Special Feature
Working with Dan Kiley
by Heather Prince
Joe Karr has always felt lucky in his career and reminisced on the unique working environment of Dan Kiley’s practice. “When I started with Dan Kiley, some of my best friends and classmates were already working there. I’d just gotten out of the Army and went back to the National Park Service in Philadelphia where I’d been working before. I was working there for a couple of months and one of my former classmates, actually my roommate, Peter Ker Walker, who later became Dan Kiley’s partner, was in Vermont. He said ‘Hey, come up for a visit.’ So, I did in the early spring of 1963. I asked if Dan was looking for anybody else for the firm. Peter said yes, that Dan would like to hire a couple of people. I interviewed and I got the job! In May of 1963 I got in my little Volkswagen. It was 90 degrees in Philadelphia where I was and by the time I got to Vermont, it was only 35 degrees. I had been adding on shirts and jackets as I drove up there.” Kiley and his wife and children had originally settled in a rambling house in Vermont in 1951 and he initially ran the office out of the boathouse. Before long, the practice had taken off and the house was converted to offices. “It was an absolutely idyllic environment. The office was called Wing’s Point on a point sticking out into Lake Champlain near the little town of Charlotte. It was like Shangri-La,” commented Karr. “You had long open views of the lake, it’s about three miles wide right there, and beyond that are the Adirondack Mountains in New York. One might go down to the lake at the end of the day and each time it would have a different mood. One day it would be very still, 48
quiet and waves gently lapping. The next day stormy and dark. In winter, it would freeze over sometimes. If it was very calm, it would freeze at night and it would be a smooth sheet of ice we could push the snow off of and ice skate on. It was wonderful. Sometimes in the summer we’d get a fog combined with the golden sunlight behind the mountains. It was unbelievable.” It provided a touchstone of inspiration for Kiley and his team of young landscape architects. “Dan’s office was an old white clapboard house, and that was where we all were. We were just a group of young guys unattached to anything and anyone, so we lived a very special life in this idyllic environment. We worked very hard, into the night, sometimes four o’clock in the morning, meeting deadlines constantly. But then we’d go out and ski the next day. We swam every day at lunchtime. We played volleyball on an old tennis court. We did all kinds of sports. We were all young. We’d work hard and play hard.” Karr and the team were often on their own as Kiley’s projects took him across the country “Dan wasn’t there most of the time. He’d go on trips by train because he was afraid of flying. He would be gone for two, three weeks at a time. So, he’d call in from Chicago or New York and ask how things were going. Otherwise, we were on our own,” remembered Karr. “It was an office consisting of young fellows doing all this work. We’d do the design work, then he’d come back and make a change here or there. It was an unusual situation. We all relied on one another. There were six of us from the University of Pennsylvania and we all knew each other and
The Landscape Contractor February 2022
