Levitt-ating Outdoor Tunes

Manhattan's E. 82nd St., looking down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
You can see an orange garbage truck in front of an ambulance.
And the ambulance had its lights and siren going.
The garbage collectors were in no hurry to either move aside and let the ambulance pass,
or alternatively, go down the block and double back
so the ambulance could resume its emergency response.
So as the garbage truck crawled down the block, the ambulance inched along behind,
letting its shrill siren speak its frustration.

This was the last weekend of 2024's concert series at our Levitt Pavilion here in Arlington, Texas.

Arlington's Levitt has hosted a series of live music concerts in our city's downtown district every summertime since 2008.  I used to attend them frequently, but stopped doing so a number of years ago.  

This past June, I started going again.  I'm not necessarily a fan of the music they generally host, but I have to admit:  Listening to live music outdoors can be a uniquely enjoyable experience.

That idea of providing live music outdoors was part of what led New York City philanthropists Mortimer and Mimi Levitt to begin funding venues for such concerts across the country.  Their first one was built in the 1970's, on a former town dump in affluent Westport, Connecticut, near the Levitt's summer home.  In 2003, they contributed money for overhauling Pasadena, California's historic Art-Deco bandshell.  And next came lil' ol' us, here in Arlington, where our struggling downtown needed a signature redevelopment project.

Arlington's Levitt Pavilion opened in 2008, on the site of what had been a small office building for Texas Electric Service Company.  It's across the street from city hall, and next-door to the campus of First Baptist Church.  Municipal facilities and some long-time churches were almost all that were left downtown, since ours had become like many across suburban America:  snubbed by corporate tenants who wanted massive office parks, and abandoned by shoppers who wanted air-conditioned malls.  

Still, our downtown did have a few things going for it.  Crime wasn't really a problem, for example, and we never had full-blown urban blight.  Plus, one of the largest campuses in the University of Texas system anchored the district's southwestern corner, with tens of thousands of students.  Our downtown certainly wasn't a dump, yet it lacked any notable architecture or cultural heritage sites, putting it at something of a crossroads.  Either it could continue a long, quiet slide into further irrelevancy, or it could search for an infusion of intrigue.

Perhaps a nascent notion of where it could go came from one attraction our downtown used to have:  the former Johnnie High's Country Music Revue.  It was a rather unpolished effort for musicians somewhere between amateur and almost-professional, staged from an old, faded theater.  It certainly never gave Nashville any run for its money, but it represented Arlington's first significant live-music venue.  

And its significance came when High helped "discover" LeAnn Rimes, right here in Arlington.  Not Dallas, nor Fort Worth.

High and his family were among downtown's earliest redevelopment advocates.  In fact, back in the day, I participated in a couple of community events where we locals strategized with city leaders and urban development professionals about downtown's future.  And one of those "charrettes" was held in High's banquet hall.

October 12, 2024, at Arlington's Levitt Pavilion.
The artist on stage was Braedon Barnhill.

Around that time, the Levitts were establishing their live outdoor music foundation, and Arlington landed on their radar.  I don't know how all the funding worked, but a brand-new, contemporary venue got built with considerable fanfare.  I was hoping we'd get a nostalgic-looking bandshell like Pasadena's, but what we got is larger yet relatively anonymous in its aesthetics.  On the plus side, it has a deep, elevated stage flanked by sleek, curved walls.  But it's topped with a flat, angled roof that looks merely utilitarian.  The stage is aimed directly into the setting Texas sun, meaning musicians are literally frying in rays for the first part of most evening performances. 

But that also means audiences never look into a glare... except when all of the stage lights are swirling and flashing in full brightness.

In theory, the Levitt Foundation wants each of its venues to provide at least 50 summer concerts annually for their respective communities.  However, here in Texas, summer evenings often see temperatures stay well above 90 well into the night.  So Arlington's Levitt splits up its concert season into clusters of events around Memorial Day and Labor Day, on into early October.

And here we are. 

I believe the very first concert at Arlington's Levitt, back in 2008, was actually a special fundraiser which I didn't attend.  But the next night launched their series of "free" concerts, and I was there for that one.

When Arlington's Levitt opened, I was working for an Internet technology company located downtown.  My boss, who was involved in several civic endeavors, got the contract for the pavilion's local website.  I helped work on its content with their staff, and learned some of the Levitt background that helped me understand it wasn't just a re-boot of the nostalgic, ad-hoc community bandshell.  This was a real pursuit of sustainable arts development.

For my first few concerts, I remember simply sitting on one of the concrete benches ringing the perimeter of the amphitheater's grassy lawn.  But as you can imagine, concrete gets mighty uncomfortable during a two-hour music session.  So I went out and bought a canvas camping chair just for my Levitt visits.  'Cause I don't actually do camping, y'all.  Eventually, it started to fall apart, so I got some thick string from my late grandmother's sewing kit and did a rudimentary job of stitching that chair back together.  And remarkably, it's held ever since.

After my dear father developed dementia, and his activity level began to decline, I'd have him sit in that canvas chair in our backyard, since it was better than the rickety folding chairs he and Mom had owned for decades.  But I could tell he was still uncomfortable in it, so I hunted about and bought a high-back canvas chair for him.  Since I now had two camping chairs, the both of us would often sit in our backyard, under our enormous magnolia tree, just enjoying each other's company, our view down the creek behind our house, and the lawn which Dad could no longer mow.  He'd sit there and verbalize his contentment with the tableau, and then ask whose house this was.  And I'd reply, "It's your house, Dad!  Yours and Mom's.  You own it and this is all yours."  And he'd smile and nod his head... until he'd ask the same question five minutes later.  And just as he'd repeat his question, I'd repeat my answer.  

If you've cared for a loved one with dementia, you know how that goes... On and on, right?

Those were hard years, and looking back I wonder the extent to which sitting in those chairs with Dad, and that particular "conversation" we always had, played a role in the halt of my Levitt attendance.  For a long time even after his passing, I couldn't look at those chairs in our garage without recalling his questions about someplace he should have recognized as his own.  I know there were several years I didn't even sit in them.  Perhaps it's more than coincidental that October 12, which was this past Saturday, marked the 9th anniversary of his death from full-blown Alzheimer's.  And October 12 was the last regularly-scheduled concert of this year's Levitt Arlington season.

And I took Dad's high-back canvas chair to sit in.  I can do it now without much emotion.

My Dad had been born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, just like Mortimer Levitt was.  Mortimer's father was a busker on Coney Island, which was one of my father's favorite childhood places, even if, like Mortimer, my Dad could rarely afford to pay for its legendary amusements.  For his part, Mortimer would go down to Coney Island and stand with his father outside the district's music halls and listen to the songs coming from musicians inside, but he never could afford to pay to go in and listen as a legitimate audience member.

Years later, after he made a small fortune selling custom-made shirts, Mortimer and his second wife, Austrian-born Annemarie "Mimi" Gratzinger Levitt, decided to plow their money into the arts.  At first, it was the usual stuff for wealthy New Yorkers, who had plenty of options in terms of local arts endeavors to support.  But Mortimer never could shake that feeling of exclusion he'd felt, standing on the sidewalk outside Coney Island's music halls, never being able to pay their ticket prices to get inside.

Mortimer recalled that even standing outside, he still enjoyed listening to the music.  And so when town leaders near their Connecticut place started talking about a new bandshell, the Levitts embraced the idea.  And things took off from there:  Outdoor.  Music.  That anybody can enjoy, whether they could afford to pay an entrance fee or not.

Today, the Levitt pavilions like to say they provide "free" music.  But that's not really true, is it?  Nothing is free, and especially not music by relatively professional musicians in modern, well-landscaped, and handicap-accessible venues boasting the latest high-tech amplification and lighting systems.  So the Levitt's organization provides a lot of money, and individual pavilions raise the rest they need to pay their expenses, which always includes paying the musicians they host.  The Levitts wanted their idea to not only benefit audiences, but also support musicians and their craft.

At the finale concert this past Saturday, a local Levitt staffer announced to the audience that each season here in Arlington costs well over $1 million to produce.  That's some expensive "free" music.

A group of local businesses help sponsor each evening's artist, and volunteers work the crowd about half-way through with buckets adorned with battery-powered LED lights, into which attendees are encouraged - but not mandated - to toss some bucks.  Some of the volunteers even carry a credit card scanner.  There's also a huge donation QR code on a jumbotron audience members can scan with their smartphone.  But for those who really can't afford to give anything, there's no money pressure.

I've heard quite a range of musical genres over my years of attending Levitt performances.  Lots of country-western, of course, and its multitude of sub-categories, such as Texas country, old-school country, bluegrass, and Tejano country.  I've heard R&B, Black Gospel, soul, and funk.  I've heard plain-Jane pop music, and stuff that frankly, I wouldn't know how to categorize.  Unfortunately, I've not once heard an orchestra, although some of the bands have been pretty big.

The music can tend to vary in quality, but since my personal preference tends to the classical side, I'm no expert on any of the genres presented at the Levitt.  Recently, there was one group whose vocals really didn't sound good at all, and people started leaving - including me.  But then again, although I don't chip in much, I haven't ever paid the type of cover charge most clubs or concert halls command, so I'm not complaining.

Nevertheless... maybe you're wondering why I led this essay with a photo of Manhattan's 82nd Street.

I'd been visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art before I took that picture, sometime in the late 1980's.  And if I remember correctly, even inside that massive building, we could hear a siren wailing incessantly.  Yes, there's often a siren someplace in Gotham, but its noise waxes and wanes as it moves through traffic.  This particular siren, however, had been constant for what seemed like ages.  And I discovered the noise appeared to represent a battle of wills between stubborn garbage collectors in a slow-moving truck, and a stubborn ambulance crew, who apparently thought more noise would make things better.

While I didn't know it then, I now know the Levitts actually lived on that block of 82nd Street, six doors down on the right-hand side, in an elegant townhouse that recently sold for over $11 million.  They'd lived there for decades, and during the 1970's, Mimi had become involved in historic preservation as much of their Upper East Side neighborhood was being re-zoned for high-rises.  

Interestingly, their 5-story house, while tall by suburban standards, came with 2,200 feet (roughly 22 floors) of unused "air rights".  In New York City, air rights represent a property owner's city-approved ability to construct a high-rise either on that specific site, or through a conveyance of those rights to a contiguous site, meaning there is often actual monetary value simply in the empty space above one's home.

For her part, Mimi advocated against the wholesale exploitation of such air rights.  Why?  Because they encouraged the destruction of low-rise (and often historic) properties in favor of high-rises that generally create more congestion, reduce available sunlight on the ground, and in a densely populated place like Manhattan, further dilute a neighborhood's sense of community.  After all, the more people any area attracts, the harder it gets to prevent anonymity from prevailing.

Which helps to explain one of the rationales for the Levitts' magnanimity when it comes to sponsoring "free" outdoor concert venues:  community-building.  Neither Mortimer nor Mimi were against neighborhood redevelopment - shucks, they used their music pavilions as a catalyst for neighborhood redevelopment!  That was one of the reasons Arlington had been an early benefactor from their foundation, because there wasn't really much community happening anymore in our downtown core.

By my calculations, looking back at that photo I took of 82nd Street, I'd guesstimate spacially that the garbage truck and ambulance could have been right in front of the Levitt's townhouse.  Which would have been so ironic, but in a bad way!

I had a sociology professor in college (in urban studies, no less) who bluntly explained that all noise - whether it's music we find enjoyable, or a garbage truck, or a siren - is basically sound pollution.  That is, if the perfect neutrality of sound is silence.

So imagine the cacophony to which residents of that block were subjected that day!  Talk about the complete opposite of the Levitts' aspirations of bringing communities together through live, outdoor "noise".  Where's the working together for common goals, or even learning to get along despite differences, which encapsulate the Levitts' more noble goals?  

After all, their idea works, at least to some degree.  You'll recall even I myself admit I don't particularly like all the types of music I've heard at their venue here in Arlington.  But I still willingly attend.

That garbage truck and ambulance on 82nd Street provided a noisy dissonance which runs contrary to the Levitts' point, and literally in their own front yard.  

I just hope there wasn't a patient already in that ambulance...

_____

Gilding Maine's Unexpected Oasis

My photo of the Jordan Pond Gate Lodge in Acadia National Park,
commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and built in 1932.
Acadia's gate lodges are today used for housing park staff, 
many of whom are temporary summer workers.

Have you ever heard of Mount Desert Island?

In a state full of remarkable sights, it's its own exceptional place.  Ironically, many tourists to Maine have visited it, perhaps without even realizing it.

How is that possible?  Well, for starters, its name alone can be misleading, and unexpectedly complicated.  For instance, consider how the word "desert" is normally pronounced: 

"DES-ert".  Right?  

However, for this specific place, Maine residents pronounce it "des-ERT".  Like the sweets that follow a meal's main course.

Regardless of how it's pronounced, Mount Desert Island isn't anyplace arid, like Sub-Saharan Africa.  Indeed, it could be considered something of an oasis.  It is an island, implying a locale with lots of water, with only one bridge to the mainland.  It is located in the Atlantic Ocean, along Maine's rugged coastline, a region not known for having scant precipitation.  

It's not a deserted island, either, although it's never been densely populated.  It's home to both Acadia National Park and the touristy town of Bar Harbor, which visitors tend to conflate into one grand attraction, since they're pretty intertwined geographically.  It's also been a long-time summer getaway for elites, although many grand mansions of long ago were destroyed in a 1947 forest fire.  Perhaps most surprising is its largest employer, the internationally-acclaimed research institute Jackson Labs, which since its inception has been a pioneer in cancer research, among other sophisticated biomedical endeavors.

The name of Mount Desert Island - known simply as "MDI" by locals - comes from the French explorer and cartographer Samuel de Champlain, who used the term "desert" to describe the barren crest of what has become known as Cadillac Mountain.  And it's because Champlain was French that European settlers ever since have used the French pronunciation for "desert" when pronouncing his word for the place.

Cadillac Mountain towers proudly over MDI, and is the highest point on the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.  It's literally the crown jewel not just of Acadia National Park, but of the entire island.  There are practically no trees atop Cadillac Mountain's crest - just sprawling patches of bare granite, with some scrubby bushes growing in amongst its crags.  So that explains Champlain's naming rationale.

So how did Cadillac Mountain get its name?  It wasn't named after the luxury car brand, or the Michigan town near Detroit, but another French explorer, Antoine Laumet.  But he wasn't the one who named it.  Laumet, who changed his name to Cadillac, died in 1730, and the mountain was named for him in... 1918.

Long before Europeans came to what is now called Maine, Native inhabitants from the indigenous Wabanaki people called the mountain Wapuwoc, which means "white mountain of the first light".  What's fascinating about their name is that even though they didn't have any of the European explorers' cartographic tools or expertise, Maine's Native peoples knew the mountain's geographic significance relative to astronomy.

Being swaddled below its summit by dense forests of lush trees, Green Mountain eventually became its name for two centuries' worth of European settlers.  However, during America's Gilded Age (from the 1870s to the 1900s), wealthy summer people began building palatial vacation homes there, and came to desire a name that sounded more ostentatious.  And as happens when people don't dig deep enough into history, the folklore surrounding Laumet at that time tended to ignore his more unscrupulous side.

Laumet was a French commoner who re-christened himself as French nobility after arriving in the New World.  In 1687, he married an indigenous Quebecois woman (yes, from what is now Quebec, Canada).  At that point, Laumet stretched out his name with the utterly fabricated affectation "Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac", or sometimes "Antoine de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac".  Laumet chose his affectation from the town of Cadillac-sur-Garonne, in southwestern France.  And in the New World, one's ability to research the validity of another's credentials were sorely limited.  Even if you wanted facts to be based more on truth and less on what people were willing to believe, corroborating the claims of another was far harder then than it is today.

For his part, we now know that during his tenure, Jesuit priests accused Laumet of selling alcohol to Native Americans in what became Michigan.  Laumet's French financiers accused him of swindling them.  And he imported slaves from Santo Domingo to work his lead mine in what became Missouri.  Even if these were unsubstantiated allegations, no evidence exists of Laumet ever actively seeking to rebuff them.

We don't get taught nasty stuff like this in grade school history classes, do we?

Of course, an interesting sidenote to Cadillac's legacy extends to the automobile brand that bears his name.  Cadillac, the legendary car company, started in 1902 as an offshoot of a manufacturing business originally begun by Henry Ford.  The car company's name and logo were derived from the flamboyant explorer's, since Laumet concocted his own coat of arms out of whole cloth (I think there are multiple puns there!) since he was zero percent royalty or nobility of any kind.

When it comes to old cars, how unexpected to find on MDI a bona-fide automobile museum that specializes in that industry's earliest years.  Seal Cove Auto Museum owns 48 cars and displays even more in a red metal barn in the enclave of Seal Cove, on what locals call the "quiet side" of MDI, since its the furthest away from touristy Bar Harbor.

After the turn of the 20th Century, in a frenzy similar to Silicon Valley's towards the end of that same century, there were about 1,000 car companies in the United States.  Each had been founded by a group of industrious, driven entrepreneurs (yes, the puns continue) eager to capitalize on the 1885 invention of the car by Germany's Karl Benz.  

And no, Henry Ford did not invent the automobile.  

And technically, Ford didn't invent the assembly line, either.  That was another early car guy, Ransom E. Olds, who founded Oldsmobile, a brand which was treated as kindly by General Motors as Olds' overall legacy has been.  The assembly line Olds invented was basically stationary, as workers bustled around it with their specialized parts or tasks.  What Ford invented was a streamlined version of Olds' assembly line that kept workers stationary while the line moved past them.  With Ford's improvement, work got done even faster and more efficiently - which in turn drastically lowered the price of whatever was being manufactured on the line, from automobiles to refrigerators.  

That whole period of early car manufacturing has come to be called the "Brass Era", and one look at any vehicle from about 1895 to 1920 will show you why:  Behold at all that bright, shiny yellowed metal!  What an appropriate motif to close out the Gilded Age, before the Great Depression, and before chrome, which actually is easier to maintain.

Seal Cove Auto Museum's collection of bling-gilded horseless carriages includes Olds' original claim to fame, his "Curved Dash" model.  It also has a couple of early Cadillacs, and ten Fords!  They even have an electric car from the same Brass Era company that, ironically, Henry Ford himself patronized.  You see, even though his company built millions of cars, not one of them was electric, and Ford's wife, the prominent suffragist Clara Jane Bryant Ford, was afraid of sitting atop a gasoline tank next to an internal "combustion" engine.  Which wasn't exactly an irrational concern, was it - especially back in those free-wheeling Brass Era days?  (Did you catch it?)

His wife's distrust of his products notwithstanding, Ford built a mighty empire that is reflected not just in this notable museum in Seal Cove, but in a far grander edifice in another MDI town named Seal Harbor.

(If you ever take one of the whale-watching excursions out into the Atlantic from Bar Harbor, you'll see lots of seals on rocky islands and outcroppings all along the way.  Seals are kind of a big thing in that part of Maine.)

Seal Harbor is more exclusive than Seal Cove, and has historically provided summertime shelter to Rockefellers and other industrialists, and their heirs, including the only child of Henry and Clara Bryant Ford:  Edsel.  

Edsel's wife, Eleanor Lowthian Clay, had grown up spending her summers on MDI.  Her uncle owned the popular Hudson's Department Store in Detroit, and one of his business partners was Roscoe B. Jackson, who eventually married into Eleanor's family, and also eventually ran the Hudson Motor Car Company.  While Edsel and Eleanor provided some funding, the institute on MDI that is now called Jackson Labs received most of its initial financial backing from Jackson, hence its name.  

For his part, Edsel remains best-known today as the namesake of some wildly unpopular Ford vehicles in the 1950s, but in 1925, he and Eleanor built in Seal Harbor one of MDI's most remarkable estates:  Skylands.

Today, Martha Stewart owns the property, and has called it her "favorite place".  When Skylands was constructed, most of MDI's trophy homes were rambling wood confections.  However, Edsel and Eleanor's architect, Duncan Candler, wanted another native building material instead of wood, and he chose the island's pink granite for the exterior.  Over the decades, it has weathered so marvelously that the sprawling home blends surprisingly well into its overall landscape.

And speaking of the "desert" aspect of MDI's name - and its contradiction with a typically non-arid Maine - there was that massive forest fire in 1947 which destroyed Millionaire's Row on the island's eastern shore.  Bar Harbor's fabled Gilded Age estates burned easily because they were built almost entirely of wood, and while Seal Cove fortunately escaped the conflagration, the fact that Skylands had been clad in pink granite might have provided some protection.

Still, as big as Ford family financials were back then, of all the money that has influenced MDI, what other family name comes close to matching that of the Rockefellers'?  

Maine's irony-laden oasis has been preserved as well as it's been not just because it's relatively remote.  Wealthy people may have their bad habits, but one thing wealthy people do well is protect their environment, and the natural ecosystems throughout blue-blood MDI have been righteously championed by generations of people with the money and clout sufficient for the task.  And perhaps the most prominent defender of at least his brand of habitat preservation was industrialist heir John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  

His estate, called The Eyrie, was next-door to the Fords' Skylands, and the two families were good friends.  You can say what you will about some of his more controversial pursuits, but "Junior", as he was called both respectfully and derisively, dearly loved MDI.  He aggressively lobbied for Acadia's national park designation, as well as Grand Teton's, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Yosemite's.  Junior wasn't Acadia's most ardent supporter - that was local entrepreneur and philanthropist George Dorr, who donated the land for Jackson Labs.  However, Junior purchased land and then donated it for not only Acadia, but those other national parks as well.  

Today, some people think they'd like much of that land to revert to private ownership.  And yes, at least in the case of Acadia, it's true that MDI property values are particularly high because the park commands so much of it.  But fortunately, so far, nobody seems willing to watch subdivisions and shopping centers snake their way up Cadillac Mountain.

In addition to land for Acadia, Junior gifted the island with 57 miles of carriage roads, 45 miles of which are in Acadia National Park itself.  One of my mother's uncles (by marriage), Earl Carter, was a laborer on Junior's project.  The carriage roads are for pedestrians and non-motorized vehicles, and feature 17 stone bridges.  Along more treacherous portions of Junior's trails, rows of granite stones suffice as guardrails, dubbed "Rockefeller's Teeth" from their uncanny resemblance to the real thing.

Isn't it odd that for a mountain with a name closely associated with a luxury motorized automobile, the park's most influential benefactor didn't want any cars - Cadillacs or otherwise - on his roads?  Initially, Junior was so adamant about keeping his roads free of motorized vehicles that he commissioned two picturesque gate lodges that blend into the rustic Acadia habitat.  Actual gatekeepers were supposed to live in these buildings to ensure cars would be stopped, but that never happened.

The photo above is of Rockefeller's gate lodge near the Jordan Pond House, a favored Acadia rest area next to... the scenic Jordan Pond.  There really was an original Jordan Pond House, a restaurant built in the 1870s which became popular with MDI's society folks, including Junior, who eventually bought it for the park.  It burned in 1979, and its replacement structure includes a gift shop and expanded restroom facilities in relatively anonymous quarters that hardly match Junior's pseudo-country-French aesthetic.  But they still serve the historic kitchen's signature popovers, and they are a genuine treat.  

Just don't dip your feet into Jordan Pond itself - it's not just picturesque; it's the town water supply for Seal Harbor.  What would Martha say...?

And yeah, that pseudo-country-French aesthetic for Junior's gate lodges... Junior and his architect, Grosvenor Atterbury, had settled on a type of medieval French Romanesque style to honor MDI's connection with historic France.  After all, each of the three modern names given to what became Junior's Maine park had connections with French colonialism, from Sieur de Mons, to Lafayette, to Acadia.

But let's not start with those names again.

Suffice it to say that regardless of what they're called, or why they're called what they're called today, Mount Desert Island, Cadillac Mountain, and Acadia National Park are well worth the visit.  And if you don't own one, maybe you could rent a Cadillac for the trip.  

Or even a Ford.  A classic Edsel would certainly be apropos.

And please - have an extra popover for me, without jam.

You'll probably get jam of another sort anyway - if you drive back through downtown Bar Harbor...

_____

What's Wright About a Lost House

 
Mid-Century Modernism.  In our acronym-focused world, it's now called "MCM".  

For most of my life, I have lived in a one-story MCM house.  Considering its age and style, our "3-2-2" is average in most aspects, and for my family, that has suited us just fine.

For Americans in general, however, up until recently, the style of our dwelling has not been especially desirable.  It does look dated - straight from the 1950s - and that look apparently was most popular... back in the 1950s!  It also isn't 2-story, which has been trendy for a while.  However, as nostalgia can't help but recirculate designs and themes from times gone by, MCM has enjoyed something of a renaissance lately.

Its heyday ran from the early 1950s through the middle of the 1960s, hence its name.  Because it evolved during post-war America's unprecedented drive into suburbia, it quickly became a favored style for builders developing the invention of the subdivision.  And the longer subdivisions have been around, the more negatively younger and younger generations view them.  

After all, trends are unsustainable - which is literally part of the definition of a trend to begin with.  For some folks, subdivisions quickly became little more than ubiquitous warrens of cookie-cutter tract houses, whether they're two-story colonials, story-and-a-half capes, or single-story ranch houses.  

And true, many suburban subdivisions haven't aged well, no matter their housing styles.

Let's stop for a moment and think about it, though.  After all, most cities are built of subdivisions, too, right?  Only that term hadn't yet been coined.  Long ago, builders sometimes constructed whole blocks of houses or apartment buildings, or maybe a few houses in a row (called "row houses" - duh).  And you have to admit:  Except for the streets of gaudy McMansions elite townies once built for themselves (before they were derisively called "McMansions"), those projects looked cookie-cutter, too.  And they all aged over time - some worse than others.  For decades, even in the best central-city neighborhoods, brownstones and row houses were the housing styles owners were fleeing.  So urbanists who like to scoff at suburbia really can't grouse about subdivisions.  Builders have historically erected whatever they can at the lowest possible price point, whether it's high-density or cookie-cutter or urban or otherwise.

At any rate, not all suburban housing is as bland and dismal as urbane sophisticates like to imagine it as being.  I'll admit my family's longtime home in Arlington, Texas - between Dallas and Fort Worth - doesn't feature an award-winning design, but it's not a tract house, either.  Its floorplan is unique.  It was constructed in the late 1950s by a prominent local builder named Happy King as his personal family's home.  At around 1,700 square feet, it's not large by today's standards, but it features some notable MCM design cues such as a large, open kitchen and two living areas that flow into each other.  Our patio door is about double the width of most, and opens onto wide concrete steps leading down to an expansive patio.  

Like many cities developed during suburbanization's early years, Arlington has a number of subdivisions with MCM homes.  Some of those homes are quite large, and most are smaller than ours.  Many of them have been updated over the years with unfortunate additions and other changes that have diluted and often destroyed their original MCM aesthetics.  But ours has stayed relatively the same, even down to its pocket sliding doors all along its one central hallway.

Unfortunately, one of the most exquisite MCM specimens ever built in Arlington was destroyed by the city a couple of years ago.  The Curtis Mathes house was in a subdivision dubbed "Meadow Oaks," about a mile east of our house.  It sat along the same waterway, Johnson Creek, that also runs through our backyard.  Over the decades, as Arlington expanded from a humble railroad stop to a city of over 400,000 people, storm water runoff has been directed into Johnson Creek at rates that overwhelm it during most storms.  The Mathes house never flooded, but the city decided to take it anyway as part of broader plans for a future linear park.  So all we have of it today are memories and photographs.

It's known for being the home of Curtis Mathes, a name shared by both a father and a son from a family known for manufacturing color television sets, components for Cadillac automobiles, and other electronics.  Curtis "junior" was tragically killed along with 22 other passengers in a bizarre fire aboard an Air Canada jet in 1983 at the Cincinnati airport, a pivotal event in aviation safety which led to several new requirements, including streamlined emergency evacuation procedures.  A remnant of the Mathes company now sells grow lamps specifically for cannabis plants.  They've even partnered with our local college, the University of Texas at Arlington, in studies exploring future uses for cannabis other than, um, "recreational". 

While it's unclear how long Curtis "junior" himself owned the house generally ascribed to him, or how long his sister owned it after his death, or their heirs after them, the property is nevertheless understood to be an architectural legacy of a unique business empire.  

Jane Mathes Kelton was Curtis' sister, and a philanthropic entrepreneur in her own right.  She spit her time between this house and another one in Costa Rica.  Jane commissioned the towering stone sculptures, Caelum Moor, that today grace an Arlington park near stadiums hosting the NFL's Dallas Cowboys and MLB's Texas Rangers.  Coincidentally, Johnson Creek also runs through that park.  Jane's company later developed a sprawling retail corridor along I-20, between Matlock and Center streets.  She named it "Arlington Highlands" in honor of her family's Scottish ancestry.

Built in 1952, the Mathes house had an address of 925 Meadow Oaks, and its last Zillow real estate listing can be found here.  It offered four bedrooms, five bathrooms, and before getting torn down had been expanded over the years to over 4,700 square feet of living space on 1.73 beautifully landscaped acres.

In a city mostly built in chunks of market-rate subdivisions, office parks, and shopping centers, the Mathes house represented something unexpectedly chic.  Not that its MCM design cues can't be found elsewhere in town, but the home's overall style boasted a type of restrained extravagance that the best of MCM tends to capture especially well.

Like most creative processes and philosophies, MCM's core design aesthetic represents something of an evolution of earlier patterns, trends, and standards.  America's Craftsman and Prairie styles, for example, drastically curtailed the use of extensive, elaborate Victorian decoration.  That reduction in ornamentation came to also define classic MCM.  Elements like pronounced roofing overhangs, wide and unpainted wood paneling, gracious porches and patios, and generous windows also extended through all three aesthetics.  

As he honed his career to become one of our country's greatest architects, Frank Lloyd Wright participated in both the Craftsman and Prairie styles while eventually developing his own ethos for residential design that was even more organic and minimized.  Much of the MCM aesthetic came from Wright's design philosophies, although he died mid-way through MCM's heyday.  As residential construction boomed in suburban areas with lot sizes typically larger than those in urban sites, developers discovered many principles of Wrightian aesthetics were easily exploitable for the untold numbers of ranch-style houses and split-levels they were building.

He did dabble in a sort of "tract" housing himself, which he called "Usonian" houses, but Wright's forte was customized residential commissions.  Sprawling, signature properties that were still gracious and warm.  He did not design the Mathes house, but whomever did obviously admired Wright's work.

Wright embraced contiguous living areas and generally kept bedrooms comparatively small.  Who needs a big room in which to sleep?  He disliked boxy spaces, but celebrated fireplaces and claimed the "hearth is the heart" of a home.  He wanted to bring nature and the outdoors indoors, so wide glass doors and windows - even walls of windows - became one of his design cues.  He claimed built spaces should blend in with their natural surroundings, so many of his residential structures are long and low.  He extended the Craftsman and Prairie eaves to help reinforce a sense of closeness with the ground.  He valued privacy, so would often "hide" front doors and other entryways.  All of these "Wrightian" design elements could be found throughout the Mathes house, although Wright also loved circles and irregular angles, neither of which the Mathes house incorporated.

It's not my opinion:  Plenty of biographers say Wright was an egomaniac who enjoyed flouting convention.  So I think he would have particularly admired the Mathes home's swimming pool.  Originally, the property featured a small indoor pool as part of its primary bedroom suite.  Eventually, heirs reworked the suite's bathroom and built a larger, oversized lap pool outdoors.  But not in the backyard, which would have been the conventional location for one.  You see, since the Mathes property runs along a creek, a backyard pool risked possible flooding issues.  

Knowing Arlington's municipal codes and zoning as well as I do, I imagine they had to get a waiver from city hall to do that.  They also probably had to get permission from nearby neighbors, since even today, it could be considered a controversial use of front yard space.  The family cleverly included a tall, massive stone wall in front of their pool, disguising it from the street.  That stone wall also lent to the home's dominant linear quality, and blended surprisingly well with all of the trees also screening the facade.  Fortunately for the family, their property was large enough so that plenty of lawn space still separated their private swimming oasis from the road.

Today, however, all of that is gone.  The swimming pool has been filled in and its stone wall destroyed.  Not a trace of the Mathes house remains.  Just a wellhead for the property's private freshwater source.

At this point, I could launch into a dissertation about the value of historic preservation, or at least a civic appreciation of venerable architecture and aesthetics.  Especially since good examples of original MCM are getting harder and harder to find. 

But instead, I'll simply let these photos speak for themselves.  And hope any future park the city is planning for this site looks even half as nice as this place did - for almost 70 years!

Street view. You'd never know such a splendid house existed beyond that screen of trees.
Such discreet understatement was a hallmark of Wrightian-inspired MCM.

Barely visible in the preceding photo was a massive stone wall that faced the street.
This swimming pool ran behind that wall - in part of the front yard!
But it was still invisible to passersby.

So much Wrightian-inspired MCM going on here, including the walls of windows, low roofline,
a brick wall screening the front door, and wide, shallow steps leading to the door.

Voila! The front door - a design trick popularized by Wright.
The long, low eaves were also Wrightian and Craftsman/Prairie-inspired.

A luxuriant wall of windows, and this wasn't even the main dining area.
Plus a continuous plane of brick as a perpendicular axis,
extending from the interior outward beyond the windows.

More windows. And a broadly exaggerated fireplace surround
to accentuate Wright's "hearth and home" ethos.

Window walls. Everywhere! These look out over the backyard towards Johnson Creek.

Windows even under the kitchen cabinets, along the countertops, looking into the backyard.

 

_____

TV's Comedy Situation

 

Television.  How much of it do you watch?

I used to watch quite a lot of it.  That was years ago, though.  Back when television programming literally was accessible only via a television set.  You arranged your life to watch your show when your show was scheduled to be on, which usually was only once a week.  None of those programs were available online, because "online" didn't exist.  

The only TV "cable" we ever had...
the wire from our old rooftop antenna
still coiled in a closet behind the fireplace.

My family never had cable or satellite.  We started out with rabbit ears, then one of those spindly rooftop antenna jobs, and now a thin, tablet-shaped black plastic contraption.  Eventually, VCRs did help erode the hold TV schedules had on our lives, but while we still have one, I can't remember when we last used it.

Times indeed change, and the history of television proves it. 

It's mostly a relic from my Manhattan apartment days, but I still have my trusty, boxy cathode-ray JVC "Mastercommand" set in my Texas bedroom.  I bought it at a "Nobody Beats the Wiz" electronics chain store on Broadway, in Greenwich Village, when The Wiz was metropolitan New York's version of Best Buy.  It weighs a ton, but the thing just won't quit.  Maybe because I almost never turn it on!

My parents' TV lineage has been a different story.  They only owned three sets during their 50 years of marriage, and Dad bought each of them from Sears Roebuck, since that's where most people of their generation got their appliances.  Before he was married, my father fancied himself as something of a technophile, whiling away many Saturday afternoons in New York City's fabled Radio Row, where the World Trade Center now sits.  But after he got married and had kids, he and Mom didn't bother with television until my brother and I were in elementary school... and we'd come home asking them why all the other kids knew some "Mr. Rogers" who lived on "Sesame Street"!

Our first TV was a small black and white model.  The next one, after we moved to Texas, wasn't much bigger, but it was a color set.  The last one Dad bought was larger still, but no comparison to the enormous screens most people wanted.  And screen size used to be one of the metrics by which social strata was determined.

Mom and I got our first digital TV only three years ago, after a near-zero deep freeze forced us to go without power for almost 24 hours.  Our home's interior temperature sank into the low 50s - cold enough long enough, apparently, to make that Sears set set literally blow a fuse when I first turned it on after our electricity returned.

(For the record, my Greenwich-Village-vintage television came through that deep freeze just fine.)

The next day, a jovial neighbor across the street asked how we'd fared in our frigid weather, and I laughingly told him about our Sears TV literally emitting acrid smoke.  He invited me over and offered one of his many digital flat-screen models to - as he put it - at least bring us into the 21st Century!

Still, we hardly watch it.  At least, compared to the amount of TV we used to consume.  Mom reads a lot these days, after her daughter-in-law gifted her with a Kindle.  And I guess I've simply lost interest in the medium.  

It's not because I'm too sophisticated or high-brow for pop-culture entertainment, although I do think pop-culture standards have declined considerably since I was a kid.  Some might say TV itself has had a lot to do with that.  Since I don't watch any prime time television anymore, I wouldn't know if there's any good-quality prime time programming on it today anyway!  Maybe there is, but my priorities in terms of how I want to spend my time have changed, and television ranks quite low.

Not that I'm anti-TV.  I'm simply far more deliberate in my use of it.  For example, I still watch some of the classic old sitcoms on those re-run stations.  Sitcoms have historically been my preference for TV viewing, over dramas or game shows or reality shows, with an exception being my relatively recent affinity for Columbo, the 1970s detective show which itself can be quite droll.  I'll readily admit I like the comedy classics because they're not just humorous, they're familiar and nostalgic, two qualities becoming increasingly desirable in our increasingly confrontational age. 

Actually, though, on that score, we tend to forget how controversial some historical sitcoms were during the age in which they originally aired.  They seem innocuous enough now, but the themes they portray weren't universally embraced back in their day.  For example, social pecking orders - both by the wealthy and the under-educated - became a common satirical target on The Beverly Hillbillies.  And equal opportunity for women in The Mary Tyler Moore Show mirrored a major social upheaval for the 1970s.

I doubt it was ever considered controversial, but Hogan's Heroes has become my favorite sitcom.  My brother and I began watching when we were in junior high school.  You can imagine how many times I've now seen each and every episode, over and over and over again.  I don't watch it as much as I used to, but some episodes remain so funny to me, I can still laugh out loud, even while reciting their punchlines by heart.  

Granted, I'm a sucker for the type of slapstick banter Hogan's Heroes supplies in abundance.  Yet despite all its comedic appeal, there are distinct aspects about the show that separate it from the conventional sitcom genre.  For one thing, obviously, being set in a prisoner-of-war camp immediately presents incredible challenges regarding humor.  It takes a lot of creativity to consistently extract relevant content from that scenario to deliver six years' worth of humorous episodes.  

Then there's the complication of being set not in America, but Europe, with an international cast to boot.  Then consider how its second-most-powerful leader among the prisoners, Sergeant Kinchloe, is played by a Black actor, Ivan Dixon.  That alone represented a particularly bold statement for the show's era, spanning 1965 to 1971.  Werner Klemperer, who plays Colonel Klink, was a musician in real life, but he was a classically-trained violinist, not a rock star.  Hogan's Heroes had numerous reasons to end up being a flop.  Yet it didn't then, and hasn't today.

While I don't have a favorite Hogan's Heroes episode, one of them does strike me as particularly compelling.  And it all comes down to one key line, which surprisingly, isn't spoken by lead characters Hogan or Klink, but by Kinchloe.  For a show so reliant on whimsy, the scene is stark, and void of humor, yet it becomes satisfyingly uplifting.

Episode 11, from Season 3, was written by Richard M. Powell, and named "Is General Hammerschlag Burning?"  Kinchloe finds himself thrust to the forefront as a childhood acquaintance of a Black chanteuse now working in wartime Paris, who has managed to secure the trust of the city's Nazi commander.

Although she personally loathes him and his cause, this chanteuse doesn't want to jeopardize the protection she receives from Hammerschlag.  Still, she's piqued by Kinchloe's sudden re-entry into her life, and especially what she considers his naive dedication to the Allied cause.  She is so ambivalent towards the Allies, and Americans especially, because she and Kinchloe are people who Americans haven't historically respected.  How could a Black American risk his life for a country whose society had treated them the way it had?  And how could he expect her to do the same?

Kinchloe's logic makes her think, and convinces her to cooperate:

"You don't understand us... Hammerschlag, you can understand... So just ask yourself a question: Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a Hammerschlag kind of world?"

That's a heavy line for a sitcom, right?

On a lighter note, I can report that I do have a favorite sitcom theme song.  It's a cappella jazz, technically; the airy, poignant "Angela" by Bob James for Taxi, floating along while an iconic Checker cab crosses New York's 59th Street Bridge from Manhattan into Queens.  The combination of such dreamy music with the rhythmic cadence of the bridge's passing structural trusses tends to be mesmerizing, especially in the afternoon sun.  

While its tune hardly fits the typically bubbly sitcom style, in a way, it still scores (get the pun?!) as sitcom theme music because of its irony:  That idyllic tableau I described totally contrasts with the real New York City taxi experience, which almost always is jarring, gritty, and hardly mesmerizing!

For a sitcom theme song with words, I like the far more energetic "Movin' On Up" by Ja'net Dubois and Jeff Barry for The Jefferson's, a show whose early episodes also featured the 59th Street Bridge during its theme song, but with the Jefferson's yellow Checker cab leaving Queens for Manhattan's fabled Upper East Side.

Okay, so I have a fondness for the city of my birth.  At least when it comes to sitcom music.  If you think about it, however, many of the most popular and influential sitcoms were set in New York.  I Love Lucy, for example, literally invented so many standards still used in the modern sitcom it's almost boring today.  Seinfeld, whose incredible writing turned otherwise ordinary experiences into catch phrases.  Then there's The Odd Couple, which like New York itself, is something of an acquired taste.  I started watching The Nanny while living in Gotham, and quickly realized that while a lot of acting was going on, those spandex outfits and gaudy bling worn by Sylvia and Grandma Yetta were not "artistic license".  They literally were what I'd see plenty of grandmothers wearing when I'd go shopping with my aunt along 86th Street in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge!

One of the last grand shows from the "golden age" of sitcoms is Frasier, which isn't set in New York, but features two main protagonists who fancy themselves as being urbane enough to be cosmopolitan snobs.  With fiendishly witty dialog presented in articulate cadence, and irrepressibly goofy subplots rippling throughout the series like earthquake fault lines, Frasier celebrates satire.  It ran from 1993 to 2004, ending 20 years ago, yet in many ways, the show has hardly aged.

I'm particularly fond of at least one scene and one entire episode from Frasier that are timeless in their creativity.  My favorite scene is actually a wordless one-act play from the episode entitled "Three Valentines" and features Niles, superbly embodied by David Hyde Pierce.  It's been years since I've personally ironed anything, but watching Niles try to meticulously press his dress pants (but start a small inferno instead) is five minutes and thirty-something seconds of sheer comedic delight.  Incredibly, Pierce spends all that time - and it flows by so quickly - with hardly any dialog of any kind, save for some impromptu grunts and exclamations.  He ends up presenting a master class in wordless acting that epitomizes the art of unadulterated humor.

My favorite full episode is Frasier's attempt at reproducing a vintage radio theater who-done-it, in "Ham Radio", written by David Lloyd.  I've already told you how much I enjoy slapstick comedy, and this particular show overflows with it.

Almost every other line is a punchline.  Right down to a dyslectic participant in Frasier's on-air shambles of a production who emotively fires off her one and only line:  "Look out - He's got a NUG!"

Think about it, relative to how a dyslectic person suffers from an unfortunate speech impediment.

Ahh... like most good comedy, it gets me every time!

And I got another pun in there too, didn't I?  "Firing off" a line...  

See how humor gets to me?

_____

Annabelle's Beach

Have you ever watched Columbo, the TV murder mystery franchise?  

It spanned almost three decades, but for me, the best episodes were from the 1970s.  Their plots may not always be rock-solid, and dialog can often be unrealistic, but their cinematography often brims with compelling complexity.  

Columbo makes for great retro television because it celebrates its period optics.  Southern California's vintage estates, for example; before skyrocketing property values forced many owners to subdivide sprawling grounds.  Enormous luxury cars, before the mid-70's gas crisis forced automobile downsizing.  And larger-than-life clothing fashions that, frankly, are charming today because they have NOT withstood the test of time!

Nearly every episode is set in Los Angeles, and many involve the Pacific Ocean in some way.  A murderer is either throwing incriminating evidence into the Pacific, they live along the Pacific, they kill somebody on its beach, or they're piloting yachts just offshore.

My favorite Columbo episode is "Try and Catch Me".  It checks all the essential Columbo boxes, with a grand mansion, opulent European convertibles, lavish sets, gorgeous Pacific shots, and an emotive orchestral soundtrack.  It features an exceptionally well-crafted finale, with everything kept afloat by witty dialog in keeping with the franchise's efforts at being something of a comedy.  

In "Try and Catch Me", the diminutive, venerable Ruth Gordon plays an overly-assertive mystery writer who grew up in Massachusetts, but now lives on the West Coast.  Early in the episode, she's strolling along a Malibu beach with the man she ends up murdering.  Just before suddenly, two horses gallop around either side of them (talk about dramatic cinematic foreshadowing!), she bluntly offers an unsolicited comparison of America's two oceans.

"As for the broad Pacific, I find that rather an effeminate body of water," she declares.  Her stilted Boston Brahmin affectation clashes with LA's sun-soaked waves, rolling up from azure surf onto the sand.  "Down on the Cape, when I was a girl, I watched the Atlantic day and night.  How it churned and boiled and roared!"

"Nobody but you could put down a whole ocean!" chuckles her unsuspecting prey.

I've never seen the Pacific Ocean, but I've seen the Atlantic many times, been boating on it, and lived next to it.  My mother's family is from coastal Maine, and my paternal grandfather worked freighters back and forth across the Atlantic.  My maternal grandfather's father even died at sea when, in 1920, the 4-masted schooner he captained, the Amelia Zeeman, literally disappeared in the fabled Bermuda Triangle.

Personally, I don't believe there is such a thing as the Bermuda Triangle, at least in terms of there being a particularly nefarious zone for ships and aircraft in the Atlantic.  Nevertheless, as far as folkloric myths are concerned, don't you think it curious that the Pacific doesn't have any similarly significant section within its vast expanse boasting such notoriety?

Unlike some of my forebears, I don't have salt water in my veins, and I doubt I could identify one ocean from another like Columbo's protagonist presumes to do.  I've never been particularly fond of boats or being beyond the sight of land.  I'm content to live in landlocked north Texas, hours away from any salt water.  However, I've been to the Gulf of Mexico and to me, salt water there tastes and smells similar enough to the Atlantic's - albeit maybe cooked a bit more by Texas' far warmer climate!

In the painting above, we see a rather frothy waterscape as viewed from the domesticated interior of a building perched atop a rocky shore.  Tempestuous waves, lots of surf, and even blurry pine boughs all convey a dynamic of wind.  Quite close to shore, the prominent lip of an incoming wave can be seen, followed immediately by at least five more.  Whitewater from spent waves roils about the foreground.  It's obviously not a calm day, but it's not a hurricane, either, since plenty of sunlight illuminates everything.  A distant island or peninsula reaches into our sightline from the left, leaving the rest of the horizon open, as if to suggest an even greater body of water extends far beyond our sight.  Perhaps the tableau represents a scene from one of the Great Lakes, or an ocean?

When my Mom first saw this painting, she loved it.  You see, nostalgia immediately conditioned her to recognize the view from her Aunt Isabel's and Uncle Walter's cottage along Blue Hill Bay in Brooklin, Maine, west of Mount Desert Island.  When my father and I later saw it, we agreed with her.  And when my three eldest nephews saw it for the first time, they blurted out almost in unison, without any coaching, "That's Annabelle's Beach!"

Many of their early summers were spent on Aunt Isabel's beach, years after both Isabel and Walter had passed away, as their heirs own it and let us use it whenever we'd visit Maine.  Mom called it "Aunt Isabel's beach", but somehow, the nephews always heard "Annabelle", perhaps because that was the name of a character in one of their childrens' stories.  So for all practical purposes, it became "Annabelle's Beach" to us and remains fondly so today.

Imagine our surprise, however, when Edith, one of Mom's cousins who lived in Maine her entire life, visited us in Texas.  "Do you recognize the place this painting appears to depict?" Mom playfully challenged, expecting her cousin to say it was their Aunt Isabel and Uncle Walter's place.  But nope, Cousin Edith stood and stared and then leaned forward and squinted at the painting, before finally giving up.  "No, I don't know where this is," she conceded.

"Doesn't it look like Uncle Walter and Aunt Isabel's waterfront cottage in Brooklin?" Mom prodded her cousin.  But no; again, Cousin Edith shook her head.  She turned to her husband, who would have been acquainted with the scene as well, yet he politely shrugged his shoulders for lack of recognizing it himself.

So there's that.  Nevertheless, at least for my more immediate family, this painting reminds us of the delightful Maine shore at a beautiful property we could enjoy at our leisure - without also having to pay Maine's staggering waterfront taxes for the privilege!  All we had to do was remember to re-latch the chain across their private gravel driveway when we left.

In case you're wondering, that one-bedroom, three-season house was built in the 1950s, and far closer to the shore than would be permitted by law (or logic) today.  Having the surf roiling so near an interior room represents a sensation that no contemporary building permit or insurance policy would allow for new construction, due to environmental concerns over erosion and fluctuating sea levels.  Indeed, a series of strong storms this past winter pushed many new rocks up against freshly-exposed roots from the waterline's pine trees, and "Annabelle's" heirs (who winter in Arizona) told Mom earlier this summer that even the shape of the shore had appeared to change.

What makes this picture ironic, however, isn't that Cousin Edith and her husband didn't identify it as being "Annabelle's".  What makes this picture ironic is that its artist, a next-door neighbor of ours here in Texas, painted it while living in Santiago, Chile.  

Those are her glasses, her coffee mug, and her sugar bowl.  And this was the view out of her apartment's window.  Overlooking... the Pacific Ocean!   

Definitely not how I'd consider an "effeminate body of water" to appear, is it?

Well, that depiction was ostensibly spoken by a Columbo murderer.  So, in keeping with the lieutenant's signature phrase, she was simply wrong about "one more thing".

_____

Maine's Coastal Reach

 

When I was a kid, my parents regularly took us to Maine to visit Mom's parents.  We spent every Thanksgiving in Maine, plus at least one summertime trip.  

I loved my grandparents, especially my grandmother's scratch-made biscuits and sumptuous peanut butter cookies.  However, my childhood self found Maine to be dull and boring overall.  Nothing but quaint buildings, bucolic scenery, and chilly salt water.

Sounds okay to you, though; right?  Indeed, now that I'm older, I realize how superficially my childhood self perceived Maine's rugged charms.

My mother grew up in New England.  Partly in Massachusetts, but mostly in coastal Maine.  Sedgwick, to be exact, on Maine's rural Blue Hill Peninsula.  And yes, just north of its eponymously-named town, there is a solitary hill whose thick forest of spruces and pines actually imparts hints of blue in just the right, misty light.

Living on a peninsula, obviously, means that one's community is surrounded by water on three sides.  Which, by extension, means that water plays a significant role in one's way of life.  Sedgwick's economy may have historically relied on family farms, blueberry barrens, and a couple of sawmills, but back then, as today, the people there live lives regulated by the salt water, its tides, its weather, and a geography literally sculpted by the sea.

Mom's parents eventually settled in my grandfather's mother's house, situated on an old country road, high above the shore of Eggemoggin Reach, between Sedgwick's tiny village and a tall suspension bridge linking the peninsula with Deer Isle.

You've probably never heard of Eggemoggin Reach.  Shucks, you've probably never heard of a reach at all, at least relative to a body of water.  So, here you go:  In English nautical terminology, a "reach" is a saltwater channel between the mainland and a relatively contiguous collection of outer islands, with ready access to the ocean from either end.  

A "reach" generally runs longitudinally, so sailing vessels can navigate under winds coming along their side.  As far as I've been able to determine, after scouring several charts of Maine's coast, the state only has two major reaches, Eggemoggin and Moosabec.  And for Eggemoggin, Deer Isle serves as the buffer from the open ocean, creating the channel for Eggemoggin Reach's ten-mile stretch.

In our post-modern society, with a mature aviation industry, and space exploration now dominated by private enterprise, a ten-mile protected salt water passage may sound irrelevant.  But that didn't used to be the case.  Long before Europeans discovered Maine - and waged part of America's Revolutionary War along the peninsula's western shore - Native Americans had already named this body of water.  Their choice, "Eggemoggin", roughly translates into "a narrowed waterway with fish".  From their apt name, they likely recognized how its geography provides valuable benefits, both for people living along it, and traversing upon it.  If you've ever experienced severe weather that comes directly off of an ocean, you can appreciate how Deer Isle's presence shelters the reach and mainland from the worst winds, tides, waves, and precipitation that can wreak havoc on coastlines.

Today, maybe even because it's something of an anachronism, Eggemoggin Reach claims considerable prestige as a premier channel for sailing enthusiasts.  Every August, for example, the world's largest wooden boat sailing race takes place there, the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta.  And one of the world's foremost publishers dedicated to wooden boatbuilding, appropriately named "The Wooden Boat", is based on the shores of the reach, in Brooklin, just east of Sedgwick.

Neither Deer Isle nor the Blue Hill Peninsula have ever been heavily populated.  And Maine has plenty of islands that have no physical link to the mainland.  So perhaps even more that the elite boating it hosts, the most unexpected aspect of Eggemoggin Reach can be found in its dramatic suspension superstructure, the Deer Isle - Sedgwick Bridge.

In the 1930s, when Maine planners decided to build a link from Deer Isle to the mainland, they could have engineered a causeway.  Or a shallow, "normal" bridge.  But several considerations led to a suspension structure as their eventual option.  These considerations did include the reach's pedigree as a sailing channel for tall-masted ships, but practically, engineers also factored for powerful tidal currents relative to the depth of the reach's channel, which limited the number and spacing of support pilings.  There were also issues of sourcing materials and labor, both of which were in sparse supply in the area.  

Like most of the young men who lived there then, my grandfather worked on that bridge.  He was injured when he was up, high and obscure, on a scaffold that somebody on the ground mistakenly moved, throwing him down, and knocking four of his bottom front teeth out of his mouth.

Yeah, that was long before OSHA.

To help solve both the materials and labor problems - the carelessness which led to my grandfather's injury probably not an anomaly - the bridge ended up getting partially pre-fabricated in Staten Island.  New York City was much closer to steel mills, rail yards, and a deeply skilled workforce.  Sophisticated, engineered steel structural components were then barged up to Maine, for final assembly like a giant 3-D puzzle.  The whole process ended up setting a precedent for suspension bridge construction.

Turn-about is fair play, however, since much of the granite cladding countless towers in Manhattan during that era - including the Empire State Building - came from quarries in Deer Isle!  

It's also worth noting that every year, tens of millions of dollars worth of crustaceous cargo gets trucked over that bridge from the bustling harbor in Deer Isle's largest village, Stonington - one of the world's lobster capitals.

I say all of that as a prelude for what you're about to see.  Call it "context", if you will.  

To the casual observer, this body of water in these upcoming photos may look like any ordinary lake, or maybe a river.  And not just because these photos are of poor quality.  Hey, they were taken by non-digital cameras a couple of decades ago, and I'm a bad photographer.  But these are scenes from my grandparents' home on Eggemoggin Reach, and that is Deer Isle in the distance.  The water you see is salt water, straight from the Atlantic Ocean, and this body of water is tidal, meaning the water is constantly moving; either coming in, or going out.

Even as a kid, looking out to the reach at various times during the day, and realizing how much the tide had come in or gone out, was impressive to me.  I could check the times for high and low tides listed in the local newspaper, and sure enough, there the water's edge would be!  Day in and day out, rain or shine, the tide never stops.

Unlike tropical beaches, which tend to be mostly sand, coastal Maine tends to be mostly rocky, with stones and boulders providing reliable benchmarks for gauging the tide's progress.  There was at least one boulder the size of a cargo van down at "our" shore which sometimes sat by itself with no water nearby, and other times was completely submerged.  That amazed me, because I'd been down to that boulder, walked around it, and tried to climb it, but couldn't - it was covered all over with slippery seaweed.  That wet, salty seaweed was proof of the amount of time it spent underwater!

Legally we never had "shore rights" access to the water.  As you can see, my family's property was on the "water view" side of the road, not the "waterfront" side.  We did, however, over all the decades my family owned that house, have a series of kindly neighbors across the road who gave us permission to go down their sloping meadow - it used to be a working hayfield - to the shore.

While it looks incredibly idyllic in photos, getting to and from the shore was a chore!  The walk back up to the house always seemed even longer and harder, since the meadow's slope is deceptively steep and long.  Fortunately, our neighbors always kept a path mowed, which made things easier.  One of the owners of that property, a wealthy divorcee from Mexico City, no less, owned a golf cart which she let my brother and I drive down there and back.  And it was fun - unless the sloping path's grass was wet, which significantly decreased her golf cart's traction.

(That particular neighbor also had a pristine, 1960s-vintage Mercedes sedan in her rebuilt barn - silver paint with bright red leather interior - but she didn't let us drive that, unfortunately!)

Perhaps it won't surprise you to learn that I don't really remember going down to the shore during our Thanksgiving visits.  Instead, I remember the biting wind, and the pellets of snow, and staying indoors a lot, guzzling my grandmother's homemade chicken soup! 

Meanwhile, it's Maine's beautiful summer days that truly are epic, and that I remember most fondly and nostalgically during our Texas summers, when our Lone Star sun may beam just as brightly, but always seems to lack the wholesome radiance of Maine's brilliant skies, and the sunlight's twinkling whiteness as it dances about the water's azure surface.

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Dining Tableography

You've already met my family's historic, well-used dining table:  Our antique farm table from upstate New York.

Now let me introduce you to my own dining table.  Not many people know I have one.  But I do.  I acquired it in New York also, but not from a rustic farm.  Instead, I bought it in an entirely different part of the Empire State:  Manhattan.

And although I've owned it since 1991, I can only remember ever dining on it precisely... once.

I'd been living with my aunt in her longtime Brooklyn apartment, while working in Lower Manhattan.  And I wanted my own place, but finding something both decent and affordable in such an expensive city isn't easy for anybody.  Eventually, I learned of a friend's apartment coming up for availability between Manhattan's Gramercy Park and Kip's Bay neighborhoods, on the East Side.  I'd have a roommate, but that's what made my rent manageable.

Although I'd heard horror stories about roommates - especially in a challenging place like New York City - I'm grateful to have had a surprisingly good experience with mine.  An amiable fellow around my age, he was Italian-American, a native of Staten Island, and a computer networking consultant.  We never had any money issues, or issues over noise, or personal space - or refrigerator space!

One of the ways we avoided food storage drama came from the fact that, well, I never cooked anything in that apartment.  Not only have I never enjoyed cooking, but apparently, I'd never realized how inhibiting bad kitchen aesthetics can be.

While ours was quite spacious for a Manhattan kitchen, it offered a diminutive, partly-rusted gas stove whose safety struck me as dubious at best.  Its refrigerator was also small, but surprisingly clean, so I did feel comfortable using it.  A deep, cast iron Art Deco sink broadcast its age by its porcelain's scrub-proof dinginess.  Cheap, tattered, gray carpeting ran from wall to wall, but never fit my definition of what "wall-to-wall" carpeting should look like!  Besides, I couldn't figure out how to clean it, and the fact that it was our kitchen flooring made me wonder how many generations of other people's food, grease, and germs were caught in its fibers. 

I was told by neighbors across the hall from our third-floor apartment - a friendly brother and sister from Central America - that our building dated to approximately the American Civil War era.  Ironic, huh, since my childhood home upstate also dated from that era?  I'm not sure how they knew that, but the siblings told me they could see what they thought must have been our building's outhouse in the backyard, since that was the direction their unit faced, while ours faced the street.  From the exposed water and sewer pipes throughout our 5-story walk-up, I'd already deduced that its construction predated modern indoor plumbing.  Nevertheless, when the siblings invited me into their apartment to see the purported outhouse for myself, the backyard was so overgrown with weedy trees I didn't see much of anything.

Just to clarify:  It wasn't necessarily our kitchen's age that bothered me, but its aesthetics.  Maybe I was too picky, but I'd already had my aunt's vastly nicer Brooklyn kitchen as a template.  Hers wasn't quite as old as ours, she maintained it well, and we both kept it scrupulously clean.  I'd had no issues cooking in it, although I never pretended to be good at it, and my aunt knew she wasn't either, so neither of us had high expectations for our meals!

My roommate, on the other hand, often cooked in our Manhattan kitchen, and simply ignored what I considered its many defects.  Like my aunt and me, he didn't fancy himself as a foodie, which kinda surprised me, since most New York Italians I knew were excellent cooks.  One of them, a grandmotherly co-worker of mine who also lived in Staten Island, would regularly bring in a huge portion of pasta and peas cooked in olive oil for me (she never brought food for any other co-worker unless we were having an office party).  She'd playfully insist that my "Brooklyn auntie" should have been cooking more for me!

My co-worker never could understand why it was just as well my "auntie" didn't!

Come to think of it, I shouldn't have eaten that delicious pasta at my desk at lunch, but taken it home for dinner to be reheated in a microwave.  And oh, yeah... maybe by now you've wondered why I haven't mentioned having one of those contraptions in my Manhattan kitchen.  To be honest, and prove how much I'm not a cook, I can't remember why neither my roommate nor I ever thought of getting one.

I do recall my roommate getting a toaster.  But weekdays, I always got either a "sesame with a schmear" (bagel with cream cheese) or an enormous blueberry muffin, split at its top and stuffed with butter, from various delis near the Wall Street subway near my office downtown.  Weekend breakfasts were Entenmann's donuts or Belgian waffles at a brunch place up Third Avenue.

And yes, my breakfast menu will become relevant soon.

What groceries I did purchase I got at a brand-new two-level supermarket a couple of blocks north on Third Avenue, near my Belgian brunch place.  It was situated inside an equally-new high-rise condominium tower, and I thought it was cool that we shoppers had to take an escalator (or elevator) down from street level, which featured mostly a glorified deli, to the main grocery aisles downstairs.

Our apartment consisted of five rooms plus a bathroom.  Upon entering, you'd immediately be in our kitchen, with the bathroom to your left.  Then came a middle room (which we dubbed the dining room), and then a front room (the living room), with two far smaller bedrooms off each of the larger spaces.  

Both of our living areas each featured a wall of exposed brick, which added considerable charm and texture.  While its kitchen was the worst room in the place, our whole apartment was surprisingly bright, with high ceilings and tall windows, even in the kitchen, providing excellent ambient light and cross-ventilation.

Most of that cross-ventilation came from the narrow spaces, or voids, constructed between each building, which were otherwise all attached to each other.  Those voids were about four feet wide, and they were air shafts for windows that didn't face either the street or our buildings' backyards.  They took away a lot of everyone's privacy, but in a cramped and congested place like Manhattan, privacy isn't something anyone should ever expect to have anyway.

My Manhattan bedroom's "carpeting" is now a small area rug in Texas

I mention those air shafts because our windows opening to them were in walls built at an angle.  After moving in, I went down to the city's venerable ABC Carpet near Union Square and bought two floor rugs for myself that practically fit as de-facto wall-to-wall carpeting, except for those walls at angles for ventilation shafts.

Why spend money on rugs?  Well, mainly, because except for our kitchen and bathroom, our apartment's floors were ancient wood parquet that had not been maintained.  At all.  Many of its individual pieces were no longer anchored into their four-finger pattern, but resting loosely atop our downstairs neighbor's ceiling rafters.  Walking across our floors in bare feet usually meant moisture on our skin would pull some pieces out of the flooring.

Plus, we wanted to muffle our sounds for the benefit of our neighbors.

I know - such an outmoded thing anymore:  Being considerate of others, right?

For the dining room, which was next to my bedroom, my rug measures about 11 x 7.  And for my bedroom, the rug measures about 7 x 5.  I still have them, here in Texas, and I never fail to draw amazement from visitors when I point out their dimensions and how they fit almost like carpeting in that Manhattan apartment.

With my "wall-to-wall" dining room carpeting!

And here, now, behold:  My Manhattan apartment's dining table.  I purchased it at a Scandinavian furniture store on E. 57th Street.  Its manufacturer's mark is Brdr. Furbo in Spottrup, Denmark.  I particularly liked its Mid-Century Modern minimalism, and its drop-leaf flexibility.  I set it up against our dining room's exposed brick wall, and the two complimented each other well.  Down the block from our apartment was a store that sold solid oak furniture made in what had been Yugoslavia, so I purchased two plain, lightly-stained chairs which flanked the table.

Comparing my family's antique farm table and my Danish table, I now see similarities I doubt I considered back when I was browsing that furniture shop on E. 57th Street.  For one thing, both tables feature expandability, yet have a pleasing aesthetic even in their minimal configuration.  For example, with both leaves dropped and hanging to the side of their pedestal, my Manhattan table stood elegantly yet unobtrusively for years in our Texas home's hallway.

In addition, both tables have relevance to a Civil War era provenance, having each been housed in buildings purportedly constructed during that time.  And, of course, they were both obtained in the Empire State.

But as I pointed out at the beginning of this essay, one glaring distinction differentiates these two tables that have played important roles in my life:  While I've eaten countless meals at our family's farm table, I can recall eating only one meal at my Manhattan dining table.  One.  And I remember what it was:  Corn flakes with canned peaches.  For my dinner, not even breakfast.  

I never eat cereal for breakfast.

Both angled leaves can drop
to create an ever-slimmer profile

Hey - I've already explained:  I'm no gastronome.  And corn flakes with canned peaches was a common dinner of mine in Manhattan because it was incredibly easy after a long day at the office and two subway commutes.  It did contain a certain nutritional value.  And while you probably don't think that's enough food for a healthy meal, consider that it was almost always followed by Ben and Jerry's ice cream.  Even in the wintertime!  

Meanwhile, my roommate frequently ate at this table, both restaurant food, and food he'd cooked in our kitchen.  He recognized how odd it was that I never ate at my own table, and would occasionally check with me to see whether I was leaving it pristine as some sort of museum piece, or if he really could use it without annoying me!  And I'd tell him to please use it and justify my purchase of it.  After all, it wasn't cheap.

So where did I usually eat my apartment meals?  In a corner of my small bedroom, on a captain's bed I'd inherited from the previous tenant (who'd moved to Europe), propped up by pillows, watching my TV.

As I'd dine atop that bed, I'd look through my open bedroom door out onto my beautiful, glowing Danish table up against our stylish exposed brick wall, and try to talk myself into using it.  So one time, I did.  I remember it probably because that was the only time it happened.

I never did it again because frankly, I don't enjoy eating by myself.  Even having that other empty chair at my official dining table seemed to reinforce a loneliness that pervaded my Gotham experience.  I eventually learned it's a common irony for many folks living in the middle of a metropolitan area with approximately 15 million other people.  At least it helps explain one reason I ended up in therapy!  

If my roommate's schedule had been the same as mine, and he ate his meals at approximately the same time I did, perhaps we'd have coordinated a menu plan or even brought our separate food to the same table to eat together.  But as a consultant, his hours could be all over the place, and especially weekday mornings, he knew I had to get out of the apartment by a certain time to catch the subway.  So technically, he was being considerate of me by starting his workday later than I did.

But don't think I ate all my Manhattan dinners in my bedroom, or that they were all corn flakes and canned peaches!  Or that all my meals were laced with self-pity.

A couple of other single friends from my church and I decided that since we were otherwise alone in The Greatest City On Earth, we couldn't let our relationship status stand in the way of exploring some of our planet's best cuisine.  One of my friends was originally from India, and worked as an accountant for a major cosmetics corporation.  The other was originally from the Caribbean, and taught at a private Park Avenue prep school.  Between the three of us, we managed to find a variety of genuine, culturally-significant, non-touristy restaurants around Manhattan most Friday evenings that filled our appetites without draining our wallets. 

So... does rolling all that together help explain why my Danish dining table remains in excellent condition today?  Had I known I'd only personally dine on it once, I wouldn't have purchased it to begin with.  But looking back now, I realize it came to serve as a learning experience for me, even if it served me only one actual meal. 

And maybe my roommate was on to something:  When he wondered if I was intentionally preserving it as some sort of museum artifact, maybe that's what I've unintentionally ended up doing after all!

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