Water Tower Wow

My job was part of the maritime industry regulated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (the government entity which owns the World Trade Center), and that came with Port Authority perks. One of them was getting to show a visiting client from Brazil around Manhattan Island by way of a Port Authority helicopter. It's from that helicopter that I took this photo, featuring the Twin Towers and Lower Manhattan (and the Empire State Building in the distance) from above New York Bay. This was probably taken in 1993. Tower One, home to Windows on the World, was the building with the antenna.

This photo was taken in one of the tower's elevator lobbies in December 1975 by Finnish friend Henry Karna. The orange-red banner to the right reads "Hauskaa Joulua", or "Merry Christmas" in Finnish, part of the World Trade Center's international theme.

Does your workplace throw a holiday party?  

My first real job as a teenager was with an upscale menswear retailer.  Our corporate office hosted annual "holiday" breakfasts for us salespeople, usually on a Saturday morning in early November.  They were held at various posh hotels or country clubs in Dallas, and weren't really parties as much as they were the official launch for that year's Christmas selling season.

After college, my first conventional office job was with a freight forwarding brokerage firm in New York City.  And even though those previous retail breakfasts were rather fancy, with plenty of good food in a luxurious setting, I was now in Manhattan.  The Big City.  And approaching my first Christmas there, I expected a more cosmopolitan type of company holiday party than those working breakfasts.

I was living with my aunt, a lifelong Brooklynite, and a legal secretary for a Park Avenue law firm.  Her employers regularly threw their holiday parties at Central Park's glamorous Tavern on the Green.  So yeah, I kinda expected most Big Apple office parties to be grand affairs, even if my office was nowhere near Park Avenue, and my employers weren't prestigious lawyers.

Imagine my initial disappointment when I discovered that sure, my officemates kinda held a dinner for themselves to mark the occasion.  But theirs was extremely low-key, at a faded restaurant along a dingy street between the shadows of a parking garage and the World Trade Center.  

I'd seen the place while scurrying around our office's Lower Manhattan neighborhood, running errands for our employer.  Our firm processed documentation for international freight, and in those pre-Internet days, while we had our own in-house messenger and contracts with other messenger services, sometimes it was just easier to hand-deliver urgent paperwork myself.  And while I know one shouldn't judge a book by its cover (as the old saying goes), this particular restaurant's exterior offered no reason to expect its menu and interior to be Christmas-party-worthy.

Meanwhile, yes... just a couple of blocks further north, New York's incredible World Trade Center commanded the skies.  I'm talking about the Trade Center's original version, before 9-11, when it was known for its iconic Twin Towers.  And atop Tower One was the city's dazzling two-story destination restaurant called Windows on the World.  I'm calling it "WOW" for short, because that's no understatement.  

WOW sprawled across floors 106 and 107 of the North Tower, offering wrap-around, floor-to-ceiling views of the entire city, New Jersey, upstate New York, Long Island, and the Atlantic Ocean.  Its main dining room offered tables situated on two different levels so every diner could enjoy the scenery.  Special high-speed elevators whisked us up from the tower's main lobby in a matter of seconds, meaning we had to intentionally pop our ears during a very quick trip if we didn't want an earache to spoil our expensive meal.

Indeed, talk about a "wow-factor"!  Dining way up high, sleek and serene, seemingly above everything.  Shucks, back down on the ground, that Tavern on the Green may be a Victorian Gothic bauble, but it used to be Central Park's sheep barn.

Although I'd never before been to WOW, I'd heard a lot about it.  Most New Yorkers had, including all of my co-workers.  But here's the thing:  We were paying for our Christmas party out of our own pockets.  While our employers did give Christmas bonuses, they did not host an office Christmas party.  I recall that their option to us consisted of a monetary bonus OR a party, but not both.  

So ours was the obvious choice, right?  We didn't work to party; we worked to get paid.  And we understood we were not a fancy law firm or huge corporate conglomerate.  There were only ten of us.

Still, to native New Yorkers, WOW seemed more like a tourist trap than anything else.  I'll admit my idea didn't go over well at first with my co-workers:  "WOW is too fancy, too pricey, too touristy!  Yes, the views are probably epic, but they're part of the overpriced gimmick."

I was naive enough to counter all of those facts - and yes, they were mostly true - with, "so what?  We're in New York City, and it's Christmas."

The more they thought about it, the faster my co-workers warmed up to the idea of WOW for our little party.  So we booked a large table for several of us and any significant others that wanted to come along.  Our employers let us leave the office a little early, so we could get home at a decent hour.  Posh multi-course dinners always last a while, and in those days, Lower Manhattan after dark grew more unsafe the later one stayed.

I'm no foodie, and I don't remember anything about WOW's food.  However, the fact that I don't remember their food likely means it was neither horrible nor spectacular.  I've since learned that throughout its history, WOW never managed to rack up consistently high praise from the city's demanding food critics, many of whom admittedly rated the venue for its views as much as its menu.

Hey - those views were undeniably WOW's best feature.

So the food was at least edible.  I'm sure the service was fine.  Its decor was unfussy and muted in the best (if that's possible) 1970's aesthetic.  Lots of chrome and grays and beige.  But what I distinctly remember about WOW was its bathroom!  Not because I got sick or anything, but fancy meals tend to drag on and on through salads and entrées and desserts and libations (caffeinated for me, otherwise for my co-workers!).  Usually, I can get in and out of a conventional restaurant without ever having to visit their restroom, but WOW was no conventional restaurant.  And eventually, water in my body was finding its own level, if you get my drift.

I found the men's room, went inside, and immediately, I noticed a faint sloshing sound.

And it wasn't what you're probably thinking.

The second thing I noticed was the tall, thin man in a uniform standing silently over in a corner, looking at me with a soft smile.  Just standing there next to a counter as I entered the little foyer of the men's room.

Um... what was he doing there?  He was in uniform, so he wasn't a janitor.  Was he a waiter on break?  Don't they have a break room for their staff?  I don't think he said anything.  He just stood there, with that soft smile.  It unnerved me, which reminded me of my primary purpose for being in that room in the first place.  So I turned to a bank of urinals and... was reminded of the sloshing sound.  And I saw what it was.

The water in the base of each urinal was sloshing around within the urinals, ever so subtly!  I turned to look into one of the toilet stalls behind me, and sure enough, the water was doing the same thing in them as well!

Talk about water finding its level!  Because it dawned on me:  I knew each of the Trade Center's towers had been designed to sway upwards of 1 foot in each direction at their tops, and here I was, at the top of Tower One.  The building was undoubtedly moving in the night's breezes, which 106 floors up was probably more like a gale.  And the bathroom's fixtures were moving with the building, of course.  While all the while, the water they used was constantly seeking its level.

How cool is that?!  When I realized what was happening, it made my entire evening!  Not the food, or the service, or the luxury - the very fact we were so high up into the sky that the water in bathroom fixtures was sloshing about!  So impressive. 

Yes, I'm weird.

The water wasn't moving enough to spill out onto the floor or anything.  After all, this was a luxury restaurant.  We men were forced to wear jackets (the restaurant had a ready supply of them if some poor schlep showed up without one).  Who would consent to being ordered to wear a jacket while the venue's bathrooms were a sloppy, slippery mess?  Engineers obviously calculated how much the water could move in those fixtures without spilling.  Even today, that's cool to me!

Eventually, I realized I was starting to gawk at those urinals like a Texas hillbilly on his first venture into town, so I went over to wash my hands.  And the tall, uniformed gentleman quietly handed me a towel.  Not a crisp paper thing, but a clean, fluffy fabric towel.  

"Uh, thanks...?" I found the whole thing awkward.  I was trying not to look at him or stare.  Surely that guy wasn't passing his time in the men's room by handing out towels?  Would it be rude of me to give it back to him?  So I patted my hands briefly.  I quickly placed the towel on the countertop, and hurriedly left.  I got back to our table with wet hands, which I discreetly dried on my fabric dinner napkin.

Later that evening, I got back to my aunt's apartment in Brooklyn and boy, did she get a good laugh out of my recounting to her the weird story about that uniformed guy in the men's room.

"That's the men's room STEWARD!" I remember her practically screaming, she was laughing so hard.  Shaking her head too, as I recall, marveling at my hickness.  "That's a high-class restaurant!  Its restrooms have stewards!  He hands you a towel, you dry your hands, you hand it back to him.  There's probably a woman who does the same thing in the ladies' room, too."

"  oh.  "  I was genuinely embarrassed.  I felt like I'd flunked Luxury 101.

"How much did you tip him?" my aunt asked.

"TIP?"  

"You didn't tip him?"  My aunt's bemusement turned to chagrin, realizing how unsophisticated her eldest nephew was.  "Anything?"

The next year my co-workers and I again went to WOW for our Christmas dinner, and I made sure I had a small wad of dollar bills in my front pocket to hand out to anybody in a uniform.  I didn't want to risk breaching any elitist protocols.

And the water was still sloshing about in those urinals.  It probably hadn't stopped since my last visit.

Not that my New York City Christmases were all about urinal water, but WOW, that's one of my strongest memories of them.

Peace, y'all!

_____

Historical Heisman Trophy Talk

When I worked at the freight forwarding brokerage in New York, we each had our personal coffee mug. Here's mine - complete with a nautical motif! - that I found at Zabar's, of all places, on the Upper West Side. I still have it.

Vinnie and Maria, two of my co-workers at the freight forwarding brokerage in Lower Manhattan. Taken on one of my birthdays, at a TGI Fridays on Broadway.

Would you believe I've touched the Heisman Trophy?

No, I've never played sports - football or otherwise.  And the college from which I graduated, the University of Texas at Arlington, shuttered its football program during my undergraduate years.  Shucks, I'm not even sure I fully understood what the Heisman was when I first saw it.  

Nevertheless, I think my little Heisman experience is a cool irony; another unexpected story from my New York City days.

Not just because a sports-averse person like myself got so close to such an iconic athletic touchstone, but because of the Heisman's own provenance.  In a way, it's its own irony, starting with its home being a city known for many things - except college sports! 

New York boasts several prestigious universities, yet only Columbia and Fordham continue to field NCAA football programs.  And while Ivy-League Columbia has placed in the Heismans, it's been for runners-up.  And those were ages ago... in 1938, and 1942.

Before I go any farther, let me assure sports purists I now know how important the Heisman is.  First called the Downtown Athletic Club Award, the Heisman signifies college football's most prestigious trophy.  It's been awarded annually since 1935 and is named for John W. Heisman, the first athletic director of New York City's now-defunct Downtown Athletic Club.  Heisman, the person, is credited with helping to develop not only the way collegiate football is played today in North America, but also how colleges administer their extremely popular and lucrative football programs.  

He was kind of a really big deal.

So was the DAC, back in the day.  Its home was a distinctive, proportionally-massed 35-story Art Deco tower clad in dark orange brick with chevron embellishments.  That tower still commands a choice location near the tip of southern Manhattan, a mere three blocks west of Wall Street, and four blocks south of the World Trade Center.  And the trophy which became bigger than the club itself enjoyed a place of prominence in the tower's lobby, near the main bank of elevators, where everybody could see it coming and going.  

My Heisman experience happened when I lived in Gotham and worked next-door to the DAC.  My employers were long-time club members who lunched there almost daily.

Occasionally they'd invite me to join them in the DAC's bar, which to my knowledge was the club's only venue still offering daily food service.  This was the early 1990's, and at that time, in terms of membership, the DAC was "on the ropes", to borrow a sporting term from boxing.  And yes, the club did have its own regulation boxing ring further upstairs.  

To put it frankly, those were years of decline not just for the DAC specifically, but for Lower Manhattan generally.  That was because two major economic engines for the southern tip of Manhattan Island - Wall Street and maritime commerce - were experiencing serious transitional phases.  Leaders from both industries used to be well-represented in the DAC's membership roster, but not any longer.  

Tourists likely weren't aware of it, but big banks and brokerage firms had been fleeing Manhattan's famous Financial District for decades.  Not only to Midtown and the suburbs, but also Florida, Brooklyn, and even Utah - of all places.  Inflated rents for outmoded buildings were two major problems, as was suburbanization.  

While the New York metropolitan area continued to be Manhattan-centric during the surge to the 'burbs, it was Midtown that benefited after World War II because it boasts two major commuter terminals - Grand Central and Penn Station.  The Financial District, meanwhile, had only one, and it went bankrupt during the 1950s.  And it only serviced New Jersey.  

That transit line under the Hudson River would eventually become the PATH train, whose conversion led New Jersey to help fund the World Trade Center.

It was the Hudson River itself, however, that helped make Manhattan.  After the first European ships sailed into what became New York Harbor 400 years ago, Manhattan Island quickly became our country's epicenter of maritime commerce.  Initially, the city imported goods from around the world to support the "New World's" exploding population.  Then, while our country actually made stuff, New York was our export capital, sending goods around the rest of our planet.  Now that we manufacture only a fraction of the goods we consume, we're back to importing; not from Europe this time, but Asia.  Which means America's West Coast ports are our busiest.

Indeed, New York's waterfront had been incessantly evolving, up until the time excavation began for the Trade Center's deep basement in 1966.  By then, the metropolitan region's shipping logistics had nearly deserted Manhattan Island for New Jersey's sprawling container ports and direct access to Interstate highways.  During development of the World Trade Center, most of the dirt dug up for its 7-level basement was simply trucked across the street to the Hudson River, and used as fill where abandoned piers once stretched out into the water.  Today, a huge master-planned neighborhood called Battery Park City exists where oceangoing vessels used to dock.  

The only ships docking along Manhattan anymore are cruise ships, up in Midtown. 

As my employers would explain to me over our lunches in its bar, the DAC existed in three parts:  Its legendary trophy, its dwindling yet still influential membership, and its aging yet impressive building which, in addition to its boxing ring, still held banquet halls, a bowling alley, indoor tennis courts, and - up on the 12th floor - a swimming pool that when built, was billed as the world's highest.  It's upper floors offered guest rooms where celebrities such as Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and Muhammad Ali would stay when they were in town.

Ultimately, its building's location became the deciding factor for everything else.  On 9-11, a poignant total of 11 club members perished up the street in the World Trade Center during that infamous attack.  While the DAC's tower wasn't physically damaged, it was close enough to the disaster site to be included in its security/rubble/recovery lockdown zone, which knocked it "down for the count".

Yeah, another boxing metaphor.

The DAC, whose building dates from 1930, never reopened.  Its membership, having struggled for years and now shaken by the terrorism, disbanded.  Their building was sold for conversion to market-rate condominiums.  And the club's prized trophy, the Heisman, was spun off as its own separate foundation, whose trust still awards the statue every December.

I never saw the club's hallowed Heisman Room, but if the lobby and the bar where we had lunch were representative of the rest of the building, I'd describe the facility as being traditionally, conservatively decorated.  If "decorated" is even the right word.  While its exterior remains unmistakably Art Deco, everything I saw inside was, um, uninspired.  Not cheap, but not creative, either.  Thick carpeting, most of it red.  Dim lighting, mostly from fixtures that were either original or very dated.  Lots of dark wood paneling.  And the dull scent of liquor permeating everything... or was that stale body odor from decades of sweaty athletic activities?

During lunch hours, at least, the bar rarely saw more than half its tables occupied.  The actual bar - which my employers said used to be packed three to four people deep, all raucous and boisterous back in the day - was always deserted now.  Partly because modern business practices frown on prolific public alcohol consumption, but mostly because the DAC's membership was so scant.

I can recall how silence pervaded the entire club.  Down in its lobby, curt nods of recognition from doormen and desk clerks would greet us, but no voices.  Upstairs in its bar, everybody talked in hushed tones.  Servers spoke softly, with reserve, and barely any chit-chat, but they'd obviously waited on my bosses for years.  Long-time regulars would smile at acquaintances as they passed.  Everyone was polite, but hardly effusive.

These members were affluent people, to be sure, but not from Manhattan's highest echelon.  And they weren't all male, although most of them were.  I never saw anybody famous, or even athletic, frankly.  These were New York's working wealthy; people who could afford a bit of panache but still knew how much effort it took to pay for it.  I got the impression most of us were noshing on a corporate account, not a personal one.  At the end of a meal, my bosses would discreetly sign off on a check without even looking at it, the protocol being only to approve its addition to their monthly tab.  No cash or credit cards ever appeared.

I'd never been to such a place, and its signature trophy aside, the club's novelty intrigued me.  It oozed a faded gravitas.  Of course, having that Heisman in the lobby made it all the more compelling.  I remember my employers expecting me to be quite impressed when I first walked up to the actual trophy on my inaugural trip to the DAC's elevators.  And I likely disappointed them by being underwhelmed at the experience, while most folks would have been either giddy or reverential.

On my subsequent visits, I made a point of casting an appreciative gaze at the statue while we waited for our elevator.  I was savvy enough to respect the uniqueness of that opportunity.

The company that hired me was still run by its founder, who when I worked there was a spry octogenarian.  He came into the city only a couple of days a week from his home out on Long Island.  My direct boss was his son, who endured a two-hour commute each way to and from his place in suburban Connecticut.  There was a third partner who lived in Brooklyn, but I didn't report to him.  Although the three of them were tenured members, none of them used the club's sports or fitness facilities.  Their membership was mostly for hosting clients, and visiting with fellow industry executives.  It was a business expense, with a very famous perk.

Our company's founder started his firm back when New York City had those piers and docks spiking out from all over Manhattan Island.  We were a freight forwarder, meaning we processed all of the documentation required for commodities being shipped out of the United States to buyers located in countries around the globe.  And our company was located for decades on the 25th floor of another Art Deco tower at 21 West Street, literally wall-to-wall with the DAC.

Both of these towers are today landmarked.  They were designed by the same architectural firm at approximately the same time.  Yet aside from their age and attractive aesthetics, their more obscure significance involves their shared economic and geographic historicity, since when they were built, the Hudson River and its piers were literally across the street.  Through their respective purposes (officing and recreation), they participated in servicing ocean freighting, one of the key industries that made New York what it is today.  Maybe that's not exciting to tourists and sports fans, but it still counts in terms of how the Heisman's reality has come about.

By the time I worked next-door to the DAC, the Hudson River had been pushed more than two blocks further west.  Luxury apartment buildings were rising across the street, on that infill from the Trade Center.  Even our office building, as well as the DAC, had been built on infill; the Hudson used to run where our towers exist.  It's all part of Manhattan Island's incredible transformation over the centuries.

Fortunately, since our office was on the 25th floor, we still had commanding views up the Hudson and across New York Harbor, including Ellis and Liberty Islands.

Although there were no more freighters plying their way past our building, we'd see cruise ships along the river, including the elegant Queen Elizabeth II - or QE2 for short - whenever she graced New York.  Even our firm's founder - who after decades with that view, barely ever glanced out our windows anymore - would come out of his office and stand with the rest of us as we'd silently watch the QE2 glide past.  She was a distinctive ship, and we all recognized her, lithe and stately, just like one might expect from a fairy tale form of royalty.

My most memorable conversation with our company's founder took place during my first week there.  He hosted the firm's two other executives and me for lunch at the DAC.  I'd already learned that since he was partially retired, he spent most of his time at Long Island's various country clubs.

Our server had courteously seated us around a table in the DAC's venerable bar, and almost immediately, our company's founder turned to me and asked not about my education, or my professional background, or even my hopes and dreams... 

Nope.  In his forthright style, looking me square in my eyes:  "So, how's your golf game?"

It's all about priorities, right?

You already know that sports and I do not share an intimate familiarity.  So I balked, unsure of how to proceed.  I knew we were in a venue with "Athletic" in its name, but in my case that word was utterly relative!  Plus, I barely knew the guy.  How negatively would he receive my reply?  In awkward honesty, I told him as politely as I could muster that I don't golf.

He turned to his son - my direct boss - and in a tone of disgust that even now I suspect was only partially feigned, complained, "He doesn't golf?!  Why'd you hire him?"

For his part, my boss reacted as though he'd been expecting just such an exchange between his father and me.  He dispassionately dismissed his father's query, which suggested to me that I'd passed a key test.  Anyway, in retrospect, considering how we were ensconced in such a sports sanctum like the Downtown Athletic Club bar, that whole golf thing seemed apropos.  Eventually I think the founder came to like me, even if his casual office banter with me was limited by my lack of golfing expertise.

And the Heisman?  That hunk of cast bronze has outlived its club, its building, and the entire complex just up the street that used to be the original World Trade Center.  And it's morphed into far more than a trophy.  Today, the multi-million-dollar trust created by the DAC's disbanding membership funds a number of sports initiatives for urban youth and the physically-challenged, including figure skating, chess (some people consider it something of a sport!), marathons for differently-abled athletes, sailing, and sports journalism.

Even youth golf.

So when it's awarded again this coming December, just remember that the Heisman represents more than simply college football.

There's a lot of history, some good architecture, the QE2, and... golf.

_____

Curios-ity

At first glance, nothing curious here... right...?

Do you have a china cabinet in your home?

Probably not, right?  Even if you're used to calling that piece of furniture a curio cabinet, or a hutch, you probably still don't have one.  At least, not one made of wood in a traditional style with mirrors and stuff.

For decades, they were all the rage in fashionable homes.  Yet I had no idea how far out of fashion they've fallen until I received a set of them for free.

A long-time neighbor had passed away and her heirs sold her house.  Their mother's home had five bedrooms and three living areas traditionally decorated with big furniture, most of which had been selected by an actual interior decorator.  Between close family members and friends, heirs parceled out nearly all of that furniture - with the exception of an enormous three-piece china cabinet set.  

Before the house hit the market, heirs scheduled a large local charity to come and take what nobody'd wanted.  Yet even the charity - which gladly took even a chair that was in pieces - passed on the solid china cabinet set!  

That's when you know something really is unwanted.

The heirs' Realtor showed the house with this set still in its place in the family room, near the fireplace.  The home's new owners bought it with the set in place, but they didn't want it either.  And the day before their contractors were to begin an extensive remodeling project, the new matron of the house texted me:  Did I know anybody who wants this china cabinet set?  It's so heavy and well-made, she hated to simply have her workers haul it to the dumpster being delivered to their driveway tomorrow.

Yeah, each piece is oversized, extremely heavy, and still in excellent condition.  But I'm not an interior design wonk, and I don't really know what's stylish these days, so I had no idea that the whole china cabinet thing was currently so far out of style.  While our new neighbors told me their previous home had featured similarly traditional furniture, they weren't bringing any of it over to their new place, planning instead to pivot towards a more streamlined minimalism.  And glass-door, glass-shelved wood china cabinets with carved flowers really didn't fit their target aesthetic.

Apparently, units like these don't really fit anybody's aesthetic anymore.  I've looked online and discovered people can't even give away unwanted china cabinets!  Decades ago, these behemoths often sold for four figures.  But that was then.

And that's the thing, right?  Most conventional, traditional china cabinets scream 1980's and 1990's.  Hey - I admit it:  They just look dated.  I'm guessing these free ones from across the street were purchased during the 1980's.  And frankly, I'm not crazy about them.  

But my mother loves them!

Which works, because I got them for her anyway.  I didn't realize she'd always wanted a china cabinet until I mentioned to her about our new neighbors trying to unload a set.  It caught me off-guard when Mom jumped at the chance.  So with the help of another neighbor and his teenaged son, I went and lugged the three units over here, and two of them fit exactly along a wall between our dining area and kitchen.

Back in 1965, after they'd gotten married, Mom and Dad were setting up housekeeping in their small apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.  They found a furniture store along the neighborhood's long-time shopping district, 86th Street, and purchased - among other things - a tall, colonial-style hutch.  We still have it - a high shelving unit without doors sitting above a cabinet with doors.  It's all solid wood. 

I think Mom once kept her Readers Digest books (talk about transient fads!) on that doorless hutch, but for most of its life, it has displayed her curios.  The problem with that has been... dust, right?  Curios generally are the most valuable when one purchases them, or are gifted them.  After that, they sit about collecting dust, and without glass doors to help minimize the dust accumulation, the whole thing pretty much becomes a housekeeping issue.

As they almost always do, Mom's curios represent her generation, and what her generation prized or considered collectible or nostalgic.  But younger people today are literally a different generation, and while they may bristle at the notion, they accumulate curios as well... but ones that relate to their experience.  And on the flip side, Mom's curios are probably unlike what previous American generations would have valued and collected.

Cups and saucers, for instance.  For much of the 20th Century, when couples got married, one of the big things was picking out a china pattern that would represent a certain aesthetic dignity for the newly-created family unit.  Stemware, silver flatware, linen tablecloths:  Brides-to-be used to agonize over their choices of those prized entertainment accoutrements.  And then after being gifted them as wedding presents, what ended up happening?  All that fancy table livery that wasn't damaged in automatic dishwashers was relegated "for best" to china cabinets, or even closets.

Mom's wedding china is still in several kitchen cabinets.  And for decades, she also had in her kitchen cabinets a number of old serving dishes, pitchers, and platters from her mother and grandmothers.  Although I have no particular emotional attachment to them, I knew Mom did, and I wanted her to be able to see them on a daily basis.  What's the point of having sentimental pieces if they sit behind opaque cupboard doors all the time?

So I got them out and stocked Mom's new china cabinets with them, and today they bring back happy memories for her every time she gazes at them from our dining table.

You may recall me mentioning earlier about there originally being three large pieces over at our neighbors' place.  One features glass doors, glass shelving, a mirrored back, and built-in lights at the top.  The second has glass shelves and lights, but no doors or mirrored back.  I was amazed we didn't crack the mirror or damage any of the glass in our move.  Those are the two pieces I kept to display Mom's stuff, as seen in the photo above.

The third unit was strictly an entertainment center, but it was designed ages ago for cathode-ray television sets, meaning its opening was square, not rectangular.  So I immediately decided we couldn't use it, and I didn't even bother to offer it for free on an Internet give-away app.  I disassembled it, and its parts are stacked in the garage, since they're big pieces of genuine and engineered wood that I keep telling myself some woodworker might be able to creatively repurpose.

And yeah, talking about the evolution of transience:  That boxy TV armoire was positively obsolete!  Imagine all the towering entertainment centers from the 1970's through the early 2000's which became forever outmoded with the arrival of flat-screen TVs.  That's why I disassembled the one we were gifted - which, for the record, my late neighbor had retrofitted.  She'd hired a carpenter and Best Buy's Geek Squad to accommodate her large flat-screen, which stretched awkwardly from the unit's cavernous hole intended for cathode-ray sets.

In fact, retrofitting old furniture has become something of a thing for some people.  We have neighbors who enjoy repurposing second-hand and otherwise dated furniture with new paint and hardware.  But they didn't want that old entertainment center, either.

Meanwhile, there's only a few pieces of china in Mom's pre-owned china cabinet, and they're not her wedding china, but custom tea sets friends gifted her while she was in college.  There are some Finnish glass art pieces, and some crystal vases, but the rest are from Mom's maternal kinfolk.

Mom's mother and grandmothers were not wealthy, and the pieces Mom has of theirs probably have no financial value.  But those were remarkable women who lived hard lives and made a lot out of not very much for their families.  What their remaining artifacts represent to Mom is worth considerably more than whatever these china cabinets ever cost new.  

And when it comes to value, perhaps the fact that they're now displayed in these almost entirely unwanted curio cabinets completes the motif:

Old relics being displayed in newer old relics.

Isn't that curio-us...!

____

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.
Yet no effort seemed apparent to let the ambulance 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 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 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 after his passing, I couldn't even look at those chairs in our garage without recalling his questions about someplace he should have recognized as his own.  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.

Mortimer recalled that even out in the open air, 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, I've never contributed anything close to conventional concert ticket prices, 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 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 it!  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' invention 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 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, none of them was electric (it's surprisingly old technology, actually), 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.

 

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