Victorian summer by ACC Art Books

M AT T H E W L . B E R N A R D

VICTORIAN SUMMER

the historic houses of

BELLE HAVEN PARK greenwich, connecticut

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INTRODUCTION by Matthew Barnard

At the height of the Gilded Age (1874–1900), America’s wealthiest families, flush with profits from the North’s economic expansion after the Civil War, were able to flee the oppressive heat of their urban residences to summer resorts clustered in Newport, Southampton, Bar Harbor, and Tuxedo Park. After a season or two of lodging in these idyllic locales, many came back and built luxurious summer “cottages.” At the turn of the century, Belle Haven Park, a secluded Connecticut peninsula, was mentioned in the same breath as many of these communities, particularly Newport. By the summer of 1893, the colony of Belle Haven, less than ten years after its founding, had become so popular among the most affluent circles of New York City that a writer from Brooklyn Life Magazine profiled the Colony in a series of glowing articles in its society column throughout the 1890s: BEAUTIFUL nature has scattered many delightful places within easy access of the metropolis; but I know none where nature has been supplemented by art more charming than at Belle Haven, Conn. I had previously heard it described as the Newport of Connecticut, and had read the summer resort correspondent[s’] florid and overwrought accounts of it; but my anticipation was more than fulfilled. Belle Haven lies between

Port Chester, New York and Greenwich proper, and consists of about one hundred and sixty acres of verdant undulating land stretching to the waters of the Sound, and dotted with picturesque cottages, surrounded by velvety lawns and neat highly cultivated gardens.

And yet among the Gilded Age summer colonies, Belle Haven is almost forgotten. The reason is not so mysterious: unlike those other seats of leisure, Belle Haven is a tiny private enclave, today encompassing approximately 340 acres, which outsiders are discouraged from entering. There are no Bellevue Avenues with mansions open to tourists, as there are now in Newport, or Dune Roads to breeze down to public access beaches as there are in the Hamptons. A second reason is that Belle Haven is but one enclave within what has evolved into a large, famous, suburban town: Greenwich, Connecticut. Already known for its wealth in 1884, when Belle Haven was born, Greenwich today enjoys fresh affluence as the unofficial world capital of the hedge fund industry. From Colonial days, Greenwich had a reputation for natural beauty. Its miles of green hills, laden with fruit trees, wildflowers, and rustic stone walls, slope down to the coast of Long Island Sound. The town’s waterfront—except for

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INTRODUCTION by Matthew Barnard

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around its working harbors—had very little residential development during its early years. The original mansions that were a byproduct of the agricultural-industrial age transition were grouped along the Post Road between what is now Dearfield Drive and Old Church Road. The land that would be Belle Haven Park was exquisite pasture, set high above the waterline “like an overturned spoon,” wrote Frederick A. Hubbard in his 1913 history, Other Days In Greenwich. Townspeople would go there to picnic under the ancient oaks trees and splash their feet in the shallow springs, gazing every now and then at the panoramic views of Long Island Sound. “Horse Neck Field Point,” as the Belle Haven peninsula was historically known, was long the domain of Abraham Mead (1742–1827), a Revolutionary War captain, farmer, and gifted potter. Later the peninsula was divided, roughly in half, by his decedents: Nelson Busch (1800–1875) owned the farm that became much of Belle Haven Park, and brothers Oliver Mead (1800–1887) and Nelson Mead (1860–1929) split the rest. But the Busch and Meads farmland was too picturesque to sit undeveloped for long. In 1882, four men operating as the Belle Haven Land Company paid Busch and the Meads $46,000 for the original 200 acres of Belle Haven Park. The partners were Robert Bruce, a cotton merchant; Nathaniel Witherell, a mining speculator and smelter; A. Foster Higgins, head of the insurance giant Johnson & Higgins; and Thomas Mayo, a commercial ship captain. A sales brochure from that time informed prospective buyers: “The property on which Belle Haven is situated has recently passed into the hands of a small company of capitalists, whose intention is to develop it into a Residence Park, and who will spare no expense to make it in all respects un-equaled as a place of residence for summer or permanent location.” It’s not recorded when or how the four men set their eyes on Belle Haven, but the idea of the residential park was very much in the air. Rapid urbanization had created an interest in city planning, which in turn had provoked a craze for municipal park design. One of the greatest examples of the new city greens was Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert

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Vaux’s Central Park, constructed through the Civil War and completed in 1873. There was a new demand in country living, too, as cities were grimy with industry, crime, and disease. Malaria became an unfounded city fear in the hot summers of the 1880s. Indeed, the Belle Haven sales pitch pointed out that none of the peninsula’s previous inhabitants “has suffered in the slightest degree from malaria, chills or fever.” Railroads changed American life profoundly. Though some regional tracks had been laid back in the 1830s, with a single, balky line of track going through Greenwich by the end of 1848, the great boom came after the Civil War, quickly rendering the old, slow transportation system of rivers and canals obsolete. The railroad settled new territories, opened new markets, and nationalized the economy. The New York & New Haven Railroad was bringing Greenwich within commuting range of New York City. The Belle Haven Land Company hired Olmsted’s firm (by then he had split with Vaux) to design the new residence park. It did so with the same lyrical curves and loops, the same gas street lamps and elm trees, and the same smoothly graded roads with which Olmsted and Vaux had graced Central Park. Many of the roads in Belle Haven were completed by the summer of 1884, and by December, workers broke ground for the developments first dwellings – three spartan Shingle Style houses on Mayo Avenue for Robert Bruce. The cottages “command a fine, unobstructed view of the Sound in both directions, and a beautiful view inland from the rear of the houses,” the Greenwich Graphic wrote in June 1885. Though beautifully crafted, the Bruce cottages were modest by the standard of houses that would soon rise in Belle Haven. But they were quintessentially American. One feature that made them so was the veranda, or piazza, that casually elegant extension of the old country porch. The Victorian-era veranda, wide and long, was outfitted with tables, chairs, and hammocks. The Belle Haven verandas were exceptional beauties, with varnished wooden decking, fancy light fixtures, and decorative balustrades with turned posts. They wrapped around a house on two sides

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and often three to take advantage of the breezes off the Sound. On hot summer evenings the dinner table would be set there, under a rounded gazebo-like portion where two sides of the veranda met. Very few Belle Haven houses were built without a veranda and gazebo until about 1910 when European influence came heavily into American country house design and dictated the division between indoors and outdoors. But in 1903, architecture critic Mariana Van Rensselaer wrote, “It is hardly needful today to affirm that an American country house without a piazza is in every sense a mistake and a failure.” Bruce’s cottages were investments. He did not live in Belle Haven, but in an Italianate Revival stone mansion near the center of town overlooking Greenwich Harbor. A. Foster Higgins also refrained from setting up house in the new residence park (though he did give his daughter and son-in-law a choice parcel on Belle Haven’s waterfront called Jack’s Island and an adjoining six-acre tract on Harbor Drive). He lived on Putnam Avenue, next to Jeremiah Milbank, in a classic country villa designed by Calvert Vaux. Nathaniel Witherell and Thomas Mayo, however, lived opposite each other on Mayo Avenue. (Captain Mayo appears to have been a hands-on manager of the Belle Haven investment, and perhaps for that reason was awarded the street name.) Witherell built his house first: a dark, ominous Shingle Style cottage that was completed in 1885. From the front elevation, the house was reminiscent of a dour witches’ face. Mayo’s massive Tudor Revival, and almost equally massive carriage house, went up the next year giving it a certain storybook magic. Witherell must have admired it because within six years he’d rolled his cottage down the hill to a new lot that had been created with the addition of the 1891 land purchase of thirty more acres of Oliver Mead’s property, which filled in the developments geographic void between Mayo, Otter Rock, and Field Point Drives. This purchase allowed all the properties along the south side of Mayo Avenue to expand their lots, doubling their acreage in many cases. Witherell’s original cottage was relocated to the a new lot

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near the southwest corner of what is now Walsh Lane and Otter Rock Drive and then bought by the Ackerman family of Brooklyn. With his new lot now encompassing over five acres, Witherell built a much grander Tudor house of his own to rival Mayo’s. The addition of the Oliver Mead Farm, along with the 1887 “first addition to the Park,” which included the remaining 110 acres owned by Nelson Mead situated west of Meadow Wood Road and continued along the Byram Harbor shorefront (what is now Byram Drive, Island Lane, and Quarry Farm) brought the developments land holdings to 340 acres. Several of Belle Haven’s earliest houses were Queen Anne style. One lovely example is the still-extant “Snug Harbor” (1886), also on Mayo Avenue. The Queen Anne, though it enjoyed great popularity in the 1880s, was considered a “vernacular” style, that is, indigenous and relatively informal, requiring a builder’s skill but not necessarily an architect’s expertise. This is surprising a century and a quarter later as the Queen Anne style is still appreciated today for its romantic design rigor that encompasses the expert craftsmanship of the interiors, which even the finest houses built today rarely equal. Belle Haven’s Queen Anne’s were among the best. This is largely because they did not evolve from builders using kits and pattern books, as was common, but rather from the hand of skilled architects just before the style mavens declared the Queen Anne passé. It bears mention that Snug Harbor, the first Queen Anne house in Belle Haven, was commissioned not by a New York millionaire, but by local resident, Thomas Ritch, owner of a Greenwich quarry that (was adjacent to Belle Haven on Byram Harbor’s West side) provided granite for the Brooklyn Bridge and most of the foundation walls of the cottages built in Belle Haven. Snug Harbor’s architect was Queen Anne-specialist W. Holman Smith of New York. Although talented, he was regarded as second-tier, because first-tier Victorian architects—the “society” architects— seldom designed Queen Anne’s. The Queen Anne’s elevated cousin was the Shingle Style. Its forms and details were simpler—less frilly—than those

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1 The Heights

Mayo Avenue

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1 The Heights

Mayo Avenue

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The B ruce C ottages 1884–1885 address architects

67 Mayo Avenue and 45 Bush Avenue Fred B. White/E. G. W. Dietrich

Matt: need map in high res Robert Moffat Bruce (1822–1909) is the best known of Greenwich’s town fathers. Bruce Park, Bruce Place, and the Bruce Museum, which looks out over Greenwich Harbor and was once R. M. Bruce’s home, are all named for this exceptionally generous cotton merchant. Descended from Robert the Bruce, the medieval Scottish warrior-king, R. M. Bruce was a New York City native who maintained a winter townhouse on Madison Avenue. Little is known of Bruce’s business life. But the fact that he profited handsomely during the Civil War indicates that his cotton trade went on uninterrupted—with the bonus of inflated prices—while other Northern textile men fell on hard times. Working with Southern plantations was not illegal, strictly speaking, despite a tight web of “non-intercourse” laws. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln very quietly sanctioned bits of cotton trade, for certain approved dealers, as part of a knotty political calculus. (England and France might have felt compelled to abet the Confederacy had they been denied American cotton completely. Better to let Europe buy some cotton goods from Northern mills as a sort of release valve, Lincoln reasoned, than none at all. A naval blockade of Southern ports prevented Europe from dealing directly with the South, though British arms shipments did get through.) General Ulysses

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S. Grant objected to the limited cotton trade, arguing that it prolonged the war by allowing the South funds to buy arms. Whatever the case, R. M. Bruce was among the few well-connected Northerners permitted to profit from cotton during the war, and his good fortune rebounded to Greenwich. In addition to giving the park and the museum, Bruce gave Greenwich a new Beaux-Arts town hall on Greenwich Avenue, now a senior and arts center, and contributed the lion’s share toward the building of a new Greenwich Hospital. Though a founder of the Belle Haven Land Company, Bruce never lived in Belle Haven. His Italianate Revival Mansion, now home to the much expanded and renovated Bruce Museum, overlooked Greenwich Harbor on Steamboat Road. He did, however, build four investment cottages on Mayo Avenue, adjacent to Captain Mayo’s lot, breaking ground on three of them in December 1884 – the first houses constructed in the new residence park. The following summer, the Greenwich Graphic observed, “Mr. Bruce’s three odd, but very pretty cottages are nearly completed.” The reporter was not altogether wrong to call them odd. All were done loosely in the Queen Anne style, but without the familiar Queen Anne embellishments: no

The Bruce Cottages

The B ruce C ottages 1884–1885 address architects

67 Mayo Avenue and 45 Bush Avenue Fred B. White/E. G. W. Dietrich

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The Bruce Cottages

turrets, no finials, no turned posts or stained glass. Broad triangular gables jettied out over bay- and sash-windowed second stories, and arcaded porches that extended over the entrance drive dominated the first stories. All four cottages seem to have been painted white – another departure from Queen Anne orthodoxy. In 1884, Builder and Woodworker Magazine published elevations and plans for a “House at Greenwich, Conn.” The plans, as published, are an exact duplication of the original cottage constructed at 67 Mayo Avenue. The architect of record was Fred B. White of New York. Within three years of his graduation from Princeton in 1880, with the benefit of his plans being placed in numerous design publications, White had built more than 200 homes and cottages and had another fifty under construction by 1886 when the twenty-five-year-old died. The successor to White, after his untimely death, seems to have been his contemporary and possible friend and associate in New York, E. G. W. Dietrich (1857–1924). Dietrich was also known for his suburban houses and churches. White and Dietrich shared many similar design aesthetics and he would have been a natural to take over White’s busy practice. In the late 1890s, through the turn of the century, Dietrich would partner with Gustav Stickely, one of the early founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement. They were early contributors of their plans to the new concept of purchasing designs from plan books and later home design magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Craftsman House, which they founded and published together. The remaining three Bruce cottages (were likely built and somewhat modified by these pre-built plans offered in these publications), with their strong, straightforward massing, were typical of White/Dietrich’s oeuvre in that they studiously avoided the Queen Anne style’s flightier touches. Giving early evidence of the movement toward the increasingly popular Arts and Crafts and aesthetic movement, even Dietrich’s occasional turret seems more Romanesque than Queen Anne. Though, Dietrich’s Queen Anne’s may seem less fun than others, they age remarkably

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well, particularly in lush garden settings that accentuate the cleanness of the architect’s designs. Two of the four Bruce Cottages still exist: one on its original lot at 67 Mayo Avenue; and the other was moved one block north to 45 Bush Avenue in 1905, along with its handsome carriage house in order to enlarge the grounds and add a garage building to “As You Like It.” Of the remaining two lost cottages, another was moved to what is now 55 Bush Avenue for the expansion of the “As You Like It” gardens; it later burned down. The other was demolished along with Miss Kent’s Cottage on Mayo Avenue when a new Colonial Revival house was built on that site adjacent to the “As You Like It” garage complex at 51 Mayo Avenue in 1920.

The Bruce Cottages

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The Bruce Cottages

The interior featured a deep two-story oak paneled entrance hall with a beamed ceiling and a fireplace. An oak-carved staircase wound to the second floor. The library boasted Tiffany stained-glass windows and a hand-carved Byzantine mantel. The parlor, decorated in white and gold, had a bay window facing the five-acre ground. A billiard room, a male retreat not uncommon in turn-of-the-century mansions, was sequestered away on the third floor. There were twelve bedrooms in this house of 12,400 square feet – with an extensive servant’s kitchen and staff quarters on the lower basement level; quite a lot of space for a childless couple. The outbuildings included on the enlarged property were in the same style and included a carriage house, a coachman’s cottage, a gardener’s cottage, a storage icehouse, and an extensive greenhouse complex with a “hot water heating plant” under the potting room.

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Witherell Cottages

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Witherell Cottages

A s Y ou Li k e I t

principal owners Captain Thomas Mayo William R. H. Martin built 1886 Field Point Road at Mayo Avenue address 1905 expanded architect Dehli and Chamberlain demolished 1945

Thomas Mayo (1818–1887), a ship captain born in Maine, was the inaugural president of the Greenwich and Rye Steamboat Company, organized by William Marcy “Boss” Tweed after the Civil War to ferry passengers to and from Manhattan. In 1885, around the time he and his partners in the Belle Haven Land Co. were drumming up buyers, Mayo co-founded the Greenwich Gas & Electric Lighting Co., eventually sold to Connecticut Light & Power; meanwhile he helped start up the Greenwich Water Company with local celebrity-millionaires Elias C. Benedict, banker and confidant of Grover Cleveland, and William Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil. Though Mayo himself was clearly an astute businessman, the historical record does not make clear how he “amassed a fortune,” as his obituary in the Greenwich Graphic reports he did. Mayo’s third and final wife, Elizabeth (1846–1903), was the daughter of a prosperous old-line Greenwich farmer named Nelson Bush. It was adjacent to the site of Nelson Bush’s old gambrel-roofed house that Mayo built in 1886, the Tudor Revival “As You Like It.” Mayo put up a matching carriage house notable for its size: it was reported to be about as large as the main house. “As You Like It,” with its steep-pitched gables, tall chimneys, multiple dormers, half-timbered facade, and richly finished wooden

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interior, was a fairly typically Tudor Revival, a style just coming into fashion in the United States. It was perhaps atypical in the elaborateness of its half-timbering, which ran from top to bottom (Tudors rarely were timbered on the first story.) The interior floor plan was elaborate with extensive paneling and tracery plaster barrel vaulted ceilings. One entered the house via the porte cochere, which opened into a spectacular 32-foot-long great hall, with a two-storied well that allowed the second floor clerestory windows to flood the space with light. But architects Arne Dehli (1853–1942) and G. Howard Chamberlin (1865–1948) were adept students of authentic style. Dehli wrote several books on European architecture, including, with Chamberlain’s assistance, Norman Monuments of Palermo, a four-volume scholarly work published in 1894. Monuments was “an encouraging sign that our American architects are in some cases becoming aware of the importance … of consulting and understanding the past,” according to a reviewer in the American Journal of Archeology. Mayo died in March 1887, at age sixty-eight, having outlived two wives and a daughter. He enjoyed his new estate for only three wintry months. “As You Like It” achieved full flower under the aegis of

As You Like It

A s Y ou Li k e I t

principal owners Captain Thomas Mayo William R. H. Martin built 1886 Field Point Road at Mayo Avenue address 1905 expanded architect Dehli and Chamberlain demolished 1945

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As You Like It

and a director of American Can, Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company (now PATH), International Smelting & Refining, and many other major companies. Converse was born in Boston to Sarah Peabody Converse and James Cogswell Converse, founder of the National Tube Works. Edmund Converse earned millions for National Tube through his mechanical genius: In 1882 he patented his invention of lockjoints for water and gas tubing, an important advance in the emerging field of liquid engineering. Meanwhile, National Tube produced everything from gas and water mains to flag poles at its city-like factory in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. In 1894, when he bought Lawson Cottage, Converse was already a wealthy man, but not nearly as wealthy as he would become when he folded National Tube into U.S. Steel. Before moving into the cottage, Converse hired Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert to renovate it – though Gilbert does not appear to have altered the house significantly. We can imagine that under Converse’s ownership, perhaps, Gilbert helped create, design, and implement a new master plan. It included the expansion of the estate property in conjunction with the opportunity to purchase land in the newly opened second addition to the Belle Haven Park tract across the street at the rear of the property on Meadow Wood. During his ownership the estate grew to include a total of nine acres. Not unlike the concurrent expansion of the Conover Cottage property to the North, Converse’s original carriage house was relocated and expanded to the five-acre parcel across the street where a new garage and gardener’s cottage were also constructed adjacent to a massive terraced kitchen garden. A large greenhouse complex was then added to the former location of the original carriage house at the rear of the main property. Like Converse in his field, Gilbert was on the verge of fantastic success in his field. He would soon become one of the premier mansion architects in the United States. Among his New York City palaces are Converse’s own five-and-a-half story French Gothic townhouse at 3 East 78th Street (1899). For more on Gilbert’s other ground up

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Lawson Cottage

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Lawson Cottage

curtiss cottages t h e t o pp i n g s t a t e 1887–8

principal owners Edwin Curtiss, John Topping built 1887–8 address Otter Rock and Glenwood Drives renovated and expanded 1916 architect Unknown

Edwin Burr Curtiss (1852–1928) was a lawyer and bookseller, and later a director of A.G. Spalding Bros., the sporting goods company, which was headed by his younger brother Julian Wheeler Curtiss (1858–1944). Julian Curtiss was known in Greenwich as head of the Board of Education where, today, an elementary school is named for him. Forgotten, however, is his role in the sports life of America. He designed the first basketball with James Naismith, who, in 1891, invented the sport using a soccer ball and peach baskets. In 1892, Curtiss returned from London with $400 worth of golfing equipment—some at Spalding called the purchase “Curtiss’s folly”—and proceeded to launch an American golf boom. The same year, Julian and Edwin (with others) founded the Fairfield County Golf Club, known today as Greenwich Country Club. In 1887 and 1888, the Curtiss brothers built neighboring Shingle Style cottages overlooking what is today the Belle Haven Club, at the edge of Long Island Sound. The cottages were fairly modest, Victorian sea-side affairs, built before an air of elegance took firm hold in Belle Haven. Edwin’s house was distinguished by its massive projecting gable, on the southern elevation, that extended over a covered sleeping porch on the second and a first floor piazza

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that ended at a turreted, enclosed pergola. Julian’s, next door, had its entrance on Glenwood Drive, and was distinguished by its semicircular tower capped by a third-story balcony and a protruding a-frame piazza. Soon after moving in, the two brothers installed one of the first golf greens in Greenwich on their combined hillside lawns overlooking the Casino. Both Curtiss’s later built stately, Carrére & Hastings-designed mansions off lower Lake Avenue. In 1916, John Alexander Topping, (1860–1934) who had been renting for the season in Belle Haven since 1904 (most recently at Althea Lodge see page), bought both of the old Curtiss cottages (the Glenwood house had been previously sold in 1907 to Charles Donough) and the Reddington Cottage on Otter Rock. He combined the lots to create a six-acre estate with entrances on both Otter Rock Drive and Glenwood Drive. By then, the Ohio-born Topping was a leading iron and steel executive: president of American Sheet and Tin Plate Co., and then, for the bulk of his career, president and chairman of Republic Iron and Steel. Topping had a flair for the quotable phrase: “Never fly higher than you can roost,” he said in 1929, before the crash.

Curtiss Cottages

curtiss cottages t h e t o pp i n g s t a t e 1887–8

principal owners Edwin Curtiss, John Topping built 1887–8 address Otter Rock and Glenwood Drives renovated and expanded 1916 architect Unknown

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Curtiss Cottages

windows, a wide cone over the second-floor balcony, French arched-top and gabled dormers, dark green painted wood roof shingles, tall decorative chimneys, and the expected Queen Anne wrap-around veranda. If this sounds like a hodge-podge, it is; but so was Henry Hobson Richardson’s Watts Sherman house in Newport, which delighted in running textures and patterns up against one another. It’s sometimes said that all Queen Anne and Shingle Style houses descended from that single example. Conover Cottage’s original floor plan (pictured here) is particularly fun to examine. Among other things, it shows off Teale’s tendency toward geometric layouts: the rounded turret of the library and bedroom above; the squared bay of the drawing room (and bedroom above); and the canted bay of the dining room. The plan has a pleasing flow, as many large-roomed Victorians did (the ceilings were ten feet tall), with fireplaces arrayed around the perimeter. These fireplaces befit the Conover name in their expertly carved wooden mantels and colorful tile surrounds. All in all, Conover Cottage gave off a dark but tantalizing storybook air. Not long after J.S. Conover & Co. went out of business, Conover Cottage had a new owner: Alfred Abernethy Cowles (1845–1916), head of the Ansonia Clock and Ansonia Brass companies, the latter of which Cowles merged with other brass concerns to form American Brass. (“Ansonia” refers to the Naugatuck River Valley town, not far from New Haven, named for industrialist Anson Phelps. It was there that Phelps founded his brass works in 1844; he added the clock factory six years later.) Cowles reportedly descended from Eli Terry (1772–1852), the Henry Ford of the clock world – inventor of quality mass-produced clocks that average citizens could afford. Just before the turn of the century, Cowles put a large addition on the back of Conover Cottage – which he called “Meadowbrook Terrace.” There was a new rectangular, hip-roofed wing with an extensive loggia along with the roman brick blocked square extension created on the western elevation. These additions increased the house’s square footage by about a third. Cowles also enclosed the

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Conover Cottages

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Conover Cottages

gardener to pay a fine and â&#x20AC;&#x153;get out of town.â&#x20AC;? The surviving pictures and details of the cottage from the turn of the century (one reprinted here) are from a 1919 auction brochure describing the house as containing eighteen rooms, eleven bedrooms, and four bathrooms in the main house; a two-story, frame garage and stable that could house four cars and five horses, with living quarters for two families; and a greenhouse complex with orchards. The 3.3-acre Parke estate extended along Otter Rock Drive from Mayo Avenue to Walsh Lane. The property was subdivided in the mid 1930s and the outbuildings were demolished to make way for a French, provincial, jewel-box of a house built (1935) on the southern plot, abutting Walsh Lane. The Rushton W. Skakel family purchased the house in the 1960s, and over the years added to the house,

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almost doubling it size. As abutting neighbors subdivided their adjoining properties throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Skakel aggressively acquired the adjacent parcels to prevent in-fill houses being constructed, abutting his home. Today the former Skakel property encompasses more than four acres, which includes the carriage house for the former Nathaniel Witherell rental cottage at 68 Mayo Avenue. Through the years, E. G. W. Dietrichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s design proved surprisingly adaptable to the architectural fashion of its day. Today, Parke Cottage, which still defies easy categorization stylistically, has been restored. The 11,000-square-foot house remains on just 1.5 acres, and was last sold in 2012 for more than $10.2 million.

Parke Cottage

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Parke Cottage

G rey h urst / Wi l l o w stone

principle owner built 1889 architects Carrére & Hastings demolished 1915 221 Otter Rock Drive address built 1916 architect Henry W. Rowe

One of the more impressive sights in Belle Haven today is Willowstone, a Mediterranean Villa comparable to the Breakers in Newport, but on a smaller scale, with great arched windows perched upon a fortress like retaining wall and outcropping above the Belle Haven Club. But Willowstone was actually the second great house to occupy this dramatic site. The first was the Shingle Style Greyhurst, built for Frank Morgan Freeman in 1889. Little is known of either Freeman or his house. He was the only child of Francis Parkman Freeman (1827–1899), a stockbroker who handled the dealings of Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the three wealthiest men in American history (the other two being John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie), and who married the Commodore’s great niece. In the early 1890s Francis Parkman developed Lakewood, New Jersey as a resort town, to which he retired in 1896, leaving Frank Freeman in charge of the brokerage house. Almost every public reference to Frank, however, concerns his victories on the golf links or aboard racing yachts. He died of meningitis in 1907, before turning fifty. The Freemans were related to President Grover Cleveland, a fellow descendant of Edmund Freeman, who arrived in Massachusetts in 1635 and served as vice governor of Plymouth Colony under William Bradford.

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Frank Freeman’s gray-shingle style house in Belle Haven appears to have been an almost completely undocumented work by Carrére & Hastings, one of the most storied firms in American architecture. (This house, as well as F.P. Freeman’s house in Lakewood, appears on a comprehensive list of the firm’s projects.) John Mervin Carrére (1858–1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860–1929) began their collaboration in 1885. “Within a few years, they were among the most active prestigious firms in New York, and used that position to trumpet the new Beaux-Arts style, a debonair classicism with very heavy French accents, highly figured sculpture and grand façades and spaces,” wrote architecture historian Christopher Gray. The two studied at Le École des Beaux-Arts at the same time, though in different ateliers, and met up again in New York when both worked for McKim, Mead & White – perhaps the only Gilded Age firm of greater importance. Carrére & Hastings designed such landmarks as the New York Public Library, Henry Clay Frick House (now home to the Frick Collection), and the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., as well as several of the most glittering residences of the age. In Greenwich, they designed Gold Exchange Bank founder Elias C. Benedict’s glowing white palace on Indian Harbor, just across the water from the Belle Haven peninsula, in 1895. Benedict’s “Indian

Greyhurs t/Willows tone

G rey h urst / Wi l l o w stone

principle owner built 1889 architects Carrére & Hastings demolished 1915 221 Otter Rock Drive address built 1916 architect Henry W. Rowe

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Greyhurs t/Willows tone

Harbor” was long considered the most spectacular residence in Greenwich, and some still judge it so, though in 1938— when downsizing and “modernization” was the trend—new owners removed the third floor and the eastern wing, and demolished the sumptuous guesthouse that was occupied by their daughter and son-in-law. Hastings married Benedict’s daughter, Helen, in Greenwich in 1900. Charles F. McKim was best man, Sanford White served as an usher, and close Benedict family friend Grover Cleveland was in attendance. The union of Helen and Thomas bespeaks a sort of Gilded Age incestuousness. As in Edith Wharton’s novels, New York Society personages all knew one another, and were often tied together in multiple ways. Hastings father, the Rev. Dr. Thomas S. Hastings, was the hugely respected pastor of West Presbyterian Church on 42nd Street, whose congregants included E.C. Benedict and Standard Oil’s Henry M. Flagler, a major patron of Carrére & Hastings whose son would marry another Benedict daughter. When Carrére & Hastings designed Freeman’s house, they had been practicing together for only four years, and had not settled into the grand style for which they became famous. (But they had already designed one of their great buildings, the Ponce de León Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, for Henry M. Flagler. It was done in the Spanish Colonial Revival style.) The few surviving pictures of Greyhurst are taken from the rear elevation; they show the dark-shingled house looming above the original Belle Haven Tennis Club and its courts. Most

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Greyhurs t/Willows tone

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Greyhurs t/Willows tone

T H E casino

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that the site chosen would be the level plot opposite the residence of Mr. Curtiss.” The building was further described as “ample in size and is to be arranged with one large room and smaller ones to be used as dining rooms and for other purposes and a broad piazza will encircle the structure.” The exterior walls were covered in natural shingles and topped by a steeply hipped roof with rusticated, naturally exposed trunk-like columns supporting the broad porch creating an aesthetic that had elements of an Adirondack cottage. When the shingle style Casino was built in 1892, replacing the tennis clubhouse across the street, the founders’ now ten-year-old vision of Belle Haven Park was complete. However, the residence park still looked pretty raw with an explosion of housing construction that left great swaths of land being cleared and prepared for new foundations. Belle Haven would have its social nexus, and fittingly, William A. Boring, Edward L. Tilton, and Nathan C. Mellen—Belle Haven Park’s unofficial architects by virtue of the number of their commissions (seven, together and independently)—designed the Casino. They were awarded the commission after the Greenwich Casino Association (whose directors at the time were Belle Haven millionaires James McCutcheon, Horace A. Hutchins, Nathaniel Witherell, Charles A. Moore, and Edwin B. Curtiss) selected their design over four others. Though we call the Casino “shingle style” here because of its facing, Boring, Tilton & Mellen were not Shingle Style architects in any literal sense. Boring and Tilton hewed closely to their classical training, and thus favored the Colonial Revival style with its studious symmetry, hipped roofs, and prim white-painted balustrades. Indeed, their recently completed Colonial Revival house, Old Orchard, on Field Point Drive for industrialist Charles A. Moore bore similarities to the Casino. But the Casino’s weathered-looking shingles—instead of clapboard—were considered requisite for its seaside setting. The shingle style did, after all, harken back to old New England fisherman’s cottages, and it then became the style of choice for builders of ocean-side mansions and hotels though the early 1890s. The exterior of the Casino was casually elegant. A piazza

ran across the middle three bays of the façade, flanked by square towers with leaded glass windows. A second-story balcony extended across the piazza and out over the porte-cochere; one imagines dances in the arch-ceilinged ballroom— the only main room on the second floor—spilling out into the cool of the balcony on summer nights. Just above the roofline were three clamshell dormers that crowned the steep, hipped roof a handsome widow’s walk with a porthole window in its base – details that echoed the maritime setting. The ground floor rear façade was dominated by a large sweeping veranda (again echoed by a second-floor covered balcony) looking out over the sporting boats at anchor and Long Island Sound beyond. Inside, the ground floor was limited to only three main rooms: an entrance hall, a card room, a reading room, two fireplace nooks, a small prep-kitchen, and a boathouse. The balance of the ground floor space was allocated to a piazza running the length of the structure overlooking the harbor. This was, after all, an informal “summer house” intended to operate only during the season and its limited internal floor plan reflected that. The construction of the Casino elevated the social life of Belle Haven considerably. “In a community like this, surely there is great need of such a building, where friends and neighbors can meet socially at any time, and at intervals be amused by special entertainments” organized by the “amusement committee,” said a press report from 1892. The Casino was the main locale of an annual September horse show that would end “the season” on a festive note, as Belle Havenites and other townspeople gathered by the hundreds on the grounds opposite the Casino. The horse show debuted the year before the Casino went up, but the new building helped boost the show’s prestige to the point where The New York Times felt obligated to publish the results. The ribbon winners often bore great Gilded Age surnames like Harkness (oil), Gould (railroads), and Benedict (banking). But after several glorious summers, the tradition died – a casualty of the gaining popularity of motoring. By 1926, at the height of the Nation’s unprecedented economic prosperity, the club was reorganized, and the Land Company leased the property and it facilities to a new

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VICTORIAN SUMMER t h e h i s t o r i c h o u s e s o f b e l l e h av e n , g r e e nwi ch, con n e cti cut

At the height of the Gilded Age, America’s wealthiest families began to cluster in Newport, Southampton, Bar Harbor, and Tuxedo Park. In these idyllic locales they built luxurious summer “cottages” away from the grit and grime of New York or Boston or Philadelphia.

Title Victorian Summer: The Historic Houses of Belle Haven, Greenwich, Connecticut

The Belle Haven peninsula, in Greenwich, Connecticut, is home to one of the first and most spectacular residence parks in the country. Its development occurred rapidly, and between 1884 and 1894 Belle Haven Park was transformed from scenic pastureland set above the glistening ribbon of Long Island Sound into a bastion of Victorian luxury. Successful American magazine described the Belle Haven of 1902 as “a nonpareil spot, surpassing in beauty, while equaling in elegance, the pet of the fashionable world, Newport, and outshining Tuxedo in brilliance and gaiety” The New York Times, meanwhile, called it “the flower garden of Greenwich, and, indeed, of the whole Connecticut shore.”

Binding: Hardbound with di-cut and inset image on front

Size: 9.75” x 12” landscape Pages: 260

Publication Date: Fall 2017 ISBN: 978-1-939621-75-7 Rights World: Available Price: $80.00

Victorian Summer: The Historic Houses of Belle Haven Park, Greenwich, Connecticut focuses on that great flowering of Belle Haven, from 1884 to 1929. The 45-year span began with Robert Law Olmsted’s storied firm laying out Belle Haven’s graceful, lamp-lit streets, and continued with the Gilded Age’s most renowned architects designing masterpieces, in styles ranging from the whimsical Queen Anne to the ponderous Richardsonian Romanesque, for the illustrious movers and shakers of the day – men who raised up the Manhattan skyline, co-founded U.S. Steel, formed Nabisco, ran Standard Oil’s domestic business, and mined gold, silver, and iron ore to supply an exploding railroad industry. Victorian Summer features estate biographies – each telling the story of a house, an architect, and a predominant owner. Some of these houses are sadly gone or unrecognizably changed—though preserved here in photographs—but many shine on as brightly as ever. Together the biographies weave a portrait of the Gilded Age and its aftermath, with an emphasis on the architecture, but touching on such events as the Civil War, the industrial boom, and the sinking of the Titanic.

$80.00

ISBN: 978-1-939621-75-7 58000

9 781939 621757