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...

_____