“Into Detroit’s Backwater” Landscape Architecture Magazine

ROUGE RIVER

Despite cleanup efforts, land use planning, and decades of environmental advocacy, the Rouge stubbornly remains a working river.

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“ THE STREAMS OF WATER CHANNELED IN THE PIPES OF ARMILLA HAVE REMAINED IN THE POSSESSION OF NYMPHS AND NAIADS.… THEIR INVASION MAY HAVE DRIVEN OUT THE HUMAN BEINGS, OR ARMILLA MAY HAVE BEEN BUILT BY HUMANS AS A VOTIVE OFFERING TO WIN THE FAVOR OF THE NYMPHS, OFFENDED AT THE MISUSE OF THE WATERS.” —ITALO CALVINO, INVISIBLE CITIES

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INTO DETROIT’S BACKWATER

BY F. PHILIP BARASH / PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID KUKIER

ATE SUMMER, weekend, morning. The kayaks have just been unloaded from a trailer. Against the gray concrete embankment of the River Rouge, their bright liveries are surreal, a scene from the wrong movie.

Paddling down the Rouge isn’t much of a challenge—calm waters, smooth sailing. Still, it just isn’t done.

There are a dozen of us, who could be called parks nerds or thrill seekers. We slide into the kayaks and anxiously shift at the water’s edge.

On shore, Orin Gelderloos, a professor at the University of MichiganDearborn, calls us to attention. His new bicycle leans nearby. He had a princely Schwinn Continental that had carried him for four decades, but it was recently seized by his adult children out of concern for his safety.

An orientation demonstrates kayaking etiquette. An oar held up its full length means gather around. An oar held in line with the horizon, like a barbell, means stop. A finger pointed to the skies means you’ve spotted a bald eagle or a peregrine falcon.

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Gelderloos keeps his finger up and his gaze turned skyward. He is smiling. He sees a different river than we: scores of kayaks and pleasure boats, banks lined with vegetation, lagoons spanned by bicycle trails, crew shells racing by, a heron tracking the movements of its next meal.

One by one, we splash into the water. Upstream of us is an urban wild the size of a Central Park and a half, populated by soccer players, model plane enthusiasts, and a chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers by day, and by day and night, the sex trade. Farther up are 49 municipalities, hundreds of miles of tributaries, trails, middle-class backyards, muddy shallows where folks who disregard the “Do Not Eat” advisories fish for pleasure or subsistence. Downstream are drawbridges, muscular trestles covered with crude tags, railyards, docks, cement, submerged skeletons of boats shipwrecked by decades of declining fortunes; beyond that, a strait. Point the kayak to port to enter a freshwater highway that terminates at lumber-rich Duluth, Minnesota. Point to starboard to set a course toward the Saint Lawrence Seaway, out to the North Atlantic.

By a fluke of geography, Detroit is upside down. Because the arc of the Detroit River bends around the city, and because Canada’s southernmost Point Pelee peninsula sneaks in below the bend, Detroiters head south in order to cross the border of their northern neighbor. The Detroit River lends its name to the largest metropolis on its banks, but the name, like the ordinal direction, is disorienting. When European settlers arrived, they found a route that connected Lake Erie—and the Atlantic Seaboard beyond—to Lake Saint Clair and the rest of the Great Lakes system. French traders who explored these waters called them

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le détroit: “the strait.” The Detroit River is definitionally not a river, its anglicization hiding an identity crisis, a boy named Sue. In early 2018, the City of Detroit and the Detroit RiverFront Conservancy awarded the design of a 22-acre waterfront park to Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. When completed, this will be a grandiose project, of a piece with the familiar narrative of Detroit’s comeback. Like signature riverfronts around the United States, the MVVA park is a civic monument, proof positive of the city’s improving reputation, slowing depopulation, lauded creative class, and ambition. It is a monument of, and to, New Detroit. And yet, this project too turns out to be a kind of misdirection.

For every riverfront there’s a backwater. River Rouge follows the city’s westernmost border through marsh, heavy industry, and warrens of postwar housing. It flows far from the showpiece parks of downtown, extreme and remote. Polluted, dangerous, exhilarating; snaking through dockyards and half-submerged pilings and back porches; a site of forgotten history and sublimated trauma; a landscape teeming with odd characters and strange lore; a place that deserves a second look, a second chance before it, too, in the face of demographic change and accelerating development, becomes New Detroit.

LEFT

The Warrendale neighborhood of Detroit, the western end of which abuts the River Rouge.

Its affordability and access to transportation are attracting new immigrant households, and the planning firm Hector is leading a neighborhood framework plan.

We paddled unhurriedly, aided by the current. I held an annotated route map thick with the kind of detail that has cast Gelderloos as a mythical figure among generations of students. Some compare him to Henry David Thoreau or Aldo Leopold; others warn that the “class description should have included walking through swamps infested with poison ivy, being eaten alive When the glaciers receded 400 million years ago, they left a salt by mosquitoes...walking in the middle of thunderstorms.” vein beneath Detroit. On top of the deposits is the watershed His quizzes require the identification of 75 species of plants. of the River Rouge, 467 square miles of gently meandering The bow of my kayak pointed south, to Canada. branches and tributaries that drain into the fast currents of the strait. The Rouge flowed largely unchanged until 1915, when Gelderloos led his first flotilla on the Rouge in 1971. At Henry Ford bought 2,000 acres of marshlands along the main the time of the expedition, the river’s banks were not yet branch of the Rouge, upstream from the confluence with the sheathed in concrete. In canoes, Gelderloos and his team Detroit River. By then, Ford had already mastered the assembly drifted downriver, tracking patches of vegetation. Algae, line method at a factory a few miles northeast. But the River attracted to effluence from combined sewer overflows, blosRouge plant was to be on a different scale, the fulfillment of the somed in formations that he euphemistically described as philosophy that became synonymous with Ford’s name. It was “floating mats.” With the blessing of the National Science to be the world’s first fully integrated production site. Coal from Foundation (NSF), Gelderloos instructed educators from Appalachia, limestone from Rogers City, Michigan, and iron ore around the country in how to document “a glob of sewfrom Duluth would come in. Out would come automobiles. This age going down the river.” But the canoers also observed marsh was destined to become a splendid monument to modern hawks, kingfishers, and spotted sandpipers. That the NSF efficiency: the Taj Mahal, Gelderloos says, of mass production. paid attention to this obscure backwater enough to conduct national programming owed to a spectacular event that ocThe river was a necessary ally in Ford’s project. But it was curred some months earlier. The Rouge had registered on also an enemy: a shallow, capricious water that came, went, the mental map of Americans in the fall of 1969 when it and returned as it pleased. To supply the Taj with access and caught fire, sending flames 50 feet above the surface. The cooling, to carry in raw goods and dispose of waste, to ship NSF was drawn to the flames, as were others. Along with in limestone and ship out automobiles to the world, the river similar incidents across the Great Lakes region, the Rouge required discipline. It would need to be deepened, widened, fire generated public concern that culminated in the signing straightened, regulated, industrialized, engineered. of the Clean Water Act in 1972.

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The fire brought attention to other unsavory aspects of the river’s ecology. Although it was decades of industrial waste from plants and refineries along the Rouge that fed the river’s conflagration, equally concerning was the organic waste that entered the system. In the early 1970s, as the local government was negotiating with the newly formed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the establishment of a wastewater treatment facility on the Rouge, Gelderloos asked a city official about the existing primary treatment system. “Yeah, if you wanna call it that,” he remembers the official telling him. Today, even though discharges have been cut in half and significant steps have been taken in treating industrial waste, the river remains listed as an EPA Area of Concern. And so the cleanup efforts continue, along with planning and advocacy.

When I spoke with him over the winter, Gelderloos told me he was headed to a community meeting to voice opposition to a land-use decision that threatened more development, resulting in fewer permeable surfaces and additional runoff. “We’ve got an issue now, being 11 acres on sale,” he told me. “They say it’s

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‘just brambles.’ Well, it’s likely to become forested, which can mitigate 40 percent of rainfall. But we know what’s going to happen. Every 10 years, someone is going to get up at a council meeting and say, ‘My basement is being flooded.’”

Flooding remains an issue along the main branch of the Rouge. By Detroit standards, the postwar neighborhoods upstream are densely populated. Residential areas such as Warrendale and Cody Rouge are newcomers to Detroit, annexed in the 1920s and developed rapidly in the midcentury boom. As is the case around many urban watersheds, highvalue industry and housing developments sited on the river are at risk; auto headquarters, a regional shopping center, and a university campus are located in the floodplain. To mitigate the potential hazards to property, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers encased a stretch of the Rouge in a concrete chute. Its V-shaped section was meant to give floodwaters room to rise, while also driving the flow toward the Detroit River confluence.

The chute was poured in 1975. Betting conservatively, the corps

OPPOSITE

In the Riverdale neighborhood, the River Rouge runs behind this block of houses where the neighborhood’s median income is $27,000.

guaranteed it as flood-proof for 10 years. In the nearly 30 years since that guarantee expired, advocacy groups have called for a partial removal of the chute at a minimum. In its place, organizations such as Friends of the Rouge and the Rouge River Advisory Council recommend a return to soft edges and natural habitats, aligned with region-wide mitigation strategies. As part of a recent update to Ford’s River Rouge complex, for instance, a team led by William McDonough + Partners designed bioswales, green roofs, and permeable parking lots around its campus. “Vallisneria plant is growing,” Gelderloos says. “That’s a good indication. Now, the fishing birds are back—blue herons, ducks are pretty common.” Coyotes, he adds with relish, patrol the area.

Water remains an important, if often unseen, driving force for community development. The Warrendale and Cody Rouge communities, north of the industrialized portion of the main branch, are among Detroit’s most ethnically diverse. Modest houses in solid brick and hastily constructed balloon frames flank long residential blocks, sold in the 1930s and 1940s by speculators. Now, immigrants from South and Central America have moved up here by way of historically Latinx Southwest Detroit. Signs of an established Arab American diaspora are visible everywhere: Lebanese bakeries and Yemeni grocery stores are commonplace. Block clubs are likely to post meeting notices in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Rouge Park, 1,100 acres of urban wilds that grade down to the river, is the neighborhood’s backyard.

The urban planner Damon Rich, with his firm, Hector, is leading a neighborhood plan for this far-flung pocket of the city.

“We have maps from 10, 20 years after the neighborhood was annexed that show that developers were not able to put a house or store on every lot. The areas that are not developed now are as likely to have not been developed from the beginning,” Rich says. Because the neighborhood was annexed so late in Detroit’s history, its development patterns are discontinuous with the urban grid, haphazard. “The north–south streets

are traditional streets with curbs,” Rich says. “But the minor east–west streets don’t have a curb. So the stormwater is just sheeting off the street.” Unlike the heavily fortified industry of downstream neighbors, Warrendale and Cody Rouge have the improvised infrastructure of a frontier boomtown. Hector’s planning effort, which began in late 2018, will address a slate of community concerns, such as calming traffic, reviving commercial strips, and improving park facilities. But the Rouge is not on this long list. It’s a complicated relationship, Rich says. The river is “not a strong figure in people’s minds.

It’s ‘underknown.’” For residents, the Rouge registers not as a sustaining force, but as an incidental part of their parkland.

Rouge Park, he says, is out of an Italo Calvino piece—episodic, mysterious, with water at its heart.

Rich is deliberate, thorough. He named his design practice Hector in part because he knows that investigative work can be perceived as a nuisance while he circles, again and again, around intractable questions. He is quick to point out that because the planning process is still in its earliest stages, conclusions about the residents’ connections to the Rouge are premature. Still, as the plan develops, Rich tells me that a primary task will be to render Rouge Park, and the river that stitches it together, more “visible to itself first,” a case of conceptual daylighting.

Sitting high in the water, the MV Algoma Niagara was offloading its cargo of limestone at St. Marys Cement. Men who resemble miners more than sailors came up to the deck to watch the odd sight of kayakers drift alongside. The Niagara is 740 feet bow to stern and sits nearly 30 feet in the water. When fully laden, she carries 24,000 metric tons of cement: a Statue of Liberty with room to spare. Niagara’s predecessor in the trade, the MV Buffalo, was once on a routine journey when it passed another tanker that was refueling at the dock. The Buffalo’s passing created enough suction to pull the docked ship away, ripping lines and wooden pilings and igniting a devastating blaze. The Niagara was lying at the shore peacefully, but I still cleared a cautious distance from the hull. The next day, I would

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LEFT

Tugboats await maintenance and repair next to the site of the proposed Fort Street Bridge Park in the Oakwood Heights section of Detroit.

see the ship again as she maneuvered under the West Jefferson Avenue drawbridge, bound for bigger waters.

Someone raised an oar into the vertical position and we rafted up in a half circle. We would soon be passing under Interstate 75. Beneath its traffic lanes is a small green patch, invisible to drivers. In a kayak next to me, Paul Draus, a sociologist from the University of Michigan-Dearborn, extolled Forman Park’s prospects. Working with local and federal agencies, the Friends of the Rouge proposed an environmental showcase for the park, outfitting it with water treatment systems and other demonstration technologies.

I’ve never lived more than a stone’s throw from a highway. During my years in Detroit, my disreputable loft overlooked the on-ramp of a busy interchange. Later, in a Chicago apartment, elevated lanes of I-94 passed outside my bedroom windows, and the hum of interstate commerce lulled me to sleep each night. I have on occasion made the bleak joke that I expect to find eternal sleep within earshot of traffic, and if that comes to pass, I can think of no more suitable plot than Forman Park. Above it, the overpass spans the Rouge like vaults

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of a cathedral; where rows of pylons meet the ground and sink into the rising grade of the bank, they suggest the form of a concrete mausoleum.

The closest neighbors are Morton Salt and St. Marys Cement. The light is spectacular, the visitors few.

A few days later, as I traced our route onshore, I attempted to find the park again. I failed. In this part of Detroit, vistas terminate abruptly in razor wire. Roads end in sinkholes that promise if not contact with antipodes, then at least a communion with prehistoric salt flats.

In our search for the site of my future resting place, my friend David and I turned down a street of a few houses and outbuildings, as downtrodden as any, with car seats propped on the sidewalk and hoops nailed to utility posts—signifiers of habitation. The street dead-ended into an improvised barricade of potholes, children’s toys, and traffic cones. We threw the car into reverse.

of cancers and respiratory diseases among residents, who describe living on an “island” surrounded by a tempest of heavy industry. During the warm months, municipal trucks pull cisterns of water along the streets and release streams in their wake, as if dusting crops. This ritual of daily ablution This is “the Hole,” a small residential pocket in the middle of helps tamp down the particulates that otherwise saturate the 48217, Michigan’s most polluted zip code. The nickname isn’t air here. In a car, we passed these trucks on the left, driving in flattering, but it packs a great deal of information. The Hole, as the dusty lanes of opposing traffic. in “things are dark down here.” As in “doesn’t get more isolated than this.” As in “we’re buried.” But also as in “we’re dug in.” The celestial span of Interstate 75 separates the Hole from OakAs in “we’re not going anywhere.” wood Heights. The Hole’s residents are predominantly African American, whereas Oakwood Heights was a longtime enclave EPA data shows that pollution in 48217 scores more than 45 of Italian and other European immigrants. The stacks of the times the state average. Since the findings appeared nearly a Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s Detroit Refinery rise a few decade ago, subsequent reports have revealed high incidences blocks away. Marathon has been a neighbor since its founding

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LEFT

A residential block in the Delray neighborhood. In the background is an elevated section of Interstate 75 that closed in 2017 for extensive repairs after a tractor-trailer crashed into an industrial area below it.

recession, sellers were lucky to get the $40,000-plus checks for their houses, the market value of which, Draus estimates, may have been around $10,000, assuming a willing buyer. These days, Draus says, he knows of about 15 households that chose to remain in the dozen blocks of Oakwood Heights. They are not unhappy with the arrangement: Marathon, as a corporate landlord, maintains the mostly depopulated, verdant land. Private security SUVs cruise down blocks, silent after the rapture.

in the early 1930s by the industrial baron and philanthropist Max Fisher. Fisher’s name is on some of Detroit’s most refined cultural institutions, but on the Rouge, it stands for crude.

After an expansion in 2012, the plant has doubled its capacity to processing 140,000 barrels of crude oil daily.

Oakwood Heights’ proximity to Marathon was considered a liability. The Detroit Refinery is the only such facility in Michigan. Even though it boasts an impressive Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety record, a potential accident could be disastrous to a residential community directly outside the refinery’s gates. For Marathon, it is safer— and likely cheaper—to turn the neighborhood into a buffer zone. When Marathon offered Oakwood Heights residents the option to sell, most took it. Especially in the throes of a

I remember a bar on the edge of the neighborhood, at the foot of the Fort Street Bridge, its sign advertising “Fresh Booze on the Rouge.” The bar is gone now, its owner presumably decamped for more welcoming shores. The lot was temporarily used for staging a bridge construction project, and, at any rate, Oakwood Heights no longer generates foot traffic. Just up the Rouge, by the Dix Avenue Bridge, which marks Oakwood Heights’ northern border, is an institution that has withstood population shifts. It would later be called the Power Strip, but in my youth, it went by the equally evocative Chix on Dix. Marathon’s offer still stands, part of a package of cleanup and greening programs that continue to expand a buffer zone, a borderland between the refinery and the people of 48217.

But no buyout offer was made to people who live in the Hole, prompting activists to speculate that environmental justice is doled out only on one side of the racial divide.

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OPPOSITE

Marion Avenue runs parallel to the Detroit River near Belanger Park and provides access to the DTE power plant and U.S. Steel.

A quarter mile of empty lots stretch from Marathon’s fence, parallel to Oakwood Boulevard, to the edge of the Rouge, ending at the Fort Street Bridge and the parcel that once beckoned locals with fresh booze. A patch of grass that leads to a wobbly fishing pier is littered with souvenirs of sexual encounters. Across a fence is a former power station, inhabited by a recluse, and a few buildings used for maintenance of pleasure riverboats and tugs. The lot is marked by a sign announcing a new park, “coming Summer 2016.” A rendering shows families exploring a stormwater feature, bicycles parked near a bioswale, and a zigzagging boardwalk that stretches well into phase two.

For Sam Lovall, ASLA, the proposed design culminates two decades of planning, advocacy, and fund-raising.

Still, Lovall says, the new park, Fort Street Bridge Park, is “a pass-through park, not necessarily a destination.”

When the bridge is lifted, perhaps cyclists and motorists will pause in the shade here. Or perhaps an occasional hiker who attempts to conquer the length of the Iron Belle Trail, which passes through Oakwood Heights on its way to Lake Superior, will stop to rest. Or perhaps, in some remote future, sightseers from Great Lakes cruises will be tendered here from the terminal on the Detroit River,

to picnic in an urban prairie and tour the relics of industry. If landscape is a study in patience, Lovall is a master. He speaks without hurry, in a cadence of a fisherman accustomed to long days and short sentences. He first came to this site in the late 1990s, when, at the behest of a consortium of environmental and economic development organizations, he helped draft the Rouge River Gateway Master Plan. The document called for a comprehensive watershed management approach that would position River Rouge as an “amenity”: a system of riverside trails, dotted with parks and fishing piers. Twenty years later, a significant promise of the plan can finally be fulfilled. Oakwood Heights is becoming a “forest, prairie, wetland, and urban farming,” Lovall says. “The neighborhood grid would eventually go away.” With enough time, agriculture and wildlife will greet future visitors who alight at Fort Bridge Park. Meanwhile, fundraising for the first phase of Fort Bridge Park is nearly complete.

Along with partners like the Sierra Club, state agencies, and local advocates, Marathon has invested in the site. “They’re still perceived as the bad guy, but that’s changed considerably once they started to develop the site,” Lovall told me. But, I wondered, isn’t Marathon the reason that the area is uninhabitable in the first place? Lovall was silent for a few seconds. “Have you ever been to Mackinaw?” he asked, alluding to a touristy, car-free island in Lake Michigan. “Sometimes you can’t tell if you’re smelling fudge or horseshit.”

In March of 1932, a crowd of about 3,000 automotive workers mustered on this spot, at the intersection of Oakwood Boulevard and Fort Street. Not even the Taj of Industry was immune to the events precipitated by the stock market crash of 1929. Mass unemployment replaced mass production.

Hunger set in. Workers who had migrated northward, lured by the dream of automobility, now found themselves locked outside the factory gates. In the freezing temperatures of a winter day, they set off on a short march to the Rouge plant.

As they approached, Ford’s armed guards and police forces repelled the workers with fire hoses, then bullets. Five people lost their lives. For Paul Draus, this is a site of profound labor

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and environmental trauma. The so-called Hunger March “was a catalytic event,” he says. “It marked the turning of Ford’s reputation from a hero to a villain. The things that emerged from the march”—a union movement, regulation, labor rights—“are now icons of Detroit.” None is more iconic than the Detroit Industry Murals that envelop an interior courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In April of 1932, barely a month after the confrontation on the Rouge, Diego Rivera began to paint scenes of industrial progress and proletarian struggle.

The courtyard is formal, stately, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece.

Against its plaster expanse, workers make machines and

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planes, sow fields, fight wars. Sinister bosses look on. For this feat of socially subversive art, Rivera’s commission was paid by Edsel Ford.

Draus asks me to snap a picture of him across from the future park. It’s for his colleagues at the Friends of the Rouge, where he recently became a board member. We turn our kayaks perpendicular to the channel of the river, facing each other. The photograph is terrible, tilted and partially blocked by my hand.

Draus wears a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a life jacket against a backdrop of a dirt bank and a grove of trees. It looks like it

OPPOSITE

Fair Lane, completed in 1909 on the River Rouge as the home of Clara and Henry Ford, with gardens designed by Jens Jensen.

could have been taken anywhere. Nearly a century and much water has passed under the Fort Street Bridge since the Hunger March. Now, Ford Motor Company is among the funders of the Fort Street Bridge Park, where there will be signs interpreting the history of Detroit’s labor movement. Draus observes this irony as a student of history, without personal satisfaction.

Scholars of rhetoric distinguish among three kinds of irony.

Two of these—situational and verbal—describe instances where an action or utterance is the opposite of what is expected.

For instance, “Boy, the water sure is clean” is verbal irony if applied to the current state of the River Rouge. The kind of irony that makes meaning across vast stretches of time and space, that exists on the condition of perspective, is dramatic irony. It is dramatic in that it can be appreciated by spectators who benefit from critical distance, but is invisible to actors. The irony of Henry Ford’s death is of the latter kind.

blance to the industrial channel downstream. So friendly was this River Rouge, so thoroughly domestic, that on a fine day, Henry Ford could cross his lawn in robe and slippers to reach a boathouse, and embark on a leisurely errand in Callie B, his motor launch. To add a European appeal, Jensen had clad the boathouse in stone-wall cliffs that continued up toward the buildings. Twenty-six full-time gardeners maintained the grounds of Fair Lane, preserving the horizontal axes that guided the eye from the water to the manor house. Life on this Rouge was nothing like that other Rouge, three and a half miles downriver as the bird flies.

On April 6, 1947, heavy rains swelled rivers across Michigan.

The basins of the Detroit, Kalamazoo, Saginaw, and St. Clair Rivers had been inundated. Urged by snowmelt, River Rouge too would experience the worst flood in nearly half a century.

Downriver, water spread over the vast empire of coal and limestone, salt and cement. It rushed over acres of asphalt lots, steel train yards, and concrete embankments. It pushed the Rouge up, up, up. At Fair Lane, Ford’s people were frantic. Rising water had compromised on-site power generators, leaving the estate without communication or electricity. All through the following day, the staff salvaged what they could while the river advanced past the boathouse onto the lawn of the manor. Ford was distraught, but remained present and alert. By candlelight, he led his gardeners into battle against the shallow, capricious, disobedient River Rouge.

Ford prospered on land, but he profited from the rivers in his life. His vision of fully integrated production, which reached its apotheosis in the Taj on the Rouge, was conceived on the banks of another river and transferred to Detroit. Ford’s assembly line method was inspired by the meat processing plants of Armour, Swift, and others that lined the Mississippi River in East St. Louis. Production lines snaked up through plants five stories high. A hog that had the misfortune of entering the line was fated to exit it as a pile of sausages. All Ford had to do was to reverse engineer the disassembly line and locate it closer to home.

At 11:40 p.m. that night, Henry Ford was dead. The cause of death was high blood pressure, hastened by the day’s exertions.

The flood-prone marshlands of the Rouge were Ford’s enemy The river that had made him, and that he remade in his own refashioned into an ally, a triumph of engineering skill and image, had at last broken Ford’s heart. individual will. But the grounds of Fair Lane, his palatial estate, with gently sloping meadows designed by Jens Jensen, were F. PHILIP BARASH, BASED IN BOSTON, WRITES ABOUT THE CRITICAL INTERSECa bucolic refuge on the edge of a river that bore little resem- TION OF PLACES AND CULTURE. HIS E-MAIL IS BARASHFP@GMAIL.COM.

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