorgeous American antiques. Conversion from private house to museum resulted in some family areas being converted to exhibition space. However, the "museum gestalt" was here from the start.

We're taking the stairs from 2 to 4, skipping guestrooms on 3 for the moment, going instead direct to the family bedrooms on 4.

The view below looks east down the axis of the 4th floor. The stair is beyond the arch on the left; Mr. du Pont's suite - bedroom, study and bath (the latter now an exhibition room) is behind the wall on the left; his private elevator is ahead on the right beyond the first arch.

It's probably time, since we're now in Mr. du Pont's private study, to talk about the dark cloud that descended upon the enchanted world of Winterthur as the Depression deepened. Harry didn't pay for his house in cash. Instead he borrowed almost $9 million from Bankers Trust in New York and an outfit called Laird, Bissell & Meeds in Delaware, then collateralized the loans with DuPont stock. This meant one thing in 1928, when each share was worth $500, but something quite different at the end of 1929, when the share value had dropped to $116.50. By the end of 1931, DuPont shares were trading for under $54; by April of 1932, a year after moving into Winterthur, they were down to $37.50. Harry's lenders threatened foreclosure unless he came up with additional capital. Lammot du Pont, president of the family firm and Harry's cousin, saved his bacon, temporarily anyway, with a $2 million loan. In 1936, Harry and family closed their 4 houses, let most of their staff go, and took a 6-month world cruise which, for them anyway, was a major money saver. Clearly things improved, since by 1938 they were back in town giving a wedding breakfast for 835 people which, you can be sure, was but a fraction of the total cost of daughter Pauline's marriage.

Mr. du Pont's study opens onto a terrace located above the Dining Room Porch.

On the other side of the hall were the du Pont daughters' rooms...

...and down at the western end of the building, in the original (or what's left of it) house, is their mother's suite, located two stories above the Marlboro Room.

The Montmorenci Stair, which replaced Bissell and Perot's marble number, is off the beaten path in Ives' version of Winterthur. Actually there might not be any beaten paths in this tractless and convoluted mansion. The green upholstered bench is on the 2nd floor; Maggie and I are still on 3, ready to inspect more period rooms. Harry might photograph a room in its original condition, restore and install it at Winterthur and, if he were able, track down the original furniture.

29 servants' rooms were distributed along tiled corridors on 5.

Now we're back on 2, looking at guestrooms and more guestrooms, not all of which are furnished any longer as bedrooms.

Winterthur's library, located on the 2nd floor beyond the Montmorenci stairs, contains 87,000 volumes and half a million manuscripts and images, not all of which are in this room.

Can we leave without visiting the basement flower room? That would be a no.

How about the badminton court, decorated originally with antique American eagles, then redecorated in 1948, on the occasion of a visit by the Walpole Society, with 4 entire 18th century New England house facades.

Did the museum construct this Hello Dolly (well, maybe earlier than Dolly) American streetscape, and stock the shops with authentic antique merchandise? No, Harry did.

The gatehouse on Kennett Pike was the ceremonial entrance to the 2500-acre du Pont estate.

It's still there, although the estate now covers 982 acres and museum visitors use a more highway engineered entrance at a purpose located traffic light a quarter mile north.

In 1951, Mr. & Mrs. du Pont moved from Winterthur into a cottage - if one can properly describe a 21,000 square foot Regency Revival mansion as such - located about 300 feet from the new museum entrance. Harry du Pont may have sat on boards of the DuPont company, General Motors, the New York Botanical Garden, the Whitney Museum, Cooper Union and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but Winterthur was his true life's passion. According to his daughter, Mrs. Lord, conversion of the house to a museum was his intention all along.

Almost 130,000 people visit Winterthur every year, to tour the house, do research, wander the gardens, ride (or observe) the point to point, and enjoy special exhibitions like the nifty Costumes of Downton Abbey on display as of this writing. The link is www.winterthur.org.

Vintage photos courtesy Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and Maggie Lidz.

I'm Sitting This One Out

First there was a blizzard, then another blizzard (or nearly one), then a collapsed drawing room ceiling led to a last minute cancellation. The net result has been a string of field trip postponements. Ergo, I have only myself to present this week. I am seated on terrace steps at the Braes, Herbert Pratt's former country place at Glen Cove, Long Island. It's a very grand house ('Forget Gatsby,' posted on October 11, 2012) and I was happy that day. Next week: Winterthur, a remarkable building, quite aside from the treasures it contains.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About My Block

At the end of the 18th century, what we call the Upper East Side looked like this - one gracious old country place after another, perched on bluffs or at the heads of long sloping lawns, enjoying unsullied vistas of glittering waters on the Sound, as the East River then was called. Much loved by generations of Knickerbockers with names like Beekman and Schermerhorn, Gracie and Astor, Rhinelander and Jones, these vanished waterfront estates stretched in an almost unbroken line all the way to Hell Gate.

Three generations in the same house lend an air of permanence to any locality. However, the pre-revolutionary look of Manhattan's countryside north of New York turned out to be very fleeting. Development along the shoreline had been mostly elite, but those acres immediately inland were sketchy from the start. Area-wide decline began in earnest with imposition of the infamous Commissioners Plan of 1811. Devoid of even a whiff of imagination or sensitivity, the new street plan decreed that anything and everything old and/or charming be leveled, removed and/or demolished in the name of the almighty right angle. The plan was implemented in stages, and only over many years, but already by the 1830s Third Avenue had been laid out and fairly built up, in a desultory way, with wooden commercial structures, almost to Harlem Bridge. Then in 1837, the Harlem Railroad came along, spewing smoke and cinders into the dispirited fields and increasingly blowsy woods. The railroad replaced a revolutionary era bridge over the Harlem marshes with a railroad trestle and, in the process, converted not just Harlem Village, but the single stop at 86th Street into into a pair of commuter suburbs. Abandonment of the old waterfront estates was wholesale by the 1850s, when the "Forty Thieves" ran the city council and Manhattan's sordid shantytowns were being cleared, Mugabe-style, to make way for Central Park. By the close of the Civil War, when the idea of a waterfront country place on the East Side had become an absurdity, a new reality took form. Boss Tweed's Dept of Public Works embarked on a furious and, yes, first class implementation of the Commissioners Plan as it applied to the East Side. Over a thousand laborers were plunged into the construction of streets, lighting and sewers, none of which was on the West Side. Why the focus east of the Park? Not a decision made for the public good, you can be sure. Tweed and his cronies had a scam; they bought tracts of unimproved lots, Tweed then ordered construction of immediately adjacent streets, after which the lots were sold for whopping profits. (A confession: my 3 vintage images are all of the same house - Mt. Pleasant, built by William Beekman in 1763, on a site adjoining today's Beekman Place. They capture the right mood, however, and the others were, after all, the same breed of cat).

Which brings me to the Madison-Park block of East 63rd Street, seen here looking east, on which I have lived - at least, during the week - for the past 14 years. From the late 1860s until the Panic of 1873, the East Side crawled with small time land speculators and independent builders, the latter erecting speculative brownstone-front rows of anywhere from 4 to 8 houses on practically every block. Fifth Avenue had big lots, big prices and big expectations. Third Avenue became the dividing line between the working classes to the east and the gentry to the west, a divide which, despite everything that has happened since, has never really been erased. The irony of the East Side, of course, is that during the 19th century, the gentry and the working classes swapped seats, so to speak. Despite the many luxurious buildings built east of Third Avenue since the 1954 demolition of the Third Avenue Elevated train, real estate customers still abound who, as we say in the business, "get nose bleeds if they cross Third Avenue."

After about 4 years of economic blood letting in the wake of 1873, the American economy staggered back to its feet. By the late 1870s, houses that had sat unsold were selling, and builders who had been licking their wounds were back building. To my archaeological eye, development on my block of East 63rd Street appears to have sprung from bare earth to unbroken street front in 3 to 5 years. Starting in the late 1870s, four separate rows of speculative middle class houses - two rows on the north side and two on the south - went up in rapid succession, or maybe even simultaneously. Despite elaborate disguises acquired during the last century-plus, they mostly survive. The building on my northeast corner is actually part of a 5-house row fronting Madison Avenue. It was a middle class product, perhaps a little bigger and better than its mid-block sisters. When Madison went commercial after the First World War, shops invaded ground floors up and down the avenue, bedrooms above were chopped into apartments and the owner of the house on my corner expanded it into a former rear yard on 63rd St. It stands today much as it has for almost a century, its ground level now occupied by Roberto Cavalli, an uber-chic clothing store for women who wear 8-inch heels and, if I am to believe the fashion blowups usually in the windows, keep cheetahs for pets.

I can safely date the Cavallo house to the late 1870s due to the deeply incised decoration in the window surrounds called Eastlake motifs. These are specific to a genus of mid- to late-1870s brownstone house labeled, for reasons obscure to me, as "Neo-Grec." Charles Eastlake (1836-1906) was a Brit who in 1868, at the age of 32, wrote a runaway best seller titled "Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details." Eastlake's ubiquitous influence is to blame for much of the Victorian era's dispiriting taste. The machine made geometry of Eastlake motifs is like a computer chip in your dog's shoulder - its result is instant identification.

Edith Wharton described the New York of her childhood, unlike our soft focus perception of it today, as shrouded in a "universal chocolate-colored coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried." Between the death of the Greek Revival and the bloom of the Queen Anne, Manhattan and Brooklyn underwent almost 40 years of brownstone fronted Italianate rowhouse construction, resulting in tractless urban neighborhoods of startling uniformity. Many of these neighborhoods still exist, in Harlem and especially in Brooklyn. However, streetscapes on the East Side, once equally brown and militarily regular, have, as a result of wandering fashion in early 20th century, undergone significant individual rebuilding. The image below shows the north side of 63rd between Madison and Park. You may not believe it - and perhaps you may not care - but what you're looking at started life as a uniform row of practically identical high stoop heavily corniced brownstone row houses. Edith would have hated them.

Two separate builders erected these houses. The westerly row was more upscale, each 3-bay house sitting on a 20-foot wide lot. The cornice second from the left in the image below is the only remaining piece of original construction fabric that survives in this row. The original 1880s facade of the house behind the construction netting was replaced long before my arrival with a sort of ersatz stucco Georgianization. I cannot guess what's coming next.

I find this house, the second in the row, of particular interest. When I came in 1999, its facade was faced with brownstone...well, faced on the upper stories, at least. Back when it was chopped into apartments (probably in the 1930s), the original high stoop was torn off (a depressing practice of the time) in order to provide more rentable space on the parlor floor. The demolition of ponderous stone stoop and ornate front door surround required reconstruction of the ground and parlor floor facades. Houses like this typically got new bibs made of brown-tinted stucco designed, as far as proportion goes, with an often unsteady hand. Deprived of heavy front door and window surrounds, the reconfigured parlor floor windows suddenly appeared under-scaled, not that anyone cared.

During my time on the block, this house has been gutted not once but twice for single family owners, in the course of which its rooming house facade has been carefully recreated in marble.

The other three houses in the row had degenerated into similarly nondescript stoop-less brownstone apartment buildings. They were bought by one owner (not all at once), demolished (in apparently unplanned stages), and reconstructed as a single luxurious rental building that only looks like 3 separate houses. A "premier pre-school" (according to the web) called the Garden House occupies not just the ground floor, but an enormous rear winter garden as well. The latter is sunk so deep in the earth that I honestly wondered, after observing the 30th or maybe the 40th container of dirt being hauled away, if the owner was expecting to reach Beijing. Upstairs are a few $10,000/month 1-bedrooms, plus a triplex on top which is bigger than the marble house next door.

The quality of construction in this building is about as good as it gets. The design aesthetic, however, has a slightly brutal, non-hand-drawn quality to it. Compare its door to the door on the house in the second image below, also on the block, also once a high stoop brownstone, but renovated at the beginning of the 20th century.

The easterly row was more modest than its competition to the west, each house being only 16-feet as opposed to 20-feet wide. This allowed for only 2 windows per floor overlooking the street instead of 3.

Stoop removal, notwithstanding the negative vicissitudes it has inflicted upon many an old house, has some respectable antecedents. In 1911, Elsie de Wolf and Ogden Codman tore the stoop off a typical brownstone house at 123 East 55th St. and replaced it with a formal lobby on the ground floor and an entrance court outside. The house was famous in its day and, in addition to its fashionable cachet, was a lot brighter indoors. The Georgian Revival facade of the Leash, a low profile club for aficionados of shooting and hunting dogs, looks to me like it dates from the 1920s.

Sheer chance has preserved a great deal of the original architectural fabric of this row. The vintage looking facade below, however, is a recent reconstruction. Stripped in the 1940s (or maybe the '30s, hard to tell) of cornice, stoop and window surrounds, it was smooth, featureless and dull until 2010, when everything was reapplied. Indoors, it's still very "Hollywood Regency."

The cornice on the left is from 1882; the one on the right from 2010.

The private house on the left in the image below gives a good idea of what the whole block used to look like. The early 20th century extension on the house next door illustrates how totally that look has been obscured.

Shortly after completion of its new Grand Central Terminal in 1913, the New York Central embarked on a massive beautification of Park Avenue, decking the railroad yard behind the terminal and converting its partly covered sunken tracks into a landscaped boulevard. Construction of upscale apartment houses, and even a spate of private mansions, promptly ensued. In 1923 J.E.R. Carpenter designed 580 Park, which anchors my block on its northeastern end. 580 is a superbly maintained coop with interesting layouts and a movie palace lobby. Fortunately, no one can any longer mutilate its facade with through-the-wall A/C, although that's probably more a function of landmark law than coop policy.

570 Park, facing 580 across 63rd Street, was an early entrant on the avenue, designed in 1915 by Emery Roth. Like most Park Avenue buildings it was built as a rental, but Roth designed it with admirable sensitivity to Delano and Aldrich's Colony Club under construction at the same time next door. (Hear that, Frank Lloyd Wright?) The bricks are redder than they look in this photo, and make a nice contrast with the white trim, which is marble at street level and glazed terracotta above.

Here's the south side of my block, with signature Upper East Side architectural variegation.

My apartment is in one of two old houses hiding behind that vaguely Art Moderne facade. They were originally part of a row of five, although some may have been demolished to make room for 570 Park.

The most easterly in the row looks like the house across the street, before the facade facelift. No one seems to know where the stone lion beside the front door comes from. My guess? A demolished ramp on the old elevated West Side Highway, but that's just a guess.

Years ago, while showing a back apartment at 45 East 62nd Street, I glanced out the window and was surprised to see that my building on 63rd, at least from behind, still looked like two old houses. The pair of brownstones to the right of my building have largely preserved their original facades - minus the stoops, of course. Judging from the sort-of-Arts-and-Craftsy 16-over-1 windows, I imagine the house with the oriel underwent a stylish update sometime around 1900.

Despite its aristocratic Federal Revival facade, the narrow lot on which this very good looking house stands makes me pretty sure it started life as a modest brownstone row house that was renovated in the early 20th century. The difference in floor levels makes me also think it was part of a now demolished spec row that extended to the right.

The brilliant looking mansion in the images below could be on Beacon Hill. It is a house today, but was designed in 1929 by Cross and Cross for a group of amateur flyers who called themselves the Hangar Club. Note Mercury wearing his winged cap under the pediment above the front entrance.

The Hotel Lowell, designed by Henry Churchill in 1925, replaces what was probably the rest of the Hangar Club row.

Rounding out my block is the Leonori on the corner of Madison Avenue, now a condo but designed in 1901 as an apartment hotel, a species seriously out of date for most of the last century. Layouts in the Leonori suffer from an ailment afflicting most former hotels; namely, it is full of hotel rooms. The period heft makes those of us who don't actually live in it grateful for it anyway.

I love my little apartment on 63rd St., which is as extremely small as my house in the country is extremely big.

I love my little terrace as well, which is full of blooming things in the summer, and from which I can gaze upon my block and understand what it is and what it was.

Soon after moving in, my terrace provided me with a ringside seat to a peculiarly "New York" story. It unfolded during construction of that rental building across the street, the one that looks like 3 new townhouses. There were, of course, rent regulated tenants in the original buildings, some of whom were disinclined to move. The owner eventually thinned their ranks to one pair of obstreperous holdouts who occupied the front and rear apartments on the 4th floor of the middle building. Having consolidated his remaining tenancy the owner began demolishing not just the 2 flanking houses, but also the facade of the occupied house, plus most of the 3 floors below the occupied apartments. Then the man in the front died, after which his apartment was obliterated literally overnight. There was an expected flurry of anti-landlord tabloid articles, which noted that the World War II vet in the back had still refused to move. Meanwhile, steel beams were being hoisted and riveted for new floors at different levels than those in the old buildings. This necessitated hanging a sort of sling that would support the remaining half-floor occupied rent controlled apartment while the original floor supports beneath it were removed. It hung there for a while, accessed via the original public stair, now in the middle of a construction site and open to the elements. Finally the tenant left, and in less than a day his former apartment disappeared as well.

Time to go inside....

...sit at my computer, and write all this up.