Preservation Magazine, Summer 2020

PEOPLE SAVING PLACES

SUMMER 2020

The magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

ARTIST IN

RESIDENCE INSIDE A FLORIDA SCULPTOR’S TRANQUIL HAVEN

INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL IN BALTIMORE RENEWING A SAN FRANCISCO LANDMARK

contents SUMMER 2020 The magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

7 DEPARTMENTS 2 Editor’s Note 4 President’s Note 7 Past, Present, Future 14 Transitions

34

47 Itinerary 54 At Home

FEATURES 18 | Grand Vision

FROM LEFT: JENNIFER HUGHES; SCOTT SUCHMAN

At a verdant historic site in West Palm Beach, Florida, Ann Weaver Norton’s monumental sculptures share space with rare palms and cycads.

26 | Time Capsule

59 Outside the Box 64 Final Frame

34 | Industrial Evolution

Once a busy lithography plant, a massive Baltimore complex now houses local businesses and community-oriented nonprofits.

The restoration of a San Francisco landmark captures a family’s history, as well as the Victorian period’s architecture and lifestyle.

Preservation is the quarterly magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It celebrates the places that have shaped the diverse American cultural experience and inspires people to save the past and enrich the future through

On the cover: A detail of artist Ann Weaver Norton’s enormous granite sculpture Seven Beings (1965) at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo by Tina Sargeant.

charitable giving, advocacy, and volunteerism.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Sites to Behold

M

ost of the National Trust’s operations have continued with relatively minor hiccups as headquarters staff have adapted to working from home during the coronavirus crisis. But the employees at our 27 historic sites have been heavily affected by full or partial closure of these places. Event cancellations, losses in revenue, and staff layoffs are harming not only the people who care for and protect these historic sites, but also the economies and cultures of the communities where they are located.

The National Trust’s sites, like many nationwide, adapted quickly by creating or expanding virtual experiences for existing and new audiences. Longer-term impacts, however, are still unfolding.

Even with historic sites starting to reopen, some will remain closed until they can ensure the safety of staff and visitors.

Properties in the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios (HAHS) program are not immune to these hardships.

Launched 21 years ago by the National Trust as a coalition of sites that could share experiences and find solutions to common problems, the HAHS program today consists of 44 historic places that closed or changed how people could visit during the pandemic. A new book written by HAHS Program Manager Valerie A. Balint and published by Princeton Architectural Press, however, offers the opportunity to “visit” each of these places from the comfort of your own home.

The book, Guide to Historic Artists’ Homes & Studios, explores the places where important American artists created some of their most famous work. Sites in the HAHS network include Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú, New Mexico, property; Andrew Wyeth’s studio in Pennsylvania; and the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in West Palm Beach, Florida, which we feature on page 18 of this issue.

I am sure that you, like me, look forward to the time when historic sites everywhere can reopen, but also realize that things will be different than before. The question on the minds of many is, “What will be the new normal?”

We don’t know the answer, which is among the reasons why the National Trust is launching its Resiliency Fund. This $1.5 million fund will help support the programmatic impact of the National Trust during this difficult time. Raising $1 million will unlock $500,000 in matching funds from a generous Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust challenge grant. To learn more, visit SavingPlaces.org/resiliencyfund.

SUMMER 2020 VOL . 72 , No. 3 Editor in Chief Dennis Hockman Managing Editor Meghan Drueding Editorial Assistant Nicholas Som Copy Editor Katie Finley Contributing Editors Latria Graham, Reed Karaim, Joe Sugarman, Lauren Walser, Logan Ward, Chris Warren Research Editors Samantha Spengler, Kelly Tomas, Lauren Walser Proofreader Susan Cullen Anderson Creative Director Mary Prestera Butler Art Director Jessie Despard Contributing Photo Editor Michael Green EDITORIAL (202) 588-6013

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WEST Receipt of Preservation is a benefit of membership in the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded nonprofit organization chartered by Congress in 1949. The National Trust for Historic Preservation works to save America’s Historic Places. Our programs and publications are made possible in part by membership dues and contributions. A one-year membership is $20 ($30 for family membership) and includes four issues of the magazine and discounted admission to National Trust Historic Sites. (Of the dues, $6 is designated for circulation purposes for a one-year magazine subscription.) For new memberships, renewals, or changes of address, write to Membership Dept., The Watergate Office Building, 2600 Virginia Ave. N.W., Suite 1100, Washington, D.C. 20037, call (800) 315-6847, or send an email to members@savingplaces.org. To raise additional revenue, the National Trust for Historic Preservation may share its mailing list with select organizations.

Please notify the Membership Dept. if you want your name deleted. • For back issues, send $4.50 each by check or money order to Magazine Orders at the address above. Bulk copy price for 10 or more magazines is $3 per issue. For information about submitting editorial queries or photographs, please see our website, SavingPlaces.org/magazine. • Preservation (ISSN 1090-9931) is published quarterly, © 2020 National Trust for Historic Preservation, and may not be reproduced in any manner without written consent. Periodical postage rate paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. • Preservation articles are works of journalism and not the official policy of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Articles about products do not constitute endorsements. The National Trust for Historic Preservation assumes no responsibility for the content of advertisements. • POSTMASTER: Send address changes to National Trust for Historic Preservation Membership, The Watergate Office Building, 2600 Virginia Ave. N.W., Suite 1100, Washington, D.C. 20037.

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PRESIDENT’S NOTE

Resiliency and Recovery

O

ver the past several months our world has changed dramatically. These changes evidence how our physical, cultural, economic, and social health are intertwined and interdependent, across all divisions of race, class, wealth, and geography.

First, with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed as if the entire country had shut down. And, like every other sector of our economy and our society, the cultural sector was deeply affected, including the National Trust.

Yet, we adapted. We learned to do our work while sheltering at home, we discovered new ways of communicating, and we developed creative ways to share the power of historic places in digital form. With a generous sponsorship from American Express, we celebrated May as our inaugural Virtual Preservation Month, each day unlocking a new online feature about a special historic place— from art lessons at the studio of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner to the Tidal Basin Ideas Lab (with five of the best landscape architecture firms in the country) to a culinary history of artichokes at Cooper Molera Adobe in Monterey, California. We found new tools to engage Americans with their history, reminding them how the resiliency of historic places and their ongoing stories echo our resiliency as Americans. As preservationists, we have a critically important role to play in our country’s recovery from the pandemic.

Then, layered over the pandemic, came the tragic killing of George Floyd, followed by public demonstrations across the country that rightfully questioned why the values of freedom, opportunity, and justice are still not applied equally to all Americans.

As preservationists, we also have a role to play in helping the nation recover from the longstanding diseases of structural racism and inequity. At the National Trust, we are committed to recognizing and preserving the places that tell the full story of the American people, and—particularly in this moment—preserving and honoring the buildings and landscapes that tell the stories of generations of African Americans, whose history defines the very meaning of the word resiliency. By taking a proactive approach, such as through our African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (a number of the program’s accomplishments are summarized in this issue on page 12), we can help to advance the goals of racial justice and equity.

Our history and the places where it happened give us critically important tools and inspiration to heal and unite our society. At the National Trust, we pledge to deepen our commitment to these efforts—and to the achievement of a more just and healthy society—in grateful collaboration with partners around the country.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded nonprofit organization, works to save America’s historic places.

Paul Edmondson President and Chief Executive Officer Tabitha Almquist Chief Administrative Officer Lynn English Interim Chief Development Officer Geoff Handy Chief Marketing Officer Katherine Malone-France Chief Preservation Officer Thompson M. Mayes Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel Patricia Woodworth Interim Chief Financial Officer PRESIDENT EMERITUS Richard Moe FIELD SERVICES Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, District of Columbia, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco BOARD OF TRUSTEES Timothy P. Whalen, Chair Susan E. Chapman-Hughes and Jay Clemens, Vice Chairs Christina Lee Brown, Linda Bruckheimer, Laura W. Bush, Lawrence H. Curtis, Samuel Dixon, Damien Dwin, Kevin Gover, Luis G. Hoyos, Shelley Hoon Keith, Fernando Lloveras San Miguel, C.H. Randolph Lyon, Martha Nelson, Charles Morgan Royce, Lisa See, G. Jackson Tankersley Jr., Phoebe Tudor Ex Officio The Attorney General of the United States The Secretary of the Interior of the United States The Director of the National Gallery of Art Representative, National Trust Advisors Representative, National Trust Historic Sites Councils & Boards Representative, National Preservation Partners Network Chairs Emeriti Robert M. Bass, Alan S. Boyd, Carolyn Brody, Nancy N. Campbell, William B. Hart, J. Clifford Hudson, Jonathan M. Kemper, Marita Rivero Honorary Trustee David McCullough NATIONAL TRUST HEADQUARTERS The Watergate Office Building 2600 Virginia Avenue NW Suite 1100, Washington, DC 20037 (800) 944-6847

PEDMONDSON@SAVINGPLACES.ORG

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SavingPlaces.org

See yourself here.

PLAN YOUR VACATION TODAY.

VISITQUEENANNES.COM

unlock history HISTORY UNLOCKED!

This May, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in partnership with financial supporter American Express, opened a window to a world of adventure during the first-ever Virtual Preservation Month.

Over the course of 31 days, participants took a digital journey to explore Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House in Virginia, trekked to North Carolina to explore Nina Simone’s childhood home, ambled down Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, and so much more.

Today, all these amazing places remain at your fingertips.

Visit SavingPlaces.org/PreservationMonth and unlock history across the country!

The Tenement Museum, New York, NY. Photo by Travis Roozée

Sponsored by

PAST | PRESENT | FUTURE

F I R ST LO O K

Rail Life

VRX STUDIOS

AT THE CORNER OF MAIN STREET and GE Patter-

son Avenue in downtown Memphis, a railway landmark has been rehabilitated, helping to rejuvenate the city’s historic South Main Arts District.

Opened as a train station and office building in 1914, the eight-story building was constructed by the Illinois Central Railroad. This past winter, a development group that includes Kemmons Wilson Companies, the Henry Turley Company, and Valor Hospitality Partners unveiled its conversion into the Central Station Hotel. Part of a mixed-use, $55 million adaptive reuse project, the building retains its original exterior. It also houses an Amtrak station that had to be able to operate without interruption during construction, which posed

a hurdle for contractor Robins & Morton. “It’s kind of like changing the hubcap as the car is going down the interstate,” says David Green of Robins & Morton.

BGKT Architects incorporated the main level’s original concourse signs, which lend a cosmopolitan feel. The 123-room hotel, part of the Curio Collection

by Hilton, also takes guests on an auditory journey through Memphis’ musical history with its vinyl record collection, which contains more than 40,000 songs. Burnished metal details throughout the space recall Memphis’s history of metal craftsmanship, and all the artwork inside the property was made by artists living and working along Amtrak’s 900-mile City of New Orleans route. —Latria Graham SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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PAST | PRESENT | FUTURE

Dreyfuss + Blackford Architecture oversaw the rehabilitation of a classic midcentury office building in Sacramento, including its oneof-a-kind tile mural by artist Wayne Thiebaud.

PHOTOS BY BRUCE DAMONTE

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S P OT L I G H T

Mural Support

W

ayne Thiebaud is famous for his paintings of everyday objects like cakes, lipsticks, and lollipops. But just a few years before he became an internationally known artist, he created a large-scale tile mural for the under-construction Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) headquarters in Sacramento, California. Called Water City and completed in 1959, the 3,650-squarefoot mural was conserved in the summer of 2019 as part of an $83 million renovation of the International Style structure.

Albert Dreyfuss and Leonard Blackford, the building’s original architects, requested a piece that would wrap around the exterior ground floor. Thiebaud came up with a four-panel abstraction of a city reflected in water: one section each for the east and west walls, and two sections for the south wall, which contains the building’s main entrance. “In a sense, it’s kind of an early history of the development of Sacramento,” he says. He commissioned artisans in Italy to make glass tesserae (richly colored mosaic tiles) in variations of orange, red, blue, and white. The tiles were mounted on panels, which were sent to Sacramento and installed.

Almost 60 years later, the firm that still bears Dreyfuss and Blackford’s names was selected to modernize the National Register–listed building. Dreyfuss’ son, architect Alan Dreyfuss of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates (WJE), managed the preservation aspects of the project.

These included the conservation of the mural, which Dreyfuss calls “exceptionally important to the building.”

Though 12-foot overhangs had protected the mural through the years, it had a handful of damaged white tiles and needed a thorough cleaning.

WJE used a gentle detergent to restore the tesserae’s natural luster and repaired tiles using identical ones salvaged from the building’s all-white rear wall. “It was very delicate work, because we had to match the grout. Otherwise, it would be glaringly obvious that the tiles had been repaired,” says WJE’s Kyle Normandin.

The mural is Thiebaud’s largest work, and now that its conservation is complete, his verdict is a thumbs-up. “They did a superb job, I think,” he says. “It looks almost new.” —Meghan Drueding SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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PAST | PRESENT | FUTURE

PERSONALITY

The Capital’s Gain

Color Theory EVER SINCE JENNIFER WILKOSKI GLASS worked on the restoration of James Madison’s Montpelier more than a decade ago, she had wondered why the main house’s faded yellow front doors didn’t match the vibrant yellows of its interior doors. That mystery has now been put to rest, following a six-week repair and refinishing project.

James Dinsmore, who helped oversee Madison’s expansion of Montpelier, built and installed the front doors in 1809. They were initially painted a bold yellow ocher to indicate their significance; brightly colored paints were expensive at the time. As the property changed hands over the centuries, the doors were stripped or repainted on at least five occasions.

The mid-2000s restoration identified a lighter, plywood-like yellow color as original.

But after more recent analysis, Glass and conservator Susan Buck discovered that the paint sample used for the restoration had degraded over time. They realized that the interior and exterior doors did match originally.

Glass removed the three sets of doors one at a time, cleaned their hardware, and covered them in the closest commercially available match to their historical shade of yellow. The project was completed in February of 2020.

“We get lots of compliments on the doors now,” says Glass, director of architecture and historic preservation at Montpelier, a National Trust Historic Site in Orange County, Virginia. “It’s fascinating to look carefully at the craftsmanship of the doors and the other woodwork.” —Nicholas Som

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HOW DID YOU GET YOUR START IN HISTORIC PRESERVATION? I have a professional degree in architecture and a master’s in architectural studies. I moved to San Francisco in 2002 and started working for [architecture and preservation firm] Page & Turnbull. One of my first tasks was to go into the archives and research the history and photographs of buildings we were working on. Right away, I realized I could combine my interests as an architect with my love of history. Eventually I moved to D.C. I joined Grunley Construction in 2009 and have been there ever since.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON? Right now, I’m working on laser-cleaning the dome of the Jefferson Memorial and doing a complete exterior restoration of the

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR CAREER HIGHLIGHTS? I led the constructionside survey team for the earthquake repairs for the Washington Monument, which meant setting the protocols for surveying, labeling, documenting, photographing, and cataloging all the stone conditions from top to bottom. I also spent five years [partly at a previous job] working on the modernization of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

In 2017, I received the Richard Morris Hunt Prize, a fellowship for an exchange program between French and American architects, and spent five weeks in France.

It was wonderful to see the similarities and differences in our preservation practices.

That exchange is something I’m passionate about, so I

FROM LEFT: JENNIFER WILKOSKI GLASS; SCOTT SUCHMAN

NEWS BRIEF

Some of Washington, D.C.’s most recognizable sites—the United States Capitol Building and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, for example—have been preserved with the help of architect Constance Lai, historic preservation manager at general contractor Grunley Construction. Lai also empowers the next generation of preservationists through regular speaking engagements, volunteer work, and service as a board member of numerous architecture and preservation organizations. We recently spoke with her about her career. —Lauren Walser

Constance Lai on the roof of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building in Washington, D.C., a National Trust easement property. Another of her projects, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, is in the background.

joined the board of the AIA Architects Foundation [the prize administrator] to help the continuation of the program.

HOW HAS THE PANDEMIC AFFECTED YOUR WORK? I was the guinea pig for giving a virtual talk for the D.C. Chapter of the Association of Preservation Technology. It’s been our first foray into the virtual world. Normally, we get to see each other in person— with site tours, lectures, and happy hours—but with this pandemic, we said it’s the perfect time to try something new and learn new tech platforms.

WHAT INNOVATIONS IN PRESERVATION MOST EXCITE YOU? The ability to laser-scan existing buildings is incredible. It allows us to understand buildings in a three-dimensional way that we’ve never been able to do before. We can understand the exact dimensions in the spaces between the floors and find cavities in the walls that we didn’t know existed, which helps us see how we can insert new infrastructure, like mechanical or electrical systems.

YOU DO A LOT TO PROMOTE DIVERSITY IN THE ARCHITECTURE AND PRESERVATION FIELDS. WHY IS THAT IMPORTANT TO YOU? The responsibility of architects is to create spaces where our society can live, work, and play.

It’s important that the people who are designing these spaces reflect the population that they’re designing for.

America is very diverse. We need to have those same faces in our profession, because it makes what we do in providing these spaces to the public much more relevant. That’s our goal: to make spaces that are relevant to the communities that are using them.

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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PAST | PRESENT | FUTURE

I N S P I RAT I O N

F

or more than a decade the National Trust has been strengthening its capacity to save places related to African American and other underrepresented histories. This work paved the way for creating the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF), the largest preservation campaign ever on behalf of African American history, activism, and achievement.

Since January of 2018, the fund has enabled the National Trust to model innovative preservation approaches, take direct action to protect African American cultural heritage, and conduct critical research exploring how preservation impacts equity, displacement, and affordability. Additionally, AACHAF awards cash grants to projects that preserve Black history sites and stories.

To date, the National Trust has received almost 2,000 proposals requesting nearly $190 million in grant funding, and by the end of this year, it will have invested more than $4.3 million in nearly 60 AACHAF preservation projects.

“Later this summer we will announce our 2020 grant recipients, which will include the City of Minneapolis,” says Brent Leggs, AACHAF executive director. “The funding will enable a partnership between the city and the African American community to document significant historic places as a way of healing

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community divides and offering hope to many.” Clayborn Temple (above)—a church central to the Memphis, Tennessee, Civil Rights protests and the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike—will also receive critical funding.

Past Action Fund grants have supported hiring new staff positions at cultural heritage organizations like the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Mississippi and Weeksville Heritage Center in New York. Grants have also funded much-needed research in places like the historically segregated Westside neighborhood of Las Vegas and Freedom Colonies across Texas. Preservation planning for an HBCU icon called Fountain Hall at Morris Brown College, where W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk, was also made possible through this funding.

“Now is the time to elevate the important history imbued in these places and stories,” says Leggs. “With humility and in partnership, we work with communities to expand the American story on behalf of all Americans.” The 2020 list of grantees is expected to include a diverse range of places and overlooked stories that exemplify the richness and complexity of American history.

To learn more about these places and to celebrate this year’s grantees, please visit SavingPlaces.org/african-american-culturalheritage. —Dennis Hockman

ABOVE: STEVE JONES; OPPOSITE FROM TOP: LISA VOLLMER; VANCE FOX/H+K ARCHITECTS

Telling the Full Story

OBJECT LESSON

Think Piece

I

t’s never easy to follow in the footsteps of a famous parent, but Margaret French Cresson managed to pull it off. Cresson—the daughter of Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French—realized she had a genuine talent for sculpting after trying it out on a dare from a family friend. She studied with artists in New York City and Boston, as well as with her father at Chesterwood, his western Massachusetts estate that is now a National Trust Historic Site.

In 1920, when Cresson was in her early 30s, she created one of her most acclaimed works: Girl with the Curls. The luminous marble portrait head of a young girl—a likeness of Helen Geary, thought to be a family acquaintance in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—was modeled in clay, then plaster, and carved by the Piccirilli brothers, master carvers in the Bronx, New York. “It’s not just a straightforward portrait of an individual,” says Donna Hassler, executive director of Chesterwood. “There’s something that’s really intriguing and conveyed in a thought-provoking way. The subject seems almost at a distance. She’s thinking about something else.” The piece is on display in French’s studio at Chesterwood.

Cresson gained a reputation as a respected sculptor of busts and reliefs and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1942. She wasn’t the only female sculptor to be encouraged and mentored by French; his onetime assistant Evelyn Beatrice Longman also became a well-known artist. Works by Longman, as well as additional pieces by Cresson, are part of the National Trust’s collection at Chesterwood. Visit chesterwood.org for information on the site’s summer opening status and an online exhibition of Cresson’s work. —Meghan Drueding

N E WS B R I E F

School Memories OVER A PERIOD OF 90 YEARS, Native American students arrived at the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada, in circumstances as varied as the different tribal cultures they represented. Many were made to attend the boarding school against their and their family’s will, as part of the federal government’s forced assimilation policy. “Some were just picked up in a cattle truck [and taken to the school], and their parents didn’t know where they were,” says Bobbi Rahder, director of the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum, which opened in January.

“In other cases, the parents wanted the kids to go, or the kids may have wanted to. Alumni have told us there were many different reasons.”

The school operated from 1890 to 1980, and the 110-acre site is now on the National Register. The Nevada Indian Commission worked closely with the state historic preservation office and Reno, Nevada-based H+K Architects on the rehabilitation of two structures—the 1923 Administration Building and the 1925 post office—that now house the museum. Both were built with locally quarried stone by Hopi and Italian masons, as well as student apprentices. The stone walls and fireplaces were preserved as part of the rehab, as were original wood ceiling beams and windows.

The museum addresses the school’s complicated legacy with exhibitions based on input from Stewart alumni and relatives. A self-guided audio tour of the grounds and a virtual tour are both available; visit the museum’s website, stewartindianschool.com, for updates on its opening status. —Meghan Drueding

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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TRANSITIONS

PLACES RESTORED, THREATENED, SAVED, AND LOST

by Nicholas Som

SAWMILL, SHELDON JACKSON SCHOOL The sawmill building of the former Sheldon Jackson School in Sitka, Alaska, has been revitalized as a research support center and gift shop for the Sitka Sound Science Center (SSSC). One of 17 contributing structures to the campus, which is designated as a National Historic Landmark District, the 1941 sawmill housed classes in European boatbuilding and wood-milling techniques for Alaska Native students. After the school shuttered in 2007, many of its buildings were deeded or sold to organizations and a summer camp. In 2010, SSSC purchased two, including the sawmill. Used primarily for storage after its machinery was sold in 1976, the building’s wood pilings and galvanized metal siding had severely deteriorated, but its original spruce floorboards and trusses remained functional. With guidance from local preservation experts, contractors, and architecture firm Welsh Whiteley Architects, SSSC decided to deconstruct the sawmill and rebuild it on a new concrete foundation, preserving its original frame. Workers replicated the original metal siding while salvaging some of it and reusing it on the interior. Funded by a combination of grants, public funds, and individual contributions, the $1.2 million project was completed in June of 2020.

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CAITLIN FONDELL

RESTORED

GARY WATER TOWER An octagonal, 133-foot-tall water tower in Gary, Indiana, was completed in 1909, just three years after the establishment of the city. Constructed by the Gary Heat, Light & Water Company, the tower was part of a waterworks complex designed by John W. Alvord, a Chicago civil engineer who oversaw the water supply system for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The company covered the tower’s steel columns with a concrete shell and a decorative cornice, transforming it into a community landmark. In 2019 the tower’s most recent owner, Indiana American Water, announced its intention to raze the building, which was also known as the Jefferson Park Water Tower. Indiana American cited safety and structural issues, as well as redundancy with a new water tower nearby. A City of Gary employee informed nonprofit Indiana Landmarks in February of 2020 that the city supported preservation as an alternative, but Indiana American Water’s demolition permit was approved later that month. With no further avenues for recourse or discussion, demolition began in April of 2020.

FROM LEFT: LEE LEWELLEN, HUNTER KERHART

LOST

R E S T O R E D TRUST BUILDING In 1928, the Title Insurance and Trust Company opened its new headquarters, a 10-story Art Deco office building in the heart of Los Angeles’ financial core. Its terra cotta facade, gilded ceiling decorations, travertine interior walls, and marble floors conveyed its significance, and artist Hugo Ballin created polychromatic tile murals to adorn the entrance. Following several ownership changes in the 1970s, the Trust Building temporarily housed the Los Angeles Central Library and was used as a filming location for movies such as The Dark Knight Rises and Divergent. The property had been mostly vacant for more than a decade when Nelson Rising—who began his career as a lawyer working in the Trust Building—and his company Rising Realty Partners purchased it in 2016. Crews began restoring the structure, removing layers of paint and acoustic tiles to reveal its original ceilings. Shear walls were added to help bring it up to modern earthquake standards, and its exterior terra cotta and murals were fully cleaned. The $40 million renovation, designed by Architectural Resources Group and Gensler, was completed in Feburary of 2020, and the building will contain retail stores, restaurants, and office space.

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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TRANSITIONS

BACON’S CASTLE SLAVE QUARTER The last surviving slave quarter on the grounds of Bacon’s Castle, a former plantation in Surrey, Virginia, has been restored. Constructed out of wood and brick in two stages between 1829 and 1848, the two-story building was once one of many dispersed across the site and likely housed three or four families of enslaved people. It later served as rental lodging for sharecroppers and other tenants before nonprofit Preservation Virginia purchased Bacon’s Castle in 1973, operating the historic site as a house museum. With the intention of telling the fuller story of life on the property, which is a National Historic Landmark, work commenced on restoring the slave quarter in mid-2018. Its four window sashes had become compromised, and its south chimney was leaning into the adjacent gable, further damaging the decayed wood siding. To relieve pressure on the gable, craftsmen temporarily removed some of the bricks that were protruding from the chimney stack and pressing into the siding, cutting them down before reinstallation. Roughly 25 percent of building’s siding needed replacement, while the rest was stripped, washed, and repainted. Repairs were completed in November of 2019. New signage interprets the structure for visitors, describing the building’s evolution over time.

RESTORED

GOTTLIEB’S DEPARTMENT STORE The former Gottlieb’s Department Store in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, was saved from the wrecking ball less than a week before its planned demolition. Morton Gottlieb and his family built the two-story structure in 1906, operating their business on the ground level for about 80 years while taking up residence upstairs. The building also held a post office until 1917. The Gottlieb family sold the building in the 1980s or ’90s, but it remained in use as retail space. Cracks in the foundation formed—signaling uneven settling—and the floor on the second level became warped. Developer Joseph Carannante purchased the property in 2018, only to discover it was structurally unsound. Carannante secured a demolition permit in the summer of 2019. Meanwhile, water infiltration caused further damage. Point Pleasant Beach lacked historic ordinances that could protect the building, but town mayor Paul Kanitra began reaching out to potential buyers willing to preserve the building’s historic integrity. He eventually arranged a meeting between Carannante and local residents Steve and Sue Fisher. With only days to spare, the Fishers agreed to purchase the building for $960,000 in December of 2019. The Fishers hope to rehabilitate the store as some form of publicly accessible space, but as of press time, plans are on hold due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

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FROM TOP: MIKE ADAMS; JERRY WOOLLEY

S AV E D

“Historic places are in our nation’s DNA. We need to preserve them for generations to come.”

Merry Sanders Sarasota, FL PHOTO BY ALEX MCKNIGHT

Create your own meaningful legacy by including the National Trust for Historic Preservation in your estate plans. To learn more, contact us today.

TELEPHONE: 202.588.6017 EMAIL: legacy@savingplaces.org WEB: TrustLegacy.org Have you already included the National Trust in your will or estate plan? Please notify us so we can welcome you to our Legacy Circle.

THE LARGER-THAN-LIFE WORK OF SCULPTOR ANN NORTON, DISPLAYED IN A LUSH FLORIDA GARDEN, RECEIVES A CAREFUL RESTORATION

GRAND

BY MEGHAN DRUEDING PHOTOGRAPHY BY TINA SARGEANT

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VISION

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she agonized about what to do—she worried that marriage would interfere with her work and force her into Palm Beach society life—she ultimately said yes, with her art as a caveat. “If you are willing to take an artist for your wife and one like me,” she wrote him, “then I am yours.”

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eaver—now Ann Weaver Norton—needn’t have worried about becoming a society matron. She hadn’t married Ralph for his money, but she now had the financial freedom to dive into her work more fully than ever before. She had been creating plaster sculptures that bridged the figurative and the abstract, and now she was able to get more of them cast in bronze, an expensive process that made the pieces more marketable.

The couple lived in the historic West Palm Beach neighborhood of El Cid, in a 1925 house originally designed by the well-known Palm Beach architect Maurice Fatio and then renovated in the Monterey Revival Style by another important Florida architect, Marion Sims Wyeth. The Nortons hired Wyeth to design an attached studio for Ann, where she worked full-time. Ralph stayed true to his promise to respect and support her career until his death in 1953 at the age of 77.

Ann was only 48 years old, and there was still a lot of the world—and the United States—that she hadn’t seen. She began traveling, and the otherworldly landscape of the American Southwest, particularly Bryce Canyon in Utah, captured her imagination. “She was really inspired by the rock formations there,” says Cynthia Inklebarger, curatorial manager at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens.

Ann had agreed to produce a sculpture in her husband’s honor for the Norton Museum of Art, and over time it became much larger than the three-piece work she had initially envisioned. An evocative grouping of mysterious figures whose forms recall Bryce Canyon’s rocky outcroppings, it consisted of pink Norwegian granite and measured 15 feet tall at its highest point. The piece, Seven Beings, became too big for its designated spot at the museum, and she decided to install it in her own backyard instead.

Previous pages: Ann Norton’s Seven Beings, completed in 1965, is one of her best-loved works. Opposite: Her studio contains clay and plaster models and maquettes, as well as many of her cedar sculptures.

THIS PAGE: ANN NORTON SCULPTURE GARDENS

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n the serene, palm-filled confines of the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in West Palm Beach, Florida, the rare black-and-blue Atala butterfly dips from one frond to another all spring and summer. Scientists believed the Atala to be extinct in southern Florida from 1937 to 1959. But recent conservation efforts have brought it back, and it’s drawn to the thick undergrowth of glossy green leaves in the junglelike sculpture gardens—a modern-day stop for art, nature, and garden lovers that’s undergoing a revival of its own.

Right about the time the Atala was thought to have died out in South Florida, the gardens’ eventual namesake, New York sculptor Ann Vaughan Weaver (shown at right), was starting a new life there. The Alabamaborn, classically trained artist had spent years scraping by on a meager income. Her accolades from her time in New York were many: traveling fellowships to Europe, a silver medal from the Cooper Union Art School, participation in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1939, the 35-year-old received a coveted private commission for a garden sculpture, which she executed to the delight of her client, a Vermont doctor. She hoped to do more.

But the nation’s entry into World War II was approaching, and the market for personal luxuries like custom statuary soon vanished. Weaver’s New York abode was a rented room that cost $8 a day, and according to William Eiland in his 2000 biography Ann Weaver Norton: Sculptor, she “lived for a period on nothing but bananas.” The fanatically hardworking, 5-foot-tall sculptor needed a full-time job. She got one in 1942, as an instructor of sculpture at the recently opened Norton Gallery and School of Art (now the Norton Museum of Art) in West Palm Beach.

Her new bosses, art collectors and museum founders Ralph and Elizabeth Norton, had moved to the area in the late 1930s. Elizabeth’s ill health kept her at home much of the time, but Ralph and Weaver became friends, bonding over their shared love of art and classical music. Elizabeth Norton died in 1947, and after six months as a widower, Ralph asked Weaver to marry him. Although

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The Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens is a member of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios (HAHS), a program of the National Trust. For more information on HAHS, visit SavingPlaces.org.historic-sites

Clockwise from top left: Gateway Number 3 (1974– 75) measures 27 feet tall; Gateway to Knowledge, a West Palm Beach replica of a Norton work in Massachusetts, forms the background for Momentum (2015)

by Jim Rennert, part of a temporary exhibition this spring; Rennert’s bronze Timing (2017) was displayed near Norton’s 30-foot Gateway Number 5 (1977).

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Untitled Horizontal Sculpture, a 1979 Norton work in handmade Mexican brick, occupies a shallow pool in the house’s rear yard.

The 48-foot-long sculpture was conserved in 2019.

With the help of engineer Gene Leofanti and stonecarver René Lavaggi, who became her lifelong collaborators, Ann Norton completed Seven Beings in 1965. Since the 1950s, she had focused more and more on the approach of “direct carving”—making sculptures directly from a material, as opposed to creating plaster models and then casting them in metal. During the 11 years she spent on Seven Beings, she also began exploring the use of wood as a medium, using hand tools to carve 30-foot pieces of British Columbian cedar into abstract works influenced by Native American totem poles. And sometime in the 1960s or ’70s she grew interested in building towerlike sculptures out of handmade brick.

Norton had her studio expanded so she’d have even more room to execute the large-scale works she had long dreamed of being able to complete. “I’ve always thought big,” she told a reporter from the Palm Beach Evening Times. “Even when I was first learning in art school, my drawings were always running off the page.” The wood sculptures remained indoors, protected from the elements, but her 2-acre property was the ideal site for her massive brick sculptures, and soon Seven Beings had company. The Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens were starting to take shape.

As Norton traveled the world, particularly India and the British Isles, her work grew more abstract. In her Gateways, a series of up to 30-foot brick forms with carved openings, critics saw the influences of Jain temples and Scottish dolmens. The six Gateways are scattered in the northern half of the sculpture gardens, along

pathways through dense subtropical vegetation.

After laboring mostly outside the mainstream of the art world for decades, Norton received a spurt of attention during the last years of her career. The Rodin Museum in Paris invited her to contribute a sculpture for a show there in 1976, and two years later she received her only public commission, for a posthumously completed piece in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Gateway to Knowledge. A pair of important New York venues—the Clocktower gallery and the Max Hutchinson Gallery—held exhibitions of her work in 1978 and 1980.

By that point, Norton had been diagnosed with leukemia. She wanted to make sure her life’s work would be preserved in a peaceful setting where members of the public could come and undergo a “deep refreshing,” as she put it. She contacted a friend, Sir Peter Smithers, a British politician, former spy, and garden designer. “She told him the last piece of the puzzle was this garden,” says Margaret Horgan, the site’s managing director.

Smithers planned a rare collection of climate-appropriate palms and cycads (cone-bearing seed plants) that would complement the existing native palms, pines, and mahoganies. The idea was that visitors would feel as if they were in a tropical jungle, stumbling across Ann’s sculptures serendipitously. “A first meeting with each one must be an event, almost a shock,” he wrote in his 1996 memoir Adventures of a Gardener. By the time Ann Norton died in 1982, the gardens were open to the public.

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Opposite from top: The house’s rear portico; The garden’s meandering paths through lush vegetation create a sense of discovery. This page: A maquette Norton made for Seven Beings.

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ince then, an evolving group of dedicated staff members and volunteers have maintained the nonprofit Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens and raised money to keep it going. “The gardens have a rabid fan base,” says Dave Lawrence, president of the Palm Beach Cultural Council. “I think the mix of art and nature makes it pretty extraordinary.”

In 2015, the site brought in conservator Rosa Lowinger and her firm, RLA Conservation, to evaluate the condition of the nine major outdoor sculptures, which had withstood multiple hurricanes.

Plant growth, moisture, and salt air had damaged some of the bricks, as well as the rebar that forms the armature of most of the works.

“I love those sculptures, because I work with these materials all the time, but on buildings,” says Kelly Ciociola, a principal conservator at RLA. “It’s amazing what Ann Norton was able to do with an architectural material as sculpture.” Ciociola and skilled RLA technicians Humberto Del Rio, Junior Norelus, and Pablo Brouwer have conserved six of the garden sculptures since 2016, gently cleaning them and removing vegetation—including roots that had grown in tiny cracks, ultimately spreading out and causing more damage.

Rusted rebar had also expanded inside the brick cladding, so the RLA team removed the bricks and old mortar joints, treated the rebar, and then replaced the brick where possible. In cases where the old brick was too damaged, they created replacements from restoration mortar, repointing them so they look as close to the original bricks as possible.

Refining the property’s landscape has also been a top recent priority. SMI Landscape Architecture has worked with the gardens over the past few years to make its pathways more wheelchair accessible without detracting from the sense of surprise Smithers and Norton had wanted. In 2018 the firm created a small amphitheater for outdoor classes and performances, and in 2019 it completed a “welcome garden” on the corner of the site to provide a more public street presence.

RLA was scheduled to start work on another garden sculpture, Untitled (Monument Number 8), in March, but the COVID-19 crisis scrambled those plans. The site hopes to start that work this summer, along with repairs to the main house, which holds gallery space for visiting exhibitions. (The fixes to the house are funded as part of a state relief package passed after Hurricane Irma, which damaged the building’s windows, railings, doors, and balconies in 2017.) “The repairs will be great for the house’s preservation, but they also will protect us the next time there’s a hurricane,” says board of trustees chair Frances Fisher.

Norton’s studio, too, sustained damage in the storm, and Horgan and Fisher hope to have it restored sometime in the next year.

The 1,224-square-foot studio gives the impression that the detailobsessed artist has just stepped away and will return any moment.

Her chemicals for patinating her metal casts are stacked behind glass doors, her smocks are lined up in a closet, and her tools hang in cabinets. Maquettes, models, charcoal and pastel drawings, and wood and metal sculptures fill the space, providing a sense of the range of Norton’s work. “When people walk into the studio, they’re struck with the size and height and the light coming into it,” Inklebarger says. “The wonderful smell of the cedar pieces hits you, and then you’re taken with the amount of work in there. You can see her depth and breadth as an artist.”

The sculpture gardens are typically open from October to June but, like other historic destinations across the country, the site closed in March this year. If local public health restrictions are lifted by the fall, Horgan and Fisher plan to open the gardens again in October for the 2020–21 season. The site is a member of the National Trust’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios (HAHS) program, and it’s slated to host the exhibition Artists at Home, a gathering of images from HAHS sites, in the spring of 2021. An exhibition of work by artist Carol Prusa is planned for the fall of 2021. And the hope is that the gardens’ extensive educational programming will restart soon.

The property remains a haven for endangered plant life such as the Old Man Palm, native to Cuba and named for its beardlike husk, and the Coco de Mer, another palm that hails from the Seychelles and grows the largest naturally occurring fruit in the plant kingdom. And the Atala isn’t the only butterfly drawn to the gardens. Their proliferation of the Dutchman’s pipe vine attracts the yellow-and-black Polydamas swallowtail, while milkweed brings monarch butterflies. “We always have something flying around,” says Horgan. “A regular population of birds live here, including woodpeckers. There are always sounds—lots of sounds.”

Birdsong makes a fitting accompaniment for the enormous, silent yet sentient-seeming sculptures, which Peter Smithers called “great brick creatures” in Adventures of a Gardener. “As I worked around them in the years ahead,” he continued, “each would assume a personality of its own. It would hardly have surprised me if one of them had spoken to me, though in what language I cannot imagine.”

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A restored mansion provides a glimpse of one family’s life in Victorian-era San Francisco

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he problem with history is the constant temptation to shade it with the colors of our own time. Take the multihued Victorian-era houses known as the “Painted Ladies,” a popular tour stop in San Francisco.

The proper Victorian set would have had little to do with “painted ladies” of any kind. Yet to many, the houses have come to typify the era. In truth, accenting the architectural details of Victorians with different pastels or more brightly colored paints wouldn't become popular until the 1960s and ’70s.

A true Victorian lady or gentleman would give a demure but approving nod to the city’s Haas-Lilienthal House. A captivating example of Queen Anne–style architecture, the house embodies the ornate elegance of its day while sedately dressed in a historically accurate shade of grayish green.

Determining and re-creating that particular color was part of a meticulous restoration of the Haas-Lilienthal House in 2018. It combined detective work, creative repair, and painstaking craftsmanship to bring the house—built in 1886 for William and Bertha Haas—back to its former glory. The work not only restored an architectural landmark and the only Victorian house museum in

BY REED K A R A IM # PHOTOGR A PH Y BY BA R RY SCHWA RT Z

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the city that is open to the public, but also preserved an important piece of history: the story of the Jewish immigrant community that helped to build modern San Francisco.

That legacy was one reason why the National Trust added the house to its National Treasures program, which highlights endangered places that have contributed to our shared national history, in 2012. “The National Trust recognized the Haas-Lilienthal House as an important historic site that interprets Jewish heritage,” says Mike Buhler, president and CEO of San Francisco Heritage (also known as SF Heritage), the preservation group that operates the house.

The restoration is helping SF Heritage forge a stronger connection with current-day San Francisco, bringing the story of the HaasLilienthal House to a wider audience.

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William Haas was only 16 when he arrived in the United States from his native Bavaria in 1868. He worked his way across the country, ending up in San Francisco, where he became a clerk and eventually a partner in a cousin’s wholesale grocery business. By the time he and his wife, the former Bertha Greenebaum, built their impressive 26-room home in fashionable Pacific Heights, they were active members of both the Jewish and larger communities, giving 28 preservation

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time and money to a range of civic and charitable endeavors.

“The family is a notable family in San Francisco,” says Buhler, “one of a small cohort of Jewish families that have a really important philanthropic legacy in the city and continue to be very active today.”

William and Bertha Haas had three children, and their youngest daughter, Alice, married Samuel Lilienthal, the son of a liquor company founder. The couple moved into the house in 1916, after William’s death. They remained there the rest of their lives, and the family then gave it to SF Heritage in 1973. The gift provided the nonprofit with a historically and architecturally significant Victorian dwelling, but it also came with a financial burden. “When I started in 2010, the house had been suffering from years of neglect,” says Buhler. “[SF Heritage] simply did not have the resources to properly keep up the building.”

The house did not meet accessibility standards or fire codes, had outdated electrical wiring, and needed repairs inside and out. It was also facing a decline in visitor numbers and event rentals. “It was quickly becoming an albatross for the organization,” Buhler says.

The estimated cost of restoration was in the millions. SF Heritage commissioned a feasibility study that concluded a capital campaign might raise $200,000 to $250,000. It decided to proceed anyway.

Previous page: The Haas-Lilienthal House in San Francisco was designed by Peter R. Schmidt and built by McCann & Biddell in the late 1800s. Opposite and this page: The Queen Anne–style house’s original woodwork and wallpaper were restored as part of a comprehensive preservation project completed in 2018.

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“The issue of what color to paint the exterior of the house was a very emotional one.” —Mike Buhler

Buhler believes the National Treasure designation was instrumental in helping the campaign succeed far beyond expectations. “That was really a critical turning point,” he says, “because it elevated the significance of the house both locally and nationally.”

Over five years the group raised more than $4.3 million, helped by the active participation of the Haas-Lilienthal family—particularly Alice Russell-Shapiro and John Rothmann, great-grandchildren of William and Bertha Haas. The money went toward repairs and helped fund SF Heritage’s citywide mission. It also paid for a new interpretive and education plan put together with the aid of the National Trust, which conducted visitor surveys and led a visioning workshop with the SF Heritage board.

“One of our findings in the surveys we did with the National Trust was that the house was basically invisible in the local community,” Buhler says. “People did not know about it; 85 percent of our visitors were from out of town. So in tandem with taking care of the physical needs of the house, we developed a fairly comprehensive business plan to make the house more relevant locally.”

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A 134-year-old house comes with a lot of history—and a lot of old paint. Crews for Teevan, a local contractor specializing in historic restoration, began their work by stripping up to 20 coats off parts of the Haas-Lilienthal House.

As they stripped the exterior, they found that parts of it were basically being held together by that old paint. Dry rot had invaded segments of the redwood siding. “The south facade was by far the worst. On probably every other, if not every, nail hole the nails had rusted and caused minor wood rot,” says Nicolas Beckman, Teevan project manager. “We had to perform epoxy repairs, hundreds of them. We would dig out the nail and put in a stainless-steel screw and then epoxy the damaged wood area.”

The company also re-created and replaced pieces of trim and other boards that were too far gone. Molly Lambert, a Bay Area architectural conservator, took 42 paint samples and subjected them to a detailed microscopic analysis to determine the house’s original palette. SF Heritage worked with Dunn-Edwards Paints, which donated the interior and exterior paint, to reproduce not just the colors but also the exact sheen of that first coat.

“The issue of what color to paint the exterior of the house was a very emotional one,” says Buhler. “In San Francisco, many people

Opposite: A 1927 Magic Chef range dominates the eat-in kitchen; This page, from top: Grasscloth wallpaper surrounds the mantelpiece in the second-floor sitting room; A tiled fireplace in one of the bedrooms provided warmth on chilly San Francisco nights.

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From top: The house’s varied exterior wall textures characterize the Queen Anne style; Johana Moreno of ARG Conservation Services applies a tinted, oil-based varnish to the front doors.

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BOTTOM: SCOTT HAHN/ARGCS

are accustomed to the Painted Ladies.” Visitors occasionally express disappointment that the building is not cloaked in more vibrant hues, he acknowledges, “but overall, people appreciate that they are seeing an authentic Victorian restored to its appearance from that era.”

SF Heritage faced another question, a common one in preservation, when considering the interior: whether to try to restore it to a particular point in time early in its life, or to retain the alterations made by the Haas-Lilienthal family over the years. Buhler and his colleagues decided to honor the family’s long history in the house and keep the alterations, a choice made easier because so much of the structure and its appointments was still original.

“What’s really significant about the house from the architectural perspective is its high level of integrity,” says architect Deborah J. Cooper, a principal at San Francisco's Architectural Resources Group (ARG) who guided the restoration with general contractor Oliver and Company. “Every detail is still in place because it was owned by the same family until it was transferred to [SF] Heritage.”

Because the house was so intact, it required a creative approach to restoration. “It had such a high level of historic finishes and historic integrity. Some of the ways we did things here were different than when we typically work with historic buildings in terms of bringing them up to code,” Cooper says.

For example, she notes, in many cases ARG would replace door hardware to make entrances and exits wheelchair accessible. But the original hardware on the Haas-Lilienthal doors was unusually ornate and worth preserving. “So instead we looked at very simple [accessibility] strategies like keeping doors in their open position,” she says.

In order to keep the period atmosphere, ARG found ways to make even major changes as unobtrusive as possible. It squeezed in a code-conforming restroom without intruding on the basementlevel ballroom by replacing the ancient boiler with a smaller unit. A mandated exterior fire escape descends not into the backyard but into the shell of an old pantry, so it’s less visible from the outside.

One of the bigger challenges was patching and repairing the original, deeply embossed Lincrusta wallpaper that decorates the interior. Johana Moreno, a senior conservator with ARG Conservation Services (a sister company to ARG), experimented with different materials before settling on a heavy cotton paper as a base. She hand-painted it with dimensional fabric paint to replicate the pattern, slowly building up layer after layer until she had the proper depth in the design.

“I created the pattern first, and then, when that was dry, I started working with the color,” she says. “Once I cut the paper and put it

“Every detail is still in place because it was owned by the same family until it was transferred to [SF] Heritage.” —Deborah J. Cooper

in place, some colors were a little bit off, and I ended up having to retouch and do painting on site.”

The interior woodwork received similar attention. Moreno and her colleagues carefully matched the stain and filled scratches to bring the trim back to life. The work, she notes, “was very, very detail oriented, scratch by scratch, painting delicately. That way we didn’t have to overload the surface with a new stain or new finish.”

This obsessive focus on detail resulted in a restored Victorian house that feels, in the rooms open to the public, as if the family has just stepped out for a stroll. The only challenge left was to get more of the public into those rooms.

out a 1927 addition in the back as an apartment. The latter, Buhler says, “is a significant source of income for the organization. It’s definitely helped sustain the museum financially.”

The pandemic is the latest chapter in the long history of a house that embodies much more than Victorian-era architecture. Alice

SF HERITAGE

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The Haas-Lilienthal House survived the 1906 earthquake and fires that destroyed much of San Francisco. It survived the Great Depression that ruined many wealthy families and the 1989 earthquake that caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage in the Bay Area. Now, the plan is to survive the pandemic of 2020.

As of press time, house tours, private events, and special programs had all been canceled, and it was unclear when the site would be reopened to the public. “The outlook is very uncertain,” says Buhler.

Until the pandemic hit, the site’s public programs were bringing in a wider audience, he adds. In a 2018 partnership with the Joe Clockwise from left: Charles, Florine, and Alice Haas around 1890; The children’s mother, Bertha Haas; Their father, William Haas. Alice moved back into the house in 1916 with her Goode Performance Group, for example, the husband, Samuel Lilienthal, and lived there until her death in 1972. dance and theater troupe developed a show tailored to the site. “Every room had specific vignettes—theater, spoken word, and dance throughout the house,” Buhler says. “It was amazingly creative. The month-long run was completely sold Russell-Shapiro never lived there, but she visited often as a child. out and was extended.” Mayhem Mansion, an annual Halloween She remembers playing with a train set, now on display on the lowhaunted house, attracts 1,300 to 1,500 people and uses a script er level; the excitement of holiday gatherings; and sitting down to containing details about the house’s history and construction. Vic- “traditional family Sunday dinners.” torian-themed teas and balls have also been popular.

Her family succeeded, grew, and stayed proud of their roots SF Heritage has been taking advantage of the unexpected down- at the same time as they enthusiastically embraced San Frantime to provide access to the house in other ways. For example, it’s cisco. “It’s a slice of life that is worthy of being preserved for taken an existing self-guided audio tour and repositioned it as part everybody to see,” Russell-Shapiro says. “How a certain Jewof a new virtual tour complete with home movies, historic images, ish immigrant family of the era—representative of other similar and contemporary photography. (The tour is viewable on SF Heri- families—how they lived, what they valued, how they became tage’s website, sfheritage.org, and on YouTube.)

Americans.”

As it copes with the economic implications of the pandemic, the Haas-Lilienthal House benefits from its status as a mixed-use REED KARAIM is a frequent contributor to Preservation. He has written for Smithsonian, Architect, The Washproperty. SF Heritage has its offices in the upper floors and rents ington Post and other publications. His most recent book is The Winter in Anna, a novel set in North Dakota.

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Industrial Evolution An old Baltimore lithography factory becomes a source of hope for the surrounding community

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This page and previous page: Inside the office of Strong City Baltimore, a partner and tenant of the Center for Neighborhood Innovation in the old A. Hoen & Co. complex.

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When Tom Hoen was a boy in the early 1970s, he

would visit his father’s factory on school field trips. At the time, A. Hoen & Co. was the oldest lithography firm in the country.

Its massive printing presses produced everything from Topps baseball cards to the detailed maps folded into National Geographic magazine. Hoen would ride the bus with his classmates to the company’s East Baltimore plant, and very often it was his father himself, Townsend Hoen, who would greet them. He’d usher the students into the company’s buildings—which covered an entire city block—and show them around. “As soon as you’d walk in, you’d get a distinct smell of ink and paper, and see and hear these great big, loud machines going ‘ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk,’” Hoen, now 56, recalls. “What more could a 10-year-old boy want?”

But by 1981, the cacophony had stopped, silenced in part by the development of newer presses that ran faster and cheaper but arguably did not match the quality of Hoen’s. A. Hoen & Co. became yet another East Baltimore manufacturing plant to shutter, leaving the people of the surrounding neighborhoods without the well-paying jobs they had counted on for generations.

The building, as well as the Collington Square community surrounding it, deteriorated. Other businesses left, vacant rowhouses became the norm, and the drug trade flourished. By the 2000s, “vacancy and abandonment had reached extraordinary levels,” says Michael Braverman, commissioner of the city’s | SUMMER 2020

“There’s something magical about these big, old buildings in terms of how their spiritual and economic impact goes beyond square footage.” — Bill Struever

Department of Housing & Community Development.

The grim landscape of East Baltimore’s boarded-up houses and languishing Hoen building, which the city then owned, was travelers’ first view of Baltimore as they arrived on Amtrak trains from the north. The negative impression was something that particularly bothered developer Bill Struever. As a fervent city booster who had made a career of redeveloping woebegone landmarks, he took it personally.

In 2015, when he learned that the city was soliciting requests for proposals for the Hoen complex—six separate buildings encompassing roughly 83,000 square feet—his company, Cross Street Partners, and co-developer City Life Historic Properties applied. By 2016, the buildings were effectively theirs—for just $200,000.

After meetings with members of the community and Karen D. Stokes, who was then the CEO of nonprofit Strong City Baltimore, the firms decided to redevelop the Hoen campus into a neighborhood hub, filled with agencies that could address local challenges. The complex would offer job training programs, adult education, and offices for community nonprofits and researchers committed to solving Baltimore’s problems. With Strong City involved as both a nonprofit partner and the site’s first tenant, the developers dubbed the complex the Center for Neighborhood Innovation and began the formidable task of trying to recruit other renters to a decrepit property that had sat vacant for 35 years.

But Struever, whose previous firm had redeveloped the crumbling, circa-1887 American Brewery building four blocks north as a home for another community nonprofit, recognized the buildings’ potential. “There’s something magical about these big, old buildings in terms of how their spiritual and economic impact goes beyond square footage,” he says. “We saw it as a great opportunity to demonstrate the power of adaptive reuse in transforming neighborhoods.”

For years, the city has been trying to improve this section of town, selling or auctioning off hundreds of vacant houses for redevelopment and razing hundreds more. Its largest investment sits several blocks southwest of Hoen.

As many original details as possible—such as a wooden door to a walkway that connects the Stone and Ink Buildings—were left in place.

Known as East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI), the 88-acre public/private development adjacent to Johns Hopkins Hospital aims to establish a biotech hub with shops and housing at a range of prices. Other nearby develop- ect. Whereas EBDI serves as an economic engine south of the train ments include the Baltimore Food Hub, a culinary incubator sited tracks, Hoen will help drive growth north. “While there are exin a 19th-century water pumping station, and Struever’s American traordinary areas of distress, it’s poised for near-term transformaBrewery building (see sidebar on page 40). tional growth and revitalization. Our challenge is to ensure that “The Hoen building is a bull’s-eye in many ways,” says Braver- it’s done equitably and that the residents of the Collington Square man, whose agency contributed more than $1 million to the proj- community will ultimately benefit.”

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“The overriding concern was to try not to chop up the building, and to celebrate the unique character of its full length.” — Steve Ziger

Before securing $28.6 million in financing— which included almost $15 million in New Markets Tax Credits and federal historic tax credits facilitated by the National Trust Community Investment Corporation (NTCIC), as well as state historic tax credits—the developers hired Baltimore architecture firm Ziger/Snead for the redesign. In the fall of 2016, when partner Steve Ziger first toured the complex, he was taken aback by its physical state.

“You know those photos of [a temple near] Angkor Wat with all the trees growing through the ruins?” asks Ziger. “It kind of looked like that.”

The original lettering on Building No. 1, also known as the Stone Building, has been repainted.

“It was really near the tipping point of no return,” says architect Jonathan Lessem of Ziger/Snead, who served as the project 38 preservation

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manager. “It was very much overgrown. In Building No. 4, the walls had to be almost rebuilt because trees had grown into them, eating up the mortar and brick. Who is to say how much longer it would have maintained its structural stability?”

Ziger/Snead’s design called for preserving as much of the building’s historic fabric as possible. The firm left intact the massive wooden trusses and brick walls common to all the buildings, except for structures No. 5 and 6, which were made from cinder blocks in the 1960s and served as warehouses.

Building No. 3, which was really just a roof over a concrete slab, would become a central courtyard. The roof was removed, leaving a set of steel beams between buildings 2 and 4. Cross Street Partners Vice President John Renner took a particular fancy to the open space—so much so that he got married among its ruins in 2017. “There was no electricity, no running water, and no bath-

The National Trust Community Investment Corporation (NTCIC), a for-profit subsidiary of the National Trust, supported the Hoen Lithograph redevelopment project with federal historic tax credits, as well as New Markets Tax Credits. For more information, visit ntcic.com

rooms,” he says. “I didn’t think my fiancée would go for it.”

But she did, and the couple held what would be the first— and likely only—wedding on the site.

The largest structure, Building No. 1, provided the biggest design challenge for the architects: a 330-foot-long, two-story shell. “We had never done one quite like this,” says Ziger, “but it was just a spectacular opportunity. The overriding concern was to try not to chop up the building, and to celebrate the unique character of its full length.” But the team still had to make the interior functional, integrating modern systems and offices, without compromising the long views.

The architects solved the issue by tucking offices and conference rooms along the east and west perimeters of the building, while adding a mezzanine level beneath the first floor’s 17-foot-high ceilings for additional office space and equipment. That allowed the central corridor to remain wide open, preserving the grand space.

Strong City Baltimore agreed to take over the entire first floor of the structure, which developers dubbed the Stone Building. The agency, which helps other nonprofits manage their finances and hosts adult learning classes, had operated out of a patchwork of rental properties and church basements for much of its 51-year existence. By the time Struever approached Karen Stokes about Hoen, Strong City was ready to consolidate under one roof. “The attraction for us was that we saw huge potential for the neighborhood,” says Stokes, who retired in April after more than 13 years at the organization’s helm. “This used to be a thriving neighborhood; people had jobs. We are not a manufacturer, but by bringing in 400 adult learners, our staff, our community projects, we could help create a demand in the neighborhood. … How do coffee shops happen? There have to be people. We could be a catalyst for the revitalization of this place.”

The architects divided the Stone Building’s second story into spaces for two tenants. Cross Street Partners claimed one as their new headquarters; the other went to Morgan CARES, a program of Morgan State University’s Center for Urban Health Disparities Research and Innovation, which conducts community-based research on how and why health issues disproportionately affect racial minorities.

From the Stone Building’s second floor, visitors can access the second level of Building No. 2, now called the Ink Building, through an original sliding fire door and a 12-foot-long enclosed bridge. The

approximately 6,400-square-foot second story— complete with original maple floors—has been claimed by OVFX, an animation studio owned by former Baltimore Ravens football player Trevor Pryce. OVFX plans to keep the space wide open.

Half of the first floor will house City Life Community Builders, a nonprofit that runs a construction

The complex’s courtyard contains sightlines across East Biddle Street.

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

39

“The fact that it could be again a hub of commercial activity and training for the community is just fantastic.” —Tom Hoen

and scientific illustrations. In the 19th century, its maps helped set the boundaries between Canada and the United States, as well as detailing explorer John C. Frémont’s expeditions to the American West. In the 20th century, A. Hoen & Co. printed everything from can labels to theatrical broadsides to anatomy posters for Johns Hopkins’ medical school.

After the company’s demise in 1981, scavengers stripped its buildings of anything of value, including copper pieces from the hulking power transformers in Building No. 4. That caused a leak of PCB chemicals that had to be remediated before construction began. While jackhammering the building’s concrete floor, workers unearthed hundreds of lithographic stones used as backfill. Renner says some of those stones, as well as other artifacts found in the The Hoen Lithograph complex wasn’t the first abandoned building abandoned property—various prints, original developer Bill Struever had rescued in East Baltimore. In 2009, wooden storage boxes, and other materials— Struever’s former firm, Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, completed will be housed in a small museum within the work on the American Brewery Building, the 1887 former home of the Stone Building’s lobby.

J.F. Wiessner & Sons Brewing Company. Teaming with architecture Another artifact from Building No. 4 that firm Cho Benn Holback (now owned by Quinn Evans Architects), the workers were able to salvage was the furcompany transformed the derelict, five-story building into a stately nace’s enormous iron facade. The 12-foot-tall, 3,000-pound behemoth was hauled from the headquarters for Humanim, powerhouse to an adjacent space. Eventually, a nonprofit that works to it will be preserved and displayed under the promote economic and guidance of architecture firm Frederick Ward social equity in underserved Associates, which is designing the interiors of communities.

Buildings 4, 5, and 6 for the Greater Baltimore The adaptive reuse project chapter of Associated Builders and Contracwas partially financed with tors (ABC). The trade association and training a $375,000 loan from the organization will have its offices in No. 4, while National Trust Loan Fund; the Nos. 5 and 6 will house its training facility for subsidiary that managed this the construction trades. fund has since been dissolved.

Like Strong City, ABC Greater Baltimore was looking to consolidate its operations in The National Trust Community one location after years in the suburbs. “I got a Investment Corporation also message from Bill Struever, urging me to take a provided $5.4 million in historic and New Markets tax credit equity. look at the property,” recalls the organization’s The American Brewery Building has garnered numerous awards president, Mike Henderson. “I drove down from preservation groups, including the National Trust, Baltimore there, took one look and thought, ‘There’s no Heritage, and the Maryland Historical Trust. way we’re moving here.’ It was surrounded by shuttered rowhouses. It was overgrown with trees. It was not a nice-looking place. But Bill is a great visionary, a mad-scientist guy who sees The company dates to 1835, after German immigrants August thriving businesses in communities that others don’t.”

Hoen and his relative Edward Weber brought with them a unique ABC hopes to acquire some of the neighborhood’s vacant rowlithographic process. The method—invented by another German, houses and allow its apprentices to apply what they’ve learned in Alois Senefelder—enabled artists to draw directly on lithographic helping fix them up. It would be a win-win both for trainees and the stone while applying a special ink to produce their prints, eliminat- neighborhood, says Henderson.

Opposite: The long ing the need for tedious, expensive engraving. August Hoen and his That’s welcome news to teaching assisexpanses inside son Albert continued to improve on the process over the years, and tant Tiffany Turner, who has lived in CollinBuilding No. 1 the company won a reputation for its finely detailed cartographic gton Square her entire life. The 33-year-old, remain intact.

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| SUMMER 2020

PAUL BURK

training program for individuals from distressed neighborhoods who have never worked before or who are returning to the workforce after incarceration.

Building No. 4 served as the powerhouse for the campus. Here, a massive coal-fired furnace supplied power for the complex’s first occupant, the Baxter Electric Manufacturing and Motor Company, which built engines for street cars beginning in 1885.

From 1898 to 1902, the Bagby Furniture Co. produced fine wooden desks and other furniture on the property. Then A. Hoen & Co. moved its printing presses here in 1902 after a fire at its downtown Baltimore location.

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

41

who works at a Strong City-sponsored afterschool and summer program for kids, had always known Hoen as just an ugly old building in the middle of the community. Now she thinks “it looks excellent” and hopes it’ll spur the growth of more restaurants and stores. “It’s going to make a change for the community,” she says.

“There’ll be better opportunities, better jobs. [Strong City has] a GED program in there. It’s going to help people better their lives.”

Perhaps the person most surprised by Hoen’s revival is the guy who used to visit as a kid. “I had really lost hope,” says Tom Hoen, who lives in north Baltimore and works in software development. “I just thought it was going to get knocked down, and somebody would sell the brick. They were such big buildings and in such disrepair. It’s remarkable that somebody had the vision to see how it could be done with the mix of [tenants] and finances, and make it work.”

Hoen’s one disappointment is that his father isn’t around to see Clockwise from top left: Two unfinished spaces in Building No. 1; Lithography stones found during the rehab.

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its rebirth. Townsend Hoen, who served as the company’s president for more than 15 years in the 1960s and ’70s, died in 2011. The son says his father was devastated when the family business failed, but he would have been thrilled at the building’s renewal. “He would be ecstatic to know that that building was given a rebirth, particularly with its purpose: something that will have a positive impact on the community, just like A. Hoen did. Most of the workers lived in the neighborhood. The fact that it could be again a hub of commercial activity and training for the community is just fantastic.”

As a bonus, Hoen is tickled that painters restored the original A. Hoen & Co. logo, emblazoned in big white letters on the main building’s sides and smokestack. “Friends of mine who ride the train will call me and say, ‘Hey, did you know there’s a big building down here with your name on it?’”

“Yes,” he’ll tell them. Yes, he does.

JOE SUGARMAN is a frequent contributor to Preservation and a longtime resident of Baltimore. His last story for the magazine was about the challenges faced at the National Mall’s Tidal Basin.

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QUEEN ANNE’S COUNTY Embrace the captivating sunsets that illuminate the rural landscapes, thriving Clockwise from top: A wall at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center displays all the known photos of the woman who led dozens out of slavery to freedom. Photo courtesy Dorchester Tourism; French Colonial, Ste. Genevieve. Photo courtesy VisitSteGen Tourism; Bird’s Eye View of the Chesapeake Bay—Queen Anne’s County, Gateway to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Photo by Jay Fleming; Susquehanna Museum at the Lock House in Havre de Grace, MD. Photo by Sean Simmons

HISTORIC DOWNTOWNS maritime communities, fresh local seafood and endless waterfront happenings. Outdoor adventures await you at local parks, beaches and unique bike, walking and water trails that travel through panoramic waterways and acres of pastoral landscape. Enjoy exploring quaint little shops, historic sites, museums and galleries or visit our local breweries and distilleries where you can taste the attention to detail and dedication to the craft in every glass. Relax to the sounds of live music and savor the flavors of the bay at one of our waterfront restaurants or dock bars. We invite you to experience the tranquility of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland’s Gateway to the Eastern Shore.

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MISSOURI STE. GENEVIEVE

Ready for adventure? Plan a getaway to historic Ste. Genevieve, Missouri’s Oldest Town, where you can see original 18th century French colonial architecture, explore nearby shops, wineries, golf and truly get away from it all! The perfect escape, just south of St. Louis on Interstate 55.

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ST. JOSEPH St. Joseph is a thriving community made with uncommon character for Below: Visit the annual sculpture walk in downtown St. Joseph, MO. Photo courtesy St. Joseph CVB

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VIRGINIA

LEXINGTON, BUENA VISTA & ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VA Discover Lexington—a small town with a big backyard in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Soak in the sun and scenery at Natural Bridge State Park, and along the Blue Ridge Parkway and Virginia’s Scenic James and Maury Rivers. Afterwards, savor craft brews on the Shenandoah Beerwerks Trail.

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GUASTAVINO|ITINERARY

In the Vault

SEVEN PLACES THAT SHOWCASE SPECTACULAR GUASTAVINO TILE VAULTING

by Logan Ward

Majestic Guastavino vaults grace the ceilings in the lobby of the Boston Public Library (above), designed by McKim, Mead & White, and the atrium in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at the University of California, Berkeley, designed by John Galen Howard.

ALAMY/MICHAEL FREEMAN; BART NAGEL

T

he soaring tile vaults of Rafael Guastavino and his son, Rafael Jr., grace some of America’s most iconic buildings. Yet for most of the past century, the architectural contributions of these two immigrants have gone unrecognized.

That’s changing thanks to the efforts of a few people—most notably John Ochsendorf, an MIT professor of architecture and civil and environmental engineering.

He caught what he calls “Guastavinitis” two decades ago as a Fulbright scholar in Guastavino’s home country of Spain.

Since then, Ochsendorf and others have identified more than 600 existing Guastavino projects in 30 states and six countries, as well as many that have been destroyed.

“If there’s one building that launched the career of the Guastavino family in

America, it’s the Boston Public Library,” says Ochsendorf, author of Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile. “It’s a seminal place. Without the Boston Public Library, we don’t have Guastavino coast to coast.”

When Rafael Guastavino Sr. emigrated from his home country of Spain, where he had begun to achieve success as an architect and master builder, he didn’t speak English. He also lacked connections in New York City, where he arrived in 1881. Yet by 1889 he was collaborating on the Boston Public Library with arguably the most dominant architectural firm of the day: McKim, Mead & White.

Guastavino helped the firm achieve its vision for the first large, free municipal library in the United States—a monumental building with soaring, vaulted spaces that architect Charles McKim

called a “palace for the people.”

Guastavino’s patented system was based on the principles of the tile vault, a Mediterranean technique dating to 1382 that uses thin clay tiles and plaster. His self-supporting tile arches were simultaneously lightweight, strong, and attractive—as well as fireproof, something McKim had demanded.

The original plan for the library was to plaster over the vaults’ tiles, but McKim and Guastavino realized that the exposed tiles added beauty. Guastavino had never left his structural tiles exposed before, but now he’d hit on his signature look. He employed different tile patterns throughout the library. Look for vaulted ceilings in the Guastavino Room, the Map Room Tea Lounge, and the lobby, among other spaces.

In New York City, you can find more SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

47

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GUASTAVINO|ITINERARY

ALAMY/MICHAEL FREEMAN; PENN MUSEUM

The Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Asheville, North Carolina, is the only building in the United States that the elder Guastavino designed from the ground up; The Harrison Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Museum was renovated in 2019.

than 200 existing buildings containing Guastavino vaults—Carnegie Hall, the Bronx Zoo, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, Grand Central Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. One of Manhattan’s lesser-known examples is the vaulted arcade under the approach to the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, designed and built by the R. Guastavino Company in 1909 to serve as a fruit and vegetable market.

The market closed during the Great Depression, and the space became a storehouse for snowplows and other municipal equipment. During the late 1990s, the buff-colored, herringbone-patterned tile was scrubbed clean as part of a rehabilitation that carved out a 98,000-square-foot market, retail, and restaurant complex, which includes an event space called Guastavino’s.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Museum in Philadelphia contains a trove of Guastavino vaults. Moving from the museum’s original wing, with its conventional Neoclassical interior, into the first of the Guastavino sections—the Harrison Wing, completed in 1915—visitors enter

a great rotunda housing a collection of Chinese art. “The Guastavino space is defined by revealed brick with almost no ornamentation,” says David Brownlee, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, “and you have the feeling that you’ve suddenly come into the 20th century—that you’ve entered a modern world of large, simple forms and very constrained decoration.”

But that’s just the beginning. Beneath that space is an extraordinarily shallowdomed auditorium with trapezoidal coffered vaulting and Arts and Crafts tile from the Rookwood Pottery Company in Ohio. The Coxe Wing, opened in 1926, contains two more Guastavino vaults, one supporting the other. Even more austere, this wing serves as a solemn setting for the museum’s Egyptian art.

“For my money,” Brownlee says, “that pair of spaces together represent some of the greatest Guastavino ever.”

In 1908, as he was completing work on the Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Asheville, North Carolina, Rafael Sr. died. He was 65 years old and had a grand house in nearby Black Mountain, which he built

after collaborating with architect Richard Morris Hunt on Biltmore House.

“The Basilica of Saint Lawrence is the only complete building in the country that Guastavino designed and supervised,” says Jane Rogers Vann, professor emerita of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, who gives talks on Guastavino and the Asheville basilica.

“Unlike other Guastavino buildings, the Spanish baroque design of the basilica reflects Guastavino’s own heritage.”

And what a design it was. Modeled after the 17th-century Basílica de la Virgen de los Desamparados in Guastavino’s native Valencia, the rectangular Catholic church is covered by a massive elliptical dome. Floors, ceiling, and stairs—from the foundation to the top of the twin towers— are built from tile vaulting. Guastavino donated all the tile, including decorative pieces brought from Spain, and paid for nearly half the total cost of the construction. He is buried in a ceramic tomb in the basilica’s chapel.

Like many historic churches, the Basilica of Saint Lawrence suffers from deferred maintenance issues. “It’s a local treasure SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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GUASTAVINO|ITINERARY

that I would argue has national and international significance,” Ochsendorf says.

“It’s the father’s crowning masterpiece.”

All Guastavino projects built after 1908, including some of the most iconic, were the work of Guastavino’s son, Rafael Jr., who was 8 or 9 years old when he immigrated to the United States. These include the towering Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, a revolutionary structure designed by architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and built between 1922 and 1932. Rafael Jr. worked with mosaicist Hildreth Meière, another unsung hero of American design, to create a multicolor masterpiece of ceiling art integrated into the Guastavino structural tile system. Guastavino custom-fired tile to match Meière’s designs, including the vestibule dome’s Gifts of Nature to Man 50 preservation

| SUMMER 2020

on the Plains, which features a central sun surrounded by depictions of four seasons of agricultural products. Making tile to fit the dome’s three-dimensional curves in a pre-computer age is a feat difficult to fathom.

Guastavino vaults connect to the immigrant experience at Cleveland’s West Side Market, a massive brick building completed in 1912 with an interior concourse providing room for 100 stalls.

“The West Side Market is the Ellis Island of food,” says Kathleen H. Crowther, longtime president of the Cleveland Restoration Society. Not only do the food vendors reflect Cleveland’s international diversity, but the building’s soaring ceiling resembles the vaulted ceiling Rafael Jr. built for the Ellis Island Registry Room in New York. The West Side Market is still

fulfilling its original function more than 100 years after it opened.

The Guastavino company’s work also appears in West Coast locations, including the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at the University of California, Berkeley, designed in the Beaux-Arts style by architect John Galen Howard and completed in 1907. Inside the golden oak doors, glass-capped domes tower more than 40 feet above the floor. The domes rest on steel arches and pendentives—the curved, tiled triangles of vaulting formed by the intersection of a dome with its supporting arches. The exposed beige tiles helped Howard achieve the brusque, industrial aesthetic he felt matched the character of a college of mining and engineering.

“The profession of mining has to do with the very body and bone of the earth; its process is a ruthless assault upon the bowels of the world, a contest with the crudest and most rudimentary forces,” he wrote. “There is about it something essentially elementary, something primordial; and its expression in architecture must, to be true, have something of the rude, the Cyclopean.”

Though some 600 buildings with Guastavino ceilings still stand, plenty more have been lost, in part because of a lack of appreciation. “These are unheralded figures in American architecture, first-generation immigrants who built some of the most important spaces in our country,” Ochsendorf says. “Many of us grew up in Guastavino spaces without realizing we were in Guastavino spaces.

We’re now moving closer to this being something in the public realm, where people talk about a Guastavino ceiling the same way they talk about a Tiffany stained glass window.”

HILDRETH MEIÈRE DUNN

In the vestibule dome of the Nebraska State Capitol, Guastavino vaults complement artist Hildreth Meière’s Gifts of Nature to Man on the Plains of Nebraska.

“Working with the National Trust to create a legacy of preserving places has been a joy!”

John and Frances Clausen New Canaan, CT PHOTO BY KAREN MORNEAU

Gifts of Securities, IRA Charitable Rollovers, and Charitable Gift Annuities are tax-wise tools that work for you and America’s historic places through your support of the National Trust. Contact us to learn more today!

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TRAVEL|HISTORIC TRAVEL

MARYLAND

MARYLAND

MISSISSIPPI

NEW HAMPSHIRE

PENNSYLVANIA

PENNSYLVANIA

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| SUMMER 2020

TEXAS

VERMONT

VIRGINIA

Icons of modernism. Homes to U.S. Presidents.

Historic Sites connect us with our heritage. Whether your interest is architecture, gardens, the arts, social justice, or all of them combined, visiting the National Trust’s 27 historic sites open to the public is certain to illuminate your world.

Acoma Sky City Acoma Pueblo, NM acomaskycity.org

Chesterwood Stockbridge, MA chesterwood.org

Filoli Woodside, CA filoli.org

Kykuit Tarrytown, NY hudsonvalley.org

Touro Synagogue Newport, RI tourosynagogue.org

African Meeting House & Abiel Smith School Boston, MA maah.org

Cliveden Philadelphia, PA cliveden.org

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House Alexandria, VA woodlawnpopeleighey.org

Lyndhurst Tarrytown, NY lyndhurst.org

Villa Finale San Antonio, TX villafinale.org

Oatlands Leesburg, VA oatlands.org

Woodlawn Alexandria, VA woodlawnpopeleighey.org

President Lincoln’s Cottage Washington, DC lincolncottage.org

Woodrow Wilson House Washington, DC woodrowwilsonhouse.org

African Meeting House Nantucket & Boston-Higginbotham House Nantucket, MA maah.org Belle Grove Middletown, VA bellegrove.org Brucemore Cedar Rapids, IA brucemore.org

Cooper Molera Adobe Monterey, CA www.parks.ca.gov Decatur House Washington, DC decaturhouse.org Drayton Hall Charleston, SC draytonhall.org Farnsworth House Plano, IL farnsworthhouse.org

The Gaylord Building Lockport, IL gaylordbuilding.org The Glass House New Canaan, CT theglasshouse.org Hotel de Paris Museum Georgetown, CO hoteldeparismuseum.org James Madison’s Montpelier Montpelier Station, VA montpelier.org

The Shadows New Iberia, LA shadowsontheteche.org The Tenement Museum New York, NY tenement.org

THE GLASS HOUSE PHOTO BY HARF ZIMMERMAN

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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INDIANA|AT HOME

Fabulous Prefab BOB COSCARELLI AND KAREN VALENTINE TREASURE THE FACTORY-MADE FROST HOUSE IN MICHIGAN CITY, INDIANA Interview by Chris Warren • Photography by Bob Coscarelli I MOVED TO CHICAGO from Lansing, Michigan, when I

was 20, and started working at Hedrich Blessing Photographers. From 1929 on, they documented the history of architecture—not just in Chicago, but nationally and even globally. A lot of the historic archival photos you see, especially in and around Chicago and the Frank Lloyd Wright stuff, are by photographers from Hedrich Blessing.

When I met Karen, we immediately realized we both had this passion for design, whether it was a beautifully designed pen or a beautifully designed house or interior. In fact, before I told her I loved her, I said, “I’d love to build a house with you someday.” For us, a house really was always a glass box in the woods. That’s what we wanted. We wanted our own Farnsworth House.

Our real estate agent sent us the link to this house in 2016, this incredibly Modernist house that was so striking.

And we were just like, “What is that?” We started looking at the interior photographs and we recognized all the Knoll furniture that was original to the house. We did a FaceTime walkthrough and within a week had it under contract.

We found out many months later that the house was from the Alside Homes Corp. in Akron, Ohio, which made its name by pioneering enamel-baked aluminum siding in the late 1940s. Everybody was trying to figure out how to make prefab houses for middle-class homeowners, so the company brought on this man, Emil Tessin.

Tessin was both the architect and the engineer of its prefab houses. Alside also brought on furniture and industrial designer Paul McCobb to do the kitchens and the built-ins.

Bob Coscarelli (interviewed), a commercial photographer, and Karen Valentine, a human resources consultant, in the house’s entryway with their dog, Banksy.

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AT HOME|INDIANA

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Opposite, clockwise from top left: The kitchen’s ovens, refrigerator, casework, counters, and lighting are original; Coscarelli and Valentine keep the first owner’s portrait above a Saarinen side table; More Saarinen pieces in front of a glass screen by Paul McCobb; Period-appropriate furniture surrounds the pool.

You could then buy these packages where furniture would be included.

Everyone has seen a glass box before, but this house has these bold colors mixed into that aesthetic. It was sort of International Style meets Midcentury Modernism and [artist Piet] Mondrian. What makes it even more special is that it was this beacon of Modernism and taste at an affordable level.

Robert J. Frost was a beloved pathologist in the area. The house had been built and staged in 1964. Frost and his wife, Amelia, came and looked at it and immediately fell in love. And they said, basically, “We love the house, we’ll take it.”

Alside told them, “No, we’ll find you a lot and then you can order whatever model you want and then we’ll build it there.”

Dr. Frost said, “No, we want this house.

We want this furniture and we want the lot next door, so nobody builds an ugly traditional house next to us.”

The Frosts bought the house and didn’t really change anything. Their daughter said that when they moved in, it felt like the Jetsons’ house, with clean, modern lines and built-in furniture.

We really didn’t rehab much after we bought it from the Frosts. There’s been no major change to the aesthetic of the house.

We have found all these sales materials for the houses, and there’s tons of information as to what Alside was doing and what products and materials the company was using. So every decision that we’ve made is based on historical fact and what we see in the articles and the ads about the homes.

There was wool carpeting in the main living space. We knew that, even though the house was obviously very well cared for, you just don’t want to live on 50-yearold carpeting. They also had linoleum in the kitchen, and there were different colors of carpet in the other rooms. We pulled all that up and laid terrazzo tile everywhere,

because we wanted to unify the flooring as much as possible. We saved remnants of the original carpeting and linoleum in case anyone ever wants to replicate them.

Karen, having grown up in Australia, wanted a swimming pool. We figured, it’s a prefab house, so let’s find a prefab fiberglass pool. The one we found is bright blue.

Banksy, our dog, loves it.

We also wanted the garden to be as low maintenance or no maintenance as possible. So there are lots of evergreens and a butterfly garden in the side yard. Julie deLeon, a landscape designer in Chicago, worked with us on making the Midcentury Modern-inspired garden.

What’s so nice about the yard is that the topography around the dunes here is varied. So the pool yard is actually about 4 feet lower in elevation than the house.

As you walk out toward the pool, you’re looking down at it, and the vistas are beautiful. The house sits perfectly along a north-south axis, so in the morning you get beautiful light coming in through the front. And then in the late afternoon you have a sunset filtered through all these 40-foot-tall arborvitae that are probably 50 years old now. Just being in a house and on a property that makes us feel one with nature—we pinch ourselves every day.

People seem interested in wanting to see the house and experience the house and come into the house. We’ve tried to tie any events we have here into some sort of charitable cause. We also hosted an event here last year with Eye Eaters, a series of site-specific dinner events.

We want people to be able to come in and walk through the house at their own pace. It’s fun for Karen and me to split off and take individual questions. We’ve kind of become accidental docents.

We just feel like we’re borrowing the house for a period of time. I still even have trouble saying it’s our house. I mean, really, the doctor and his wife lived here for 50 years and they’re the ones who set us up for success. That’s why the house is named after them. Their name is still on the mailbox.

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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MARKETplace

Annual Meeting of Members Going Virtual PastForward, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual conference and meeting of members, will be going virtual this fall. While this was not an easy choice to make, we’re confident it’s the right decision given the challenges being faced by all sectors of the preservation community.

This year’s conference theme of “Resilience and Relevance” will provide a platform on which we can discuss both the challenges we face and how we have adapted to meet these challenges head-on.

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The opening plenary for this year’s conference will take place at noon, Wednesday, October 28, 2020, on an online platform available through SavingPlaces.org. This will also serve as the National Trust’s annual membership meeting for the purpose of electing new members of our board of trustees (visit SavingPlaces.org/board-of-trustees after September 25, 2020, to review this year’s slate of trustee nominees).

By having a virtual event, we aim to make this year’s conference as accessible for as many people as possible. We are also building content and inviting expert speakers to ensure we’re providing practical, relevant information to meet the evolving needs of preservationists. Our priority is to make this the same high-quality event you are used to, while making sure the experience is efficient and fun.

SIGN UP FOR UPDATES!

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800-874-7848 www.erielandmark.com

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We’ll contact you as soon as details are finalized.

SavingPlaces.org/Conference #PastForward20

OUTSIDE|THE BOX

Century of Exile

HOPE CREW PROJECT HONORS HAWAIIANS QUARANTINED ON KALAUPAPA

by Dennis Hockman One of 1,200 known grave markers on Molokai’s Kalaupapa Peninsula.

L

ate last winter, just before the world was realizing the global scale of the coronavirus pandemic, a group of 14 University of Hawai'i at Hilo students completed a gravestone cleaning project with the National Trust’s Hands-On Preservation Experience (HOPE) Crew program.

In a fluke of circumstance, the goal of the project was to honor the thousands of people who were once quarantined on the remote and rugged Kalaupapa peninsula on the island of Molokai. Now a National Historical Park, the peninsula is best known as the place where approximately 8,000 residents of Hawaii diagnosed with Hansen’s disease (leprosy) were forced into isolation over more than a century. Some endured

incredibly difficult living conditions, and most spent the rest of their lives there.

Selected as the location of a leprosy settlement by King Kamehameha V in 1865, the Kalaupapa peninsula, on Molokai’s north shore, is cut off from what locals call the “topside” of the island by 2,000-foot cliffs. It remains one of Hawaii’s most isolated places. The population of permanent residents is limited to Park Service staff, state healthcare workers, and the few remaining patients who are now cured but chose to stay after living most of their lives in quarantine. “When the isolation law ended in 1969, residents were given the choice to leave,” says Kerri A. Inglis, professor

of Hawaiian & Pacific History at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo.

“But it was not easy for people to just return to their families. And when the park was established in 1980, patients who wanted to were allowed to remain.”

For the past 12 years Inglis has been taking groups of students to Kalaupapa for weeklong service trips. When the Park Service reached out to gauge her interest in having her students work with HOPE Crew there on cleaning the gravestones of Hansen’s disease patients, she jumped at the opportunity. “HOPE Crew’s objectives aligned with my desire to expose students to different career paths,” she says.

In addition to offering students hands-on training, the project immersed them in a little-known but important part of Hawaiian history.

“The history of the peninsula started with ancient Hawaiians who had a settlement there,” says Inglis. “So you have the native history layered with the arrival of Americans, the history of the people who were isolated there, and now the ongoing community layered with the national park.

The main theme through all those layers is community, resilience, resourcefulness.”

For the students, all of whom have native Hawaiian ancestry, the opportunity provided a way to honor that history and connect to their ancestors, but it also was something more. As student participant Nanea Thomas put it, “Cleaning the graves was hard work in a harsh environment, but it was very rewarding. I experienced SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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OUTSIDE|THE BOX

Clockwise from top left: Gravestones on the peninsula’s eastern shore; HOPE Crew members at work at Papaloa Cemetery; More HOPE Crew participants clean a tomb outside the historic Siloama church.

happiness in its most elevated form … the opportunity to be with the great people giving their all to this special place, to take care of the place and the ancestors. There is no other place like it in the world.”

Thomas describes Kalaupapa as “a contradictory place, of sadness and hard conditions, but of such beauty, as well. It was once a prison, but now it is a place of refuge, a piece of paradise, a place like what I imagine older Hawaiian lifestyles were like.”

The National Trust’s Molly Baker, who manages the HOPE Crew program, also noted Kalaupapa’s incongruous nature. “It is a rough place, but people made a home 60 preservation

| SUMMER 2020

of it. The residents who chose to remain are so full of joy and hope.”

Starting at around 7 a.m. each day, the HOPE Crew team got together for piko, a UH Hilo College of Hawaiian Language tradition of carefully selected songs and chants that set the tone for the day. Then they ate a group breakfast before loading up whatever supplies were needed for the work ahead. Preservation experts James “Rusty” Brenner and Jason Church, along with Baker, provided training and supervision. Brenner, of Texas Cemetery Restoration, and Church, of the National Park Service, worked side by side with Inglis and her students as they learned to clean the gravestones using the gentlest means possible.

The first step was to remove any overgrown brush and vegetation. Then the group saturated the gravestones with water before applying D/2, a biological and biodegradable cleaner. After 10 to 15 minutes, workers scrubbed away debris with a soft brush and used detail tools to

bring out lettering and carving before a final rinse with water.

At the end of the two-week project, the HOPE Crew participants accomplished more than they had set out to, cleaning not only every one of the 1,200 marked graves, but also five monuments, as well as clearing one cemetery of invasive growth.

The work, says Inglis, will help to ensure that history is not forgotten. “90 percent of people sent to Kalaupapa were native,” she says. “So almost every native Hawaiian has ancestors there. Cleaning the gravestones is honoring those people and their connection to all Hawaiians today.”

The completed project is also an acknowledgement of sacrifice. Upon returning from the isolated peninsula just as the coronavirus was emerging as a global pandemic, Inglis reflected on the people who were quarantined there.

“We know from letters that many of the patients who were taken from their families understood what they were doing by going there,” she says. “They recognized that their sacrifice was for the protection of others. We can learn from that history and should never forget it.”

MARKETplace

SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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Reservations: 800-678-8946 | HistoricHotels.org

FRENCH LICK RESORT

HISTORIC INNS OF ANNAPOLIS

GRAND HOTEL

FRENCH LICK, INDIANA Two historic hotels make one grand resort. The National Historic Landmark West Baden Springs Hotel was named America’s Best Historic Hotel by Historic Hotels of America in 2017.

Dating back to 1845, the gilded French Lick Springs Hotel is on the National Register of Historic Places. Featuring spas, casino, stables, fine dining, legendary golf and ­endless possibilities.

ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND Experience 18th-century appeal mixed with 21st-­ century convenience at the Historic Inns of Annapolis. Comprising three distinct buildings, the inns offer a refreshing mix of historic ambiance, timeless hospitality, and modern amenities in the heart of the Annapolis Historic District. Come see us and enjoy all that Maryland’s capital city has to offer.

MACKINAC ISLAND, MICHIGAN Grand Hotel is a National Historic Landmark located on beautiful Mackinac Island in northern Michigan. We invite you to sit in a rocking chair on the world’s longest porch and experience the rich traditions and historic charm that have been delighting guests since 1887.

WWW.FRENCHLICK.COM

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(888) 936-9360

(410) 263-2641

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OHEKA CASTLE

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SKYTOP LODGE

HUNTINGTON, NEW YORK A majestic French chateau-style mansion on Long Island’s famed Gold Coast and the former residence of Otto Hermann Kahn during the decadent Roaring Twenties. Today, Oheka is listed on the National Register of Historic Places boasting 32 guestrooms and suites, fine dining, a stately library, and mansion tours of the estate and gardens for guests to experience the Castle’s rich history.

BLOWING ROCK, NORTH CAROLINA Celebrating 129 years! Opened in 1891, Green Park Inn is the last of the grand manor hotels in western North Carolina. Queen Anne Victorian in style, the hotel was the most modern accommodation in the High Country when opened. Today, guests are invited to enjoy classic surroundings combined with modern amenities. ­Divide Tavern and Chestnut Grill offer ample wine and dine options.

SKYTOP, PENNSYLVANIA Live the adventure with a naturally inspired getaway at one of the most esteemed lodges in the country—Skytop. This grand historic estate features the very best in accommodations, fine dining, and limitless recreation through 5,500 pristine acres of majestic beauty nestled in the picturesque northeast mountains of Pennsylvania.

OHEKA.COM

WWW.GREENPARKINN.COM

SKYTOP.COM

(631) 659-1400

(828) 414-9230

(800) 345-7759

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The most magnificent gardens...come see how our gardens grow!

HistoricHotels.org/Gardens

THE BROADMOOR (1918)

THE INN AT MONTCHANIN VILLAGE (1799)

JEKYLL ISLAND CLUB RESORT (1887)

Colorado Springs, Colorado | The Broadmoor’s gardens cover 35 acres. The landscaping and flowering gardens, designed by the Olmsted Brothers, encourage guests to experience several different types of landscapes and the original European theme throughout the resort.

HistoricHotels.org/Broadmoor

Montchanin, Delaware | The Inn at Montchanin Village has a full-time horticulturist and its own off-site greenhouses, which provide exquisite colorful landscaping on the grounds. Plantings help define spaces and create private garden nooks for guests to enjoy.

HistoricHotels.org/Montchanin

Jekyll Island, Georgia | Whether visiting in winter or spring, the Sunken Garden maintains a distinct regal presence at the resort. Crane Cottage’s Sunken Garden is one of the most notable stops at this historic hotel with its lush trellises making the garden stand out even in winter.

HistoricHotels.org/Jekyll

FRENCH LICK RESORT (1845)

MORRIS INN AT NOTRE DAME (1952)

GRAND HOTEL (1877)

South Bend, Indiana | Morris Inn is located on the campus of the University of Notre Dame where landscapers have created numerous tulip gardens. Just steps away from the Inn’s front door, over 46,000 tulips line Notre Dame Avenue, campus sidewalks, and the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes.

HistoricHotels.org/MorrisInn

Mackinac Island, Michigan | Designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Grand Hotel’s grounds feature over 25 planted gardens that account for over 1.5 acres of maintained garden beds.

HistoricHotels.org/GrandHotel

French Lick, Indiana | French Lick Resort comprises two historic hotels, French Lick Springs Hotel, dating back to 1845, and West Baden Springs Hotel, dating back to 1902.

Between both hotels, there are over 40 different varieties of flowering perennials and 17 varieties of summer annuals planted each year.

HistoricHotels.org/FrenchLick

LA POSADA DE SANTA FE (1882)

OHEKA CASTLE (1919)

MOHONK MOUNTAIN HOUSE (1869)

Santa Fe, New Mexico | The gardens at La Posada de Santa Fe, A Tribute Portfolio Resort & Spa trace their history back to one of the original owners, Julia Staab, and the garden she planted in the late 1800s. There are many walkways for guests to explore a variety of fruit trees, walnut trees, hickory trees, elm trees, aspen trees, and cherry blossom trees.

HistoricHotels.org/LaPosada

Huntington, New York | This historic castle features French-inspired formal gardens with fountains, 10 reflecting pools, classic statuary, and tree-lined paths designed by the world-renowned Olmsted Brothers. Original gardens in the 1920s were designed by landscape designer Beatrix Ferrand.

HistoricHotels.org/OHEKA

New Paltz, New York | The formal ornamental gardens at Mohonk Mountain House, designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, were designed as the “picturesque” or “romantic style” of landscape gardening: irregular in form, with variety and boldness of composition, and a scenery of a more rugged nature.

HistoricHotels.org/Mohonk

THE HOTEL HERSHEY® (1933)

CASTLE HILL RESORT & SPA (1905)

THE AMERICAN CLUB (1918)

Hershey, Pennsylvania | Located across the street from the hotel in one of Milton S. Hershey’s legacy properties, the Hershey Gardens is a 23-acre botanical display garden that features 11 themed gardens, including a historic rose garden with 3,500 rose bushes representing 175 cultivars.

HistoricHotels.org/Hershey

Cavendish, Vermont | This elegant resort in Vermont is surrounded by beautiful gardens and the majestic pine forests of the Green Mountains. The resort’s landscaping was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

HistoricHotels.org/CastleHill

Kohler, Wisconsin | The Kohler gardens were planted in 1913 after Walter J. Kohler, Sr. traveled to Europe to study garden cities. He worked with the Olmsted Brothers to plan the green spaces that beautify the Village of Kohler and Kohler Co. campus.

HistoricHotels.org/AmericanClub SUMMER 2020 | SavingPlaces.org

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FINAL FRAME

Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens, San Clemente, California, 1927 PHOTO POSTED ON INSTAGRAM BY DANIEL J. KISER (@DANIELJKISER) ON APRIL 2, 2020

WHY THIS PLACE? I graduated in 2019 from the

Master of Architecture program at the University of Notre Dame. For my thesis project I designed a theoretical rebuilding scheme for La Casa de Maria, a spiritual retreat center in Montecito, California, that was severely damaged by the 2018 mudslides. I spent two weeks traveling around Southern California looking at other Spanish Colonial Revival houses for research and inspiration. I wanted to see what we love so much about [them] that makes us want to preserve them, while thinking about how I can take those things and use them to design new buildings.

One of the places I visited was Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens. Some of the houses 64 preservation

| SUMMER 2020

were private residences and were hard to get into, but Casa Romantica is open to the public. I loved the play of light in that space—how the hall was a little darker than the sunken, light-filled living room.

There was so much contrast between small, cozy spaces and grand, large spaces, which is lost in a lot of new houses.

Since 2009, people have been celebrating historic places that are meaningful to them by using the social media hashtag #ThisPlaceMatters. We have been publishing a selection of those places here. Out of respect for #BlackLivesMatter, we encourage National Trust supporters to instead hashtag places that are important to them using #SavingPlaces or #TellTheFullStory.

HISTORIC properties

RealEstate.SavingPlaces.org

ASPEN, CO Robin Molny designed the Ford Schumann House in 1973, after apprenticing with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949-54. The Midcentury Modern home hugs the hillside overlooking Aspen, taking advantage of stunning views of the Roaring Fork Valley and its many rocky peaks. The living room opens up completely with a long, continuous glass wall, making the extensive deck and pool an integral part of the house. With 5 bedrooms, 5.5 baths; $3,995,000. Michael Latousek, (970) 618-7768, starwoodeppley.com.

NOBLESVILLE, IN Dr. Samuel Harrell House, c. 1895.

Lovingly restored Queen Anne with 8,000 sq. ft., 4 bedrooms, and 3 baths. Stunning original 1890s decor and updated kitchen, baths, and mechanical systems. Two-bedroom apartment and office in carriage house with 8-car garage below. Quarter city block lot, close to schools, parks, and shopping; $875,000. Kurt Meyer, F.C. Tucker Company, (317) 847-9258, kurtmeyer@talktotucker.com.

BOSTON, MA Beacon Street: 1874 5-story brownstone by Peabody & Stearns in heart of Back Bay. Owner’s Frenchinfluenced 3-bedroom, 2-bath duplex features living room with Clerc & Margeridon landscape wallpaper, 12-ft. ceilings, and 3 fireplaces. Four income-producing apartments.

Office, deck, elevator, parking, and courtyard garden.

Options include a single-family home with au-pair suite.

Price upon request. Contact Douglas Miller, (617) 2764460, douglas.miller@compass.com.

UPPER MARLBORO, MD Waverly Mansion is a historic landmark and superb equestrian facility minutes to DC and Annapolis. Built in 1855 this elegant Italianate Victorian is richly appointed with high ceilings, elaborate moldings and medallions, marble mantels, original wood paneling. With rolling hills, pastoral vistas, and every amenity for the horse enthusiast, this private horse training facility is first class and Waverly Mansion is a home of rare distinction. Gary Gestson, Long & Foster, (301) 975-9500, gary@LNF.com.

TANNERSVILLE, NY Hathaway, the V. Everit Macy Estate, c. 1907 and listed on the National Register. Rare early house by famed New York society architects Delano and Aldrich. This Arts and Crafts-style estate has spectacular mountain views. The 12,000-sq. ft. house is on 200 acres in Catskills Park, 2 hours from New York City. Incredibly intact house, chestnut paneling, original finishes, fireplaces, and hardware throughout. Contact Lewis Jacobsen, Hunter Foundation, (917) 575-1302.

MILFORD, PA Built in the French Normandy style, Forest Hall was intended for use by commercial shops on the first floor and classrooms for Yale University’s forest school on the upper floors. It is at the heart of Milford Borough’s historic and commercial district 75 miles from NYC. The property consists of main building, 2 separate smaller structures and parking lot for 31 cars. Main building has 6 shop spaces on the street level. Listed on the National Register. Reggie Cheong-Leen, (646) 315-2247.

FRANKLIN, TN Meeting of the Waters, c. 1803, queen of antebellum homes in Williamson County. Built by Revolutionary War officer Thomas Hardin Perkins, this home sits at the confluence of the West Harpeth and Little Harpeth rivers on 18 acres. Home completely renovated and updated with 5,577 sq. ft., 4 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, and new kitchen. Lush gardens and early 19th century log cabin renovated as guest house. Exceptional piece of TN history. (615) 595-1885, meetingofthewaters@comcast.net.

GALVESTON, TX Spectacular John Staub designed estate custom-built in 1938 and updated 2014/15. This 5,502 sq. ft. home has 7 bedrooms, 6.5 baths with stunning updates including walnut and birch counters in the kitchen, 6 burner stove and wine cooler. With formal entry with elegant winding staircase, dining room for 24 with silk wall paneled mural, copper shingled roof and gutters. On 1.3 acres with majestic oaks; $2,100,000. Tom Galveston Real Estate, (713) 857-2309, tom@tomsgalvestonrealestate.com.

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, VA Sunnyside Farm is 111 acres in Keswick 15 minutes from Charlottesville. The 1907 American Four Square farmhouse was renovated and expanded from a design by Paul Hardin Kapp and is situated with maximum privacy. Has 9 ft. ceilings, first floor master suite, 6 fireplaces, and terrace level farm office. Pool, stables, woodworking shop and more; $1,895,000. Call Joe Samuels, Broker, at (434) 981-3322, visit www.jtsamuels. com.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA A winning combination of history, charming residence with guest cottage, and a premier location. This cabin, c. 1766, was the birthplace of the explorer Meriwether Lewis. The home has living and dining rooms, cook’s kitchen with adjacent great room, library, laundry, 3 bedrooms with private baths. Historic architectural details. Private on 2.34 acres, amidst landscaped gardens; $1,495,000. Charlotte Dammann, McLean Faulconer Inc., (434) 981-1250, cdammann@aol.com.

WARRENTON, VA Two-story hall-and-parlor style house, c. 1820-30 post-and-beam construction measuring approximately 16x28 ft. Preserved in very original condition with exceptional heart-pine floors running full length of rooms. Original staircase includes walnut baluster with heart-pine treads and risers. Original mantels, doors, and trim. Throughly photographed, numbered, identified, dismantled, and stored. Photos at Flickr.com/photos/ latchstring. Tom Thorpe, (540) 341-0102 after 5pm.

MARTINSBURG, WV Rare opportunity. Lick Run, c.

1774, on National Register and 125 acres unrestricted.

Stone Georgian 5,000 sq. ft. home, limestone barn, wonderful stone mill. Rare grouping of historic structures.

Beautiful grounds, multiple streams, waterfall, and mill race with walking path. Handsome large comfortable house, 6 bedrooms, 5 fireplaces, gourmet kitchen, second kitchen. Convenient location, near I-81; $1,600,000.

Carolyn Snyder, (304) 267-1050, www.snyderbailey.com.

HOW OU R G A R DENS GROW

French Lick, Indiana

Mohonk Mountain House (1869) New Paltz, New York

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