BOXES 70-72: New England

No, we're not in Scotland anymore. I had just returned to Cleveland after my summer 1972 trip to Europe, but soon was off on another trip, this time driving to New England with my mother and sister. Here you see them in front of a classic covered bridge in Vermont. Or at least my slide box labels it "Vermont": I can't find any bridges in Google Images that look quite like this one, with its pedestrian side entrance.

On our first leg of the journey we stopped at Colgate University, where I had had my first teaching job. In January 1966 the doors opened to Colgate's new Creative Arts Center (containing a theater and art galleries as well as classrooms), designed by so-called "brutalist" architect Paul Rudolph. I thought the building was a spectacular success, both inside and out. With my brand-new camera I had taken a couple of dim photos in winter light (see BOX 1), but now in summer sunshine I took quite a few more photos. (Evidently by 1972 I could afford to buy more rolls of film.) I'm now struck less by the number of shots of the building than by the fact that I didn't take any other Colgate photos on this trip. In any case, here they all are:

Our next major stop was at Tanglewood, in the Berkshires, where we saw a Boston Symphony concert from the lawn one evening. I didn't take photos, except of a couple of places in nearby Stockbridge, MA:

We then got a few glimpses of southern Vermont, where we saw the covered bridge and, on higher ground, this mountain view:

Next it was southeast, down to Newport, RI, where we visited Ed and Elaine Foster, who (as I reported in BOXES 40-43) taught summers at a school located in the "Dark Shadows" mansion. (Like me, my mother and sister were huge fans.) I see from the slides (but don't really have a recollection) that we took a boat tour around the "back" shores of Newport in Narragansett Bay. The mansions in the photos below may be less famous than the ones I visited and photographed on my first trip, but they would certainly do for a summer cottage, especially the one perched on a rock and another shaped like a watchtower. Along the shores you also see Fort Adams, its current walls dating from the second quarter of the 19th Century.

Back on shore we took the famous Cliff Walk along the ocean side of the properties. I assume the structure with the Chinese roof was a boathouse.

And we toured some of the Gilded Age mansions that are open to the public, as well as visiting Burnham-by-the-Sea/Seaview Terrace/"Collinwood," though I didn't take any "repeat" photos. (Again, see BOXES 40-43) Rather, I focused on one mansion I hadn't shot before: Rosecliff, a Stanford White design, completed in 1902. In the pictures below you first see Ellen in the entranceway of Rosecliff; then Mom and Ellen, with the Fosters' daughter, Kate, standing a bit more in the foreground; then the seaside view of the house, with Kate on the left. (Presumably she is being held by Ed, whom I somehow cut out of the frame.)

From Newport we drove on to Boston. I see that we visited Paul Revere's house (part of a Historic Boston walking tour, as I recall).

Yes, that's Ellen looking through the second-story window on the left of the first photo; I guess she was first in line to enter. Speaking of brutalism, we walked past Boston's then new, still controversial City Hall, during the day and later at sunset:

On that sunset walk we also passed the nearby Government Service Center--like the Colgate Arts Center, another Paul Rudolph project. But my photos unfortunately don't give a clear sense of the building:

However, another photo with a partial view of a building--a courtyard wall of the wonderful Isabella Gardner Museum--does give you a sense of the beauty and warm colors of its Venetian Gothic features:

From Boston we drove north along the coast to Gloucester and then Salem. Here are a couple of views along the drive:

In Salem we visited the Custom House where Hawthorne famously worked before writing The Scarlet Letter:

And we saw the house touted by Salem tourism as Hawthorne's inspiration for The House of the Seven Gables, even if it was more the sound of the name than the look of the house that inspired him. Sorry that the gables are pretty much hidden in the first photo below; the second photo, I think, is of Hawthorne's birthplace, which was moved a few blocks to be next to the House of the Seven Gables, one of whose gables you can see on the right.

I suppose most visitors to Salem take some notice of the witchy history of the town. Outside the Witch Museum stands a statue of Salem's founder, Roger Conant. He had nothing to do with the infamous trials, but the very dramatic 1913 statue does seem to have a spooky quality, as if he were either a threatener of witches or a warlock himself :

The only other photo I took in Salem--and on the entire New England trip--is one of the very handsome Peirce-Nichols House, dating from the early 1780s:

Once back in Ohio I got ready to move to Evanston, IL, for my first quarter of teaching at Northwestern University.