I found it hard to choose a single picture from my slide boxes to represent my travels during the months after my first trip to Europe. According to the numbered order of slides in the boxes for late 1969 and the first half of 1970, I spent time in the following places: (1) the Hudson River valley near the Catskills; (2) the Hoboken, NJ campus of Stevens Institute of Technology, where I was now teaching; (3) Warrensville, Ohio with the family; (4) farther Upstate New York, namely Utica, to be best man at Jim and Mary Hicks' wedding; (5) my home base in Manhattan, where I recorded a solar eclipse and a Berlioz Society meeting; (6) Newport, RI, to visit my friends Ed and Elaine Foster; (7) the Bronx Botanical Gardens; (8) once more Upstate, to Ithaca; (9) Ohio again, now in a summery back yard. One theme that keeps recurring in this sequence of photos is the "stately mansion," so for my opening photo I chose one in Newport that I got to visit: a place I always think of as "Collinwood," the haunted family residence of the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows.
But first to another grand domicile. During the fall of 1969 I drove with my friend Mike Bavar and his dog Toby to Olana, home of the great Hudson River School painter Frederic
Church. We must have rented a car for the occasion, or else there was a car-owning friend on our excursion, since there was no public transportation to the site, situated on high ground looking west across the Hudson to the Catskills. The mansion, designed by celebrated architect Calvert Vaux (of Central Park fame) working with Church himself, was completed in 1872,in a Victorian
style enhanced by Persian and Moorish elements. The property had been saved from developers in 1966 by its purchase by New York State, and was now a State Historic Site. The autumn day we drove up was dramatically cloudy--fine for moody views of Olana and of the Hudson Valley stretched beyond its front porch, but not so good for my Instamatic. You'll have to look elsewhere for bright-hued photos of the exterior and of the richly furnished interior, but here is what I was able to capture.
Our first view of Olana from the highway below it was pretty impressive, but not nearly as impressive as our first full view of the house:
Here is a closer view, with Mike and someone else waving from the front porch. I thought the latter was me on first glance, but it seems unlikely that a stranger would have taken a photo from such a distance, so this is probably the mystery friend--either taller than Mike or standing on a step.
He may also be the person to the left of Mike as they walk up to the entrance. Other photos show the façade even more dimly; the better ones emphasize the autumn sky:
The interior, with Church's original furnishings, was well worth seeing, but the really stunning sights were the views of the Hudson from Olana's distinctive windows :
Here is one last view of the valley from outside the house:
That same fall I had begun a fulltime instructorship in the Humanities Department at Stevens Institute of Technology, while working on my dissertation for Columbia. Stevens is located on a bluff overlooking the Hudson and Midtown Manhattan. I brought my camera one day and took just a few shots, including one of the entrance gate and one of the view from the cafeteria windows--another spectacular Hudson River overlook!
One unique feature of the campus was a dormitory in a repurposed docked ship, down below the main campus:
The view from a dorm-cabin porthole or the deck was surely unrivaled:
I went to Ohio over the holidays, but took only two photos. They feature Donya, of course, plus my sister in one shot and me and my mother in the other. I have no idea why Ellen is holding up a bunch of grapes, or even whether they're real or plastic grapes. The silver samovar in the background, by the way, was used only on very special occasions when we had visitors. (I wonder if it made good coffee; in those days I drank only instant coffee with lots of milk and sugar.)
In February 1970 my good friend Jim Hicks ("BOX 3: Princeton Visit") got married to Mary
Tremmel; they had met in Cleveland, but Jim was now pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Utica, NY, and there the wedding was held. I was best man. (Years later, Jim presided over the marriage of Anne and me.) The photos posted below may be of limited interest to anyone who doesn't know Jim and Mary, but they do record a happy occasion and provide a glimpse into a world of 50 years ago. (I certainly can't claim them to be artistic achievements in themselves, unless you want to argue that occasional soft focus and red-eye are aesthetic pluses. But I do like the last picture with the bridal dress against the snow.) I'll try out a feature I just discovered whereby captions should pop up on your screen as you hover over the photos.
On March 7, 1970, a few weeks after I returned to NYC from the wedding, there was a total solar eclipse along the Eastern seaboard, a little after noon. In the photos you see below, the weird light is not--for once--the fault of the Instamatic or the digital scanning, but just the way the scene looked on the streets of Manhattan. (Still, as I recall, the light was eerie but not as dim as in the photos.)
Later that spring there was another meeting of the American Berlioz Society, of which I was the dummy president (see "BOXES 22-24"). This time our guest was the pianist Raymond Lewenthal, who had no direct Berlioz connection but at the time was celebrated as a virtuoso performer of hyper-Romantic composers of Berlioz' era (Franz Liszt and others much less well known). Lewenthal is the long-haired man centered in the first picture and mostly hidden behind the distinguished-looking woman (can anyone identify her?) in the second. The bottom two feature the Metropolitan Opera's Francis Robinson (balding, gray-haired).
That summer I was invited to Newport by my friends and fellow graduate students Ed and Elaine Foster (Ed also taught with me at Stevens). They were teaching summer school at a girls' school housed in one of the so-called "cottages." For those of you who might not be familiar with Newport, the town is most famous as a summer residence for the extremely rich during the (previous) Gilded Age; a number of the more stately mansions were built close to the ocean, with lawns stretching down to the water. You can take guided tours of some of the most sumptuous homes, but you can also, for free, follow a path called the Cliff Walk to see the backs of the homes and their elegant gardens.
The mansion (completed in 1925, so the youngest of the original era of Newport "cottages") containing the school where the Fosters taught was called Burnam-by-the-Sea at the time; more recently it's known as the Carey Mansion (for the family that owns it) or Seaview Terrace; but to me it was "Collinwood," because the exteriors appeared on Dark Shadows. That show, to which I was quite addicted (as were my mother and sister), ran weekdays on ABC from 1966 to 1971. The estate of the ghost-and-monster-troubled Collins family was supposed to be on the rocky coast of Maine, but Seaview Terrace can look spooky in the right light, even on the milder shores of Rhode Island. Below are some shots I took with my Instamatic, including views from an upstairs window, plus a few glimpses of the interior. (No vampires, Frankenstein creatures or possessed children in evidence.)
And here are Ed and Elaine with their baby, Katherine:
Of course I looked at other stately mansions along Cliff Walk and in other historic districts of Newport, guided by my friends. One of the earliest still standing is Sherman House, designed by H.H. Richardson in what became called the Shingle Style, 1875:
Marble House, built for the Vanderbilts in 1892 by Richard Morris Hunt (who might nowadays be called a starchitect), is Beaux Arts style, while Ochre House, also by Hunt, is more Loire Valley Chateau:
The Breakers (1895), again designed by Hunt for the Vanderbilts but in a more Italian Renaissance style, is the most gargantuan of the "cottages," with a terrace facing the ocean:
Also of note are The Elms (1902) and the older, Tudorish Fairholme:
And finally, the only actual "cottage" in the bunch, the house where Ed and Elaine were staying for the summer:
I took a couple of pictures as well of a Newport dock with its seagull activity:
Later that summer I twice headed north from Manhattan. The first time was only as far as the Bronx, to spend an afternoon at the Botanical Gardens with Foster Hirsch and his friend Louis. Here's a miscellany of photos from that occasion:
(I have no idea why I had that streak of hair on my forehead--it wasn't a comb-over and it had to have been annoying.)
A farther excursion was to Ithaca, where another fellow graduate student and friend, Geoff Nulle, invited Max Westler and me for a weekend at his parents' home. Pictured below are, first, Geoff's parents' house, with the car in front, and then a handsome Gothic Revival building that I can't identify. Internet searching of the Cornell University campus and other Ithaca locations reveals no such place, though Geoff did take us on a tour of the Cornell campus, and I can tell you that the (also Gothic) mansion in the two photos that follow is Llenroc, built in 1865 for Ezra Cornell, co-founder of the university. (Try spelling the name backwards.) It's now a fraternity house.
Geoff also took us on a drive north along the shore of Lake Cayuga to Tauchhannock Falls:
Later yet that summer I was back in Ohio, working on my dissertation in a basement room of my parents' house as well as hanging out in the back yard with the family. In addition to the usual crew of Ellen, Judi and Sue, not to mention Donya, you can see Judi's boyfriend at the time, Keith, and, next to my parents, Aunt Dot and Uncle Andy, Judi and Sue's parents.
Not exactly Olana, The Breakers or Llonroc, but a good place to be.
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