The forlornness of forgotten objects

The forlornness of forgotten objects is not to be borne. Who amongst us has not felt the anguish of a discarded chair, steadfast in its grief, as it waits on the curb for the garbage truck? Who has not sensed the distress etched into the soul of that discarded dresser, drawers askew, sitting on the side of the road with the weekly trash? The birdcage poking out of the moldy cardboard box, the red wagon missing a wheel, that cheap 1950’s suitcase…Those things once fulfilled their purposes. People sat in that chair. That dresser was filled with clothes. A bird sang its little heart out in that birdcage. That broken lamp shed its golden light over many a page in its day. Objects once needed, used, appreciated. Objects living out their destinies to the hilt in gladness and joy.

Now they’re yesterday’s news.

This bothers me. Maybe their feelings are hurt when they’re left out on the curb...maybe it pains them to be exposed to the elements, unprotected...perhaps they actually mind that everyone can see their shame. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, right? How can I just leave them there? These things require saving, pronto!

So garbage day, which arrives every Tuesday, usually constitutes a bit of a rescue mission for me. Stuff I have dragged or carried home from the side of the road: a monstrously heavy art-deco dressing table with Bakelite handles, a ruinously rusted 5’ x 4’ luncheonette sign that reads “Texas Lunch”, a cast iron coal stove with pink legs, a Singer sewing machine from 1915, a twig table with a red top, a mandolin…and of course, many less noteworthy finds, finds beyond counting. Original artwork (who can forget the two giant sheep heads, done in acrylics?), lamps (how about that 36” tall shepherdess carrying a sheaf of wheat?), and of course, innumerable chairs, galaxies of chairs, universes of chairs...

Because is there anything lonelier-looking than a chair by the side of the road? What a pathetic sight. They just seem to epitomize every gloomy existential truth on the planet, each sad empty chair an actor of one in a poignant tableau expressive of all sorts of 3:00 AM-type personal fears. It is alone. Discarded. Unloved. Broken. Who doesn’t fear these things? I could be that chair…wait, what am I saying? I AM that chair. Would I leave myself abandoned on the side of the road like that? So what’s there to do but rescue it from its misery and bring it home…where I can guarantee you it won’t ever be lonely again, because I’ve got a dozen rejects just like it waiting to keep the damn thing company.

Hip to be poor

I feel like I’ve been waiting for this day all my life…it’s finally hip to be poor. Celebrities, industrialists, investment bankers all feel the sting. Waitresses, lawyers, fishermen, brain surgeons, we all share the same leaking boat now. Almost exactly a year ago, the entire country sat mesmerized before the sight of the stock market in freefall, frozen like deer in the headlights at the sight of our retirement funds, college accounts, life savings, hopes, dreams & reasons for living dissolving into thin air. Hello…Can you say "new reality"? Today you can’t open a magazine or newspaper without being bombarded by inane suggestions on how to save what little money you have left – switch from Starbucks to Dunkin! Shop at Wal-Mart! Buy generic! Olay instead of La Mer! – stratagems with about as much effectiveness as trying to stop an incoming tide with a sieve, and which offer the added stupidity of relying upon the same consumerist paradigm that got us here in the first place - buy this instead of that. Save more by spending…less. Discussion of dwindling finances is the subject du jour in the public forums, and if you want to participate in the conversation, you’d better be prepared to talk poor. It’s the chic thing to be. Poor is the new green. In the red is the new black.

This new hipness takes many forms. Some people are of course really poor. Homeless poor, hungry poor, street person poor. People sleeping on subway grates, wearing plastic garbage bags instead of clothes. Others are newly desperate, the foreclosure & short sale & unemployed poor. Many are recent arrivals to poordom, members of the struggling and debt-ridden middle class. And then of course there are the relatively affluent but still less-rich-than-they-were upper strata. Regardless of where you stand on the scale, you’ve probably had some sort of unpleasant reality to adjust to over the past 12 months. If you’re lucky, you’ve done some thinking as well.

Because that’s the one thing that no one has really been addressing – the thinking that landed us in this mess. Buy-spend-buy-spend-buy-spend…what passes for contemporary American “culture” - and its value system - depends entirely upon consumer spending. It’s the engine that makes our society run. We measure our worth by our net-worth, our success by our financial assets, who we are by what we have. If this recent crisis forces us to do nothing more than examine the structureless underbelly of what we believe, it will have served a useful purpose. Raise your hand if you’ve spent your adult life in the service of a financial lie, presenting a prosperous face to the world, while all the time running as fast as you could to keep up. I know I have. Expensive shoes, jewelry, travel experiences, beauty products. Name brands. Never a dime to my name, little in savings, everything leveraged and borrowed against and perpetually in motion, Peter paying Paul paying Peter. I refinanced my house 3 times in the past 8 years. My current mortgage is now three times what my house’s original asking price was. I am not a stupid person. My IQ is 130. The New York Times is delivered to my door daily. I re-read War & Peace, just for fun, ha ha. But wait a second…if I’m so smart, then how come I’m so poor? And didn’t I KNOW better than to get sucked into the machine? Didn’t I read Thoreau and Emerson in college? Didn’t I swear I’d never adopt the shallow materialist values of my parents? Didn’t I have IDEALS? Didn’t me and my friends who grew up in the sixties utterly reject the whole shallow consumerist paradigm?

The truth is that none of us have escaped it. I doubt anyone in this culture CAN escape it. It’s too pervasive. We can no longer even string together our thoughts in non-economic terms. We are “consumers”. We are “products”, products of our culture and products of our times, flipping through magazines, surfing 150 channels, defining ourselves by the aptly-named “goods” that we buy and the purchases that we make, our $1500 handbags, our $900 shoes, our adjustable rate mortgages. We live it, we breathe it, we dream it. We are it.

Well, now the alarm clock has gone off. And unpleasant shock that it’s been, it feels good to finally be awake again. There’s something bracing about finally facing reality. It’s like I always knew this was going to happen, that my past “success” was a triumph of smoke and mirrors and empty values, that it would all come to an end one day, but now that it has, oddly I don’t feel all that bad about it. I’m still here. So are you. No fear, no regrets. Now move on.

The Wallpaper Chronicles

Wallpaper. As a child, I hated it. I hated the repetitiveness of the patterns, the way your eye would go round and round a room and always come to rest on the same exact thing. There was something disturbing about it, disturbing in a way I didn’t yet know how to put words to, an inherent uneasiness that hinted at larger uneasinesses as yet unexpressed. A wallpapered room was a room wearing a mask, creepy, claustrophobic, a room aiming to conceal something. However, my mother loved wallpaper, loved the crisp regularity of it, and she believed it to be an essential visual component of every well ordered home. In our house, wallpaper went up and down with the seasons. The routine never varied. First every last adhering molecule of the old paper had to be removed. By hand, with a pan of solvent, a paint scraper, and when we were old enough, by me and my sister. We might have enjoyed the geometric satisfactions of putting it up, but taking it down? Talk about despising a chore! The wet solvent dripping down your arm…the sickening gluey smell of the sodden paper…the wobbly ladder and its sudden, heart-stopping lurches…the stubborn, welded-on shreds that refused to give it up...and above all, the slow, frustrating stupidity of the paint scraper. God help you if you got the dull one.

So needless to say, as an adult, wallpaper is not a place I’ve ever cared to go.

And yet…and yet. There’s a nostalgia factor to old wallpaper that can’t be denied. Almost nothing evokes the reality of a vanished past more effectively than traces of old wallpaper clinging to a wall; the very fact of its decrepitude serves as poignant reminder that it was once fresh and new, applied with hope and good intentions, tempus fugit. These remnants out of time are windows into other lives, other minds, other experiences.

I ask you: Who in the world would opt to surround themselves with Leonardo’s “Last Supper” endlessly repeating like a stuck record, pieces of which to this day still adhere to the basement walls of a small, otherwise unremarkable white house on Broadway? Who would want to live with the rigors of a biblical toile pattern, featuring a stern patriarchal figure (Moses? Abraham?) vingnetted over & over, as seen in the attic of 17 Third Street? What would it have been like to sleep in a room like that every night, stamped as it was to infinity with themes of guilt and redemption? Did those messages seep into one’s very soul? Who plastered the planks of the attic walls at 17 Chestnut with discarded newspapers & handbills from the late 18th century? Décor - or insulation - or both? Was the sailboat pattern on the closet ceiling of that dilapidated cottage on Kerry Hill chosen by an indifferent workman or by an energetic young mother-to-be? What vanished romance inspired that floral pattern in the bedroom?

Once you start noticing it, the wallpaper evidence is everywhere, and can be found in just about every old house in Newport. Look at it; look closely. Newport is good at keeping its history everpresent. Let yourself examine these gorgeous shards of vernacular history, and the ghosts who are responsible for them will flame back into being for a split second - if only in your imagination - before vanishing back into the unfathomability of the past.

class war at 40 Broadway

Last week a preservationist friend gave me a big blue button that says “Newport Needs Its Past”. Evidently someone was giving them out at a recent city council hearing on whether or not Newport should hire a new historic preservation officer to replace the one who vacated the post last fall. You’d think that filling the post ASAP would be pretty much of a no-brainer for a town whose economic lifeblood is historic tourism & whose future fortunes are almost entirely dependant on the success of that industry, but alas the world is not always a rational place, and numerous and vocal are the objectors to this plan. Their arguments run along the usual predictable lines. Can’t afford it. Don’t need it. Too much government interference in private life. No one’s going to tell ME whether I can replace a window, etc. Like so much else in life, increasingly (to me at least) these arguments seem to be less about the ostensible subject under discussion – i.e. the filling of the vacant position – than a thinly disguised battle over other issues, in this case between the economic interests of blue vs white collar Newport, the people with the chain link fences pitted against the people with the wrought iron fences. Both sides believe that they should get the final say on how things look around here. And it strikes me – committed preservationist that I am – that the opposing side does indeed inadvertently raise some very uncomfortable theoretical questions for us vis-à-vis our “Newport Needs Its Past” campaign: Who’s past are we preserving? And whose past are we erasing in the interests of saving whatever it is we deem worth saving?

I think you could make the argument that Newport is as architecturally rich as it is precisely because every period was allowed to express itself, because new things were built on top of old things, existing buildings were repurposed, utilitarian and cosmetic fixes were patched in willy-nilly with little regard for aesthetics and controls…which of course resulted in exactly the kind of organic aesthetic that the Wrought Iron Fence People now want to protect. But ironically, it was precisely the Chain Link Fence Person mentality that brought this aesthetic into being – the patch it up, make it do, make it work, piece it together approach favored everywhere by the working poor, for the simple reason that they can’t afford to adopt any other. For every William Vanderbilt that summered in Newport, there were fifty Irish maids who made his life possible. For every John LaFarge or William James who lived and worked here there were a hundred illiterate fishermen who’d never heard of them. From 1639 on, every cultured illustrious Newport inhabitant has been shadowed by a crowd of thousands of working class nobodies. Slaves. Servants. Fishermen. Seamstresses. Grocers. Carters. People who lived in small cheap houses in poor neighborhoods and saved pieces of string & old newspapers and never gave a thought to the aesthetics of architecture or the picturesque, because they would have been luxuries so out of reach & impractical that they weren’t even understood to be options. Chain Link Fence People everywhere, of every era, usually find survival more to their taste than aesthetics.

All of which brings me back to paradox of the button again. Yes, Virginia, Newport Needs Its Past. Newport needs preservation. But let’s not be stupid or naïvely idealistic about it. Let’s not pretend our commitment to preservation isn’t preventing other social truths from being expressed. Let’s not pretend that a lot of class conflicts don’t lie at the heart of this debate. And let’s not stop asking ourselves how true to reality – to any reality, of any period – is a preserved Newport, and if a preserved Newport is even an authentic one?

Six degrees of separation

By now most of us are familiar with the “six degrees of separation” concept, the notion that everyone on the planet is pretty much related somehow. You know…Barrack Obama turns out to be related to Thomas Jefferson, George Bush and Vladamir Putin are actually distant cousins, the person sitting at the next desk is descended from the Romonovs, etc. Well something kind of strange happened recently – call it an amazing coincidence of sorts – that started me thinking. What about the six degrees of separation between buildings?

This is what happened. I had a client who was purchasing a house at 28 Channing Street. Right about the same time I got a new listing for a house at 18 Congdon Ave. The two houses are in the same neighborhood, two or three blocks apart, and my buyer actually looked at both houses. So far so good. He put in an offer on the Channing St house, and to his delight, it was accepted. Meanwhile, to my delight, my listing at 18 Congdon was also put under contract. Even better. But this is where it starts to get spooky. My buyer, in his excitement about buying the house on Channing, went over to City Hall and did some research on the property, going all the way back to the moment it was built. And what he found was this: that the person who had built 28 Channing had done so while living at 18 Congdon. The two houses had a six degrees of separation type link and we – my buyer, my seller, and me - were the connective tissue.

Fast forward to later the same week. I was trying to find some background info on Moorland Lodge and kept running into a blank wall. Then I came across an entry for it on the National Register District website, claiming that it had been built by Vera Scott Cushman, heiress to the Chicago department store fortune of Carson Pirie Scott. Now the Carson Pirie Scott building in Chicago is one of THE most famous buildings in the history of American architecture, designed by Louis Sullivan, one of the very first skyscrapers, one of the very first buildings to ever employ a curtain wall, etc. It’s totally landmark, ultra famous with the scholarly set. And then it occurred to me – there was a six degrees of separation thing between the CPS building and Moorland Lodge! They’re relatives – once via Vera Cushman, and once again via me noticing the link. It was incredible. Believing I’d possibly stumbled upon one of the greatest secrets of life ever, I became more and more convinced that there might be an invisible network of relationships connecting seemingly disparate buildings. Could it actually be that a system of secret architectural energetics mysteriously underlay the everyday visible world? If true, I was so THERE…

So I started looking for these connections everywhere. And finding them. I didn’t even have to leave Vera Scott Cushman and Moorland Lodge far behind; it turns out that Cushman went on to live at Avalon out on the Drive, which in turn became the Van Alen estate, which in turn is what swallowed up Wrentham House and put it under a spell for decades…which means that Moorland Lodge & Wrentham House are sort of like distant long-lost cousins, reunited by their present day Lila Delman-client status. Or how about Berry Hill, next door to Moorland Lodge? Prior to being Moorland Lodge, a structure belonging to the Berry Hill estate stood in that location, although whether the earlier building was demolished to make way for Moorland Lodge, or was just radically rebuilt & enlarged is an open question. But either way, it would seem there’s a family connection of sorts.

Postscript. I’d finished writing this blog, but hadn’t yet pulled the photos so I could publish it, when I came across an old 2007 issue of Food & Wine magazine a few weeks ago. It had been floating around the back of my car ever since, and the other evening I finally got around to bringing it inside. I set it down on my kitchen table and casually glanced down at the label on the cover, and what I saw froze my blood. It was addressed to an occupant at 17 Chestnut Street, a house I had just listed two days before.

I rest my case.

Back to the future

A few weeks ago I attended a Newport city council meeting, held for the purposes of reviewing the Historic District Commission’s task force recommendations on how best to improve &/or streamline the city’s historic preservation procedures. During the course of the discussion, several of the participants expressed concern about new preservation guidelines potentially impacting owners of non-historic properties, which as near as I can tell gets defined around here as being anything built after 1940. Why, it was asked, should the owners of undistinguished, dated buildings like 1950’s ranch houses be subjected to the same preservation standards as the owners of important historic Victorian or Colonial homes? Why couldn’t they be exempted? Why did they have to suffer the same amount of fuss and expense and oversight that dogs the owners of more historically prestigious buildings?

A couple of days later, by chance, I had to go see my dentist, whose office is over on Gibbs Ave. He’s a smart man – film buff, Buddhist, Obama fan - and I always enjoy talking to him, even if it is usually just about my teeth. Anyhow, on my way over, I noticed some construction taking place a few doors down from him. For as long as I’ve lived in Newport that particular lot has been occupied by a large, low, clean-lined and expensive looking brick ranch house. Now two new bombastic, view-blocking McMansions were rising up out of the dirt instead. Too bad, I said to him, that they had to tear down that house on the corner. He laughed. Oh, it doesn’t matter, he said, it was just a 50’s ranch.

Does nobody in this town GET that today’s 50’s ranches are tomorrow’s historic properties? Today’s present is tomorrow’s history. We are tearing down the future’s past. Fifty years from now these buildings will no longer be ranch houses, they’ll be Ranch Houses, and people will be snapping up what few are left standing and restoring them to within an inch of their lives. Not to mention selling them for a lot of money. The 50’s ranch speaks to and is expressive of its own historical moment as surely as Colonial houses represent the 1700’s or Victorian houses reveal the 1800’s.

The pattern of architectural destruction is dismally predictable…Throughout the 19th century Colonial buildings beyond number were torn down because they didn’t conform to the new aesthetic standards of the Victorian era. Then the Victorian buildings got torn down because they didn’t conform to the more modernist standards of the 20th century. When I was a child I used to hear otherwise intelligent & sophisticated people speak approvingly about tearing down those “hideous old Victorian piles”. Down with the Victorians! Down with the Colonists! Down with the past! Then when I got to Newport in the late 1970’s, the old workers cottages of the early century were the excrescence requiring immediate removal. Now the mid-20th century buildings are what’s being torn down. Meanwhile, the buildings that have managed to survive this ongoing architectural auto-de-fe are being breathlessly restored and preserved, from whence they will be traded on the real estate market with the kind of fervor inspired in children by Pokémon cards. It makes my head spin just to think about it.

Because the bottom line is this: the vast majority of these “historic houses” – whether Colonial, Victorian, or Early 20th – have no actual intrinsic historic value other than the fact of their survival of the wrecking ball. They are significant only in that they managed to escape the destruction that eliminated so many of their peers. Most are not architectural masterpieces. Washington didn’t sleep there. They were homes built by and for tradespeople, the middle class, the everyday Joe. They were small shops, farms, schoolhouses, vacation places. The vast majority were not designed by architects, but were simply erected by builders and carpenters with absolutely no artistic agenda in mind, just a job to do. A great deal of what we are so frantically trying to preserve is nothing more than the vernacular architecture of previous eras. Indisputably our sense of our own past would be immeasurably poorer without these buildings. So why are we so determined to deprive the future of us?

Ten hopeful signs of spring

1. January glacier recedes from memory

2. Cadbury crème eggs display at the register in CVS

3. Snowdrops poking out of the thawing dirt

4. Evil army of Marshmallow Peeps invades local stores

5. Parking ticket on your windshield

6. Proliferation of Canadian geese

7. Welcome back skunks and raccoons!

8. Resident parking stickers on sale at City Hall
9. Wall of flip-flops at Old Navy

And last but not least…

10. PASTA BEACH now open for the season!!

The art of empty houses

Susan Gustavson’s recent post about modern & contemporary art reminded me all over again what it is that I love best about art: how it compels you to see the everyday in a completely new light. All art does this to some extent, but contemporary art – because it lacks much of the pre-conceived intellectual baggage of “historical” art - can be particularly good at surprising you into it. The wonderful thing is that the experience then becomes a ball rolling down hill, and everything starts to look startling and new.

When I first started studying art history, I spent a lot of time looking at art & at art images, and that way of seeing – the looking at art way - soon began to bleed into my regular life. I’d be walking around town not thinking about much of anything, and all of a sudden the Platonic ideas behind the everyday forms would come screaming out at me. The essential truth of a row of rooftops would suddenly be revealed; they were an endless series of intersecting triangles. A random assortment of buildings would be reduced to nothing more than great big blocks of color. A branch bending over a sidewalk would bisect a familiar scene, turning regular houses and driveways into components of an elaborate diagonal composition, and the clouds overhead were perpetually morphing into fantastically complex shapes, like the designs on Persian tiles. It got to the point where the vision switch became so intrusive that I actually wondered if I was going crazy, but eventually I just stopped worrying about it. And after awhile my perceptions adjusted and I settled down. But I miss it, miss the intensity and freshness of that kind of seeing.

So I’m a fan of anything that can temporarily restore it to me, which is why I found myself driving to the MFA up in Boston last month to see the Rachel Whiteread show. For those who are unfamiliar with her, Rachel Whiteread is a British sculptor who uses what is usually regarded as negative space – often in an architectural context - as her subject matter. Sounds complicated, but it isn’t. Simply put, she makes plaster casts of empty space. An early piece of hers, “House, consisted of her filling a derelict London building with cement and then stripping away the shell of the building, leaving a solid concrete cast of the empty space inside. Empty space became densely full, dense matter disappeared, reality was seen backwards, as if in a mirror. Much of what she does involves the space found within boxes, containers, architectural space. How often do we see the empty space we spend our lives inhabiting? For those of us who are realtors, how often do we seriously reflect upon the nature of the empty spaces we sell, or think about the voids that constitute our primary product?

Her installation that I went to at the MFA differed from her usual work in that the empty spaces stayed empty. What she did was to take hundreds of old dollhouses and fill them with light. The interior of every house was completely empty, save for the light, which became in effect a kind of sculptural soft cast of the interior voids. House after house, all glowing, all empty, piled on empty wooden packing crates, hillsides, towns, cities of them. Solid empty space made visible. I’ll never look at a street of empty houses in the same way again. And that, I think, is a good thing.

Fountain of Life

When I first moved up to Newport from Miami, almost thirty years ago, the one single place I recall making the biggest impression on me was Spring Street. We didn’t HAVE streetscapes like that in Miami. Beaches we had. Tourists we had. Big fancy houses and traffic and large showy boats and rich seasonal inhabitants we had. But Spring Street? This was something new under my personal sun…this was out & out exotica to me.

Then as now, every building was quirky in its own way and every building hailed from a different era. A tiny little 19th century artist’s cottage stood in the shadow of Trinity Church, which was itself a product of the early 1700s. A clump of grand mid-17th century houses rubbed elbows with wood frame storefront commercial buildings from the late 1800s, the second & third floors of which had long since devolved into rental apartments. An exuberantly, eccentrically shingled Dudley Newton house faced off with a utilitarian looking locksmith shop that appeared to have been there since George Washington was in office. Buildings from all eras were jammed together, all mixed up, incongruously thrown together like some demented jazz riff on three centuries of American vernacular architecture. That first summer I was here, I remember being stuck in Spring St’s merciless summer traffic somewhere between Church and Mary Streets and seeing it, REALLY seeing it for the first time, and thinking to myself, “My god - this is absolutely amazing”. Thirty years later, that same stretch of Spring St still manages to inspire in me a frisson of that original feeling.

Spring Street has been there for getting on close to three hundred years now. An essential component of Newport from the town’s inception in 1639, Spring Street was so-called because it terminated in the town spring, the waters of which still travel underground, out of sight, somewhere beneath Coffey’s Citgo Station. That now-invisible and forgotten spring was why Newport’s founders chose the site in the first place, and why it was able to prosper as a settlement; their 17th century equation was brutally simple = no drinking water, no town. That spring was literally the Fountain of Life for early Newport, and the movement of its swirling waters is still eerily somehow visible in the traffic patterns behind the courthouse - all roads leading inexorably towards that center spot, cars restlessly & centrifugally circling, like water rushing down a drain. I never pass the spot without thinking how far we’ve come…and how little has changed.

Castle of dreams

Browsing through the antiques at the Armory on Thames Street has long been one of my most dependable emotional pick-me-ups. To wander through the jumbled aisles of time definitely helps to put things in perspective. That cracked china plate? There’s a story hidden in its chipped surface, a story about other people, other times, other lives, other possibilities. It’s a concentrated version of the same thing that imbues historic places with their healing power. Hard to feel like you and your problems are at the center of the universe when you’re staring at the Great Pyramid of Giza…or the Coliseum…or Newport’s Friends Meeting House or the Old Stone Mill, for that matter. Historical places have a comfort-factor built right into their fabric, and a place like the Armory, filled to the brim with the survived detritus of the past, has it in spades. Yes, I know…as an activity, technically, going there probably DOES qualify as “shopping”, but the good news is that you don’t need to buy anything to reap the benefits. Like meditation, you can do it for what you’ll get out of it, or you can just do it with no thought of gain. For those of you who like to read, I offer the following bookwormish analogy: the experience triggers the same kind of light trance state brought on by a good book.

So. You head over, you arrive. The building itself looks exactly like a fortified castle. The only thing that’s missing is the moat. I find that highly satisfying. And symbolically it validates the entire experience. What do you expect to find in a castle? Treasure, that’s what. The out of the ordinary, that’s what else. Anything you buy in a castle has automatically got to be better than anything you get anyplace else, and even more to the point, anything you find in a castle is, by definition, NOT a piece of junk. Value, safety, strength. Talk about crucial messages for anyone selling anything to impart! From the moment the big heavy front doors crash shut behind you, you know you’re safe. Bring on that fantasy! Safe from crowds, safe from being ripped off, dealings, safe from boredom. Safe from loneliness. Safe from pain. Just plain safe.

From there on in I give myself over to the aimless, meditative joy of drifting through time's back alleys. Say I spot an old alarm clock from the 20’s. How did it get here? Who did it once wake up and where did they go each morning? That daguerreotype, why does that woman look so sad, that man so severe? What yachtsman did that oyster plate feed? That old doll – that rusty fire truck - where are their owners now? To what cemetery did those childhoods lead? Dance cards, cruise ship menus, faded postcards trivial (having a great time, wish you were here) and profound (we left Scituate hard at dawn, & I wept inconsolably all the way to NY), old doorknobs and keys and pond boats…autographed Elvis photos, braided hair brooches, oil lanterns, gimbaled compasses, hand painted carousel animals hewn out oak, heavy as iron…Here you’ll find all the ephemera that fills up our human lives, but disconnected and out of context, like a kaleidoscopic surrealist assemblage. Holy relics all, alive & still sparking. And so many of them, so many, it stuns. In these disjointed, discarded objects resides whatever remains of the “real” Newport, and to wander amongst them and their incoherent tales is to understand, at last, the complexity and strangeness of where you are.

Studies in Pessimism

It’s rough out there. Staying positive can present a bit of a challenge these days, especially if you are, like me, of a naturally melancholic bent to begin with. Billion dollar bailouts. Terrorist attacks. Dwindling retirement accounts. Falling home prices. And that’s just out there in the macrocosm. Here in my own personal little microcosm, conditions aren’t a whole lot better. One friend is on the verge of losing her house to foreclosure. A former co-worker from the NYYC committed suicide last month. Evils big and little seem to be multiplying exponentially all around me, like a cartoon snowball careening down a hill, growing huger & more avalanche-like as it picks up speed. Christmas is coming. My bank account never looked worse. My cat is still missing. My 52nd birthday looms. My weight is not what it should be. My houses aren’t selling. Another turn of the snowball. Add some self-doubt to the equation. What had I accomplished with my life? My achievements felt, well…small, my contributions paltry, my significance negligible. The upbeat approach was fast becoming a thing of the past, a speck in the distance.

So there was nothing else for it - it was time for a trip to the bookstore. When my internal settings need adjusting, only a bookstore can fix me. A conflicted agnostic, I don’t have a church. A therapy drop-out, I don’t have a therapist. I do, however, have a bookstore right down the street. So it was there I turned my trudging steps towards.

It’s been a bad decade for bookstores on the island, and the Newport ones have been steadily disappearing ever since the Barnes & Noble opened in Middletown several years ago. The sole exception has been Kelley’s Books, on the corner of Broadway and Malbone. A used bookstore on a busy street without so much as a parking lot, Kelley’s is an unlikely candidate for role of sole survivor, but there you have it. Used books, bent covers, poor overhead lighting. No lattes are served, no fresh mozzarella & pesto panini are available, no cds or greeting cards or magazines are sold. The inventory isn’t computerized, the proprietor tracks his customers on hand printed index cards he keeps in a dented metal box under the register and the background music isn’t even Muzak – there’s just a staticky radio tuned to a classical music FM station. Kelley’s is an un-hip throwback to a time when the only reason you went to a bookstore was to look for books, period. Even better, since it’s a used bookstore, your finds are pretty much dictated by chance and serendipity. Any pre-planned agenda is pointless; the only way to go is to abdicate all pretense at control and just browse, drift with the tides. And maybe it is precisely this not having to be in mental control that is the sweet secret reward of a visit to the bookstore. What a relief to not have to be responsible for your own consciousness, even just temporarily… In fact, now that I think about it, it’s probably safe to say that just about all of my vices tend in that direction. Farewell, self!

But back to the books. Instead of finding what you’re looking for, you’ll find what you weren’t looking for, and sometimes what you didn’t even know existed. Did I need a book on three modern Icelandic poets? I didn’t even know Iceland had any modern poets. Did I walk in there in search of yet another copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson? Nah. Did I have any intention of settling down with a good re-read of Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism? Nope. But no way could I resist the gloriously self-pitying melodrama of his opening line, to wit, “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” Bitter words, fighting words, succinctly if mordantly put, and so completely over the top that I burst out laughing, right there in the aisle.

So if you’re feeling the pain of the season, I suggest you hie yourself over to Kelley’s for a dose of righteous attitude readjustment. Forget real estate. Forget the economy. Forget your mortgage and your car payment and your tax problems. Lose yourself in the stacks. Flip through an art book. Check out the science fiction. Pull out that classic you’ve always been meaning to read. You’ll be chuckling along with Schopenhauer in no time.

SoBo, NoBo, NewBo

Thirty years ago, when I first moved to Newport, the whole Broadway neighborhood was so rundown and un-hip it virtually constituted another universe. Think downtown Fall River. Think Central Falls. Unless you needed to go to Newport City Hall on some mind-blowingly boring errand, there just wasn’t much point in getting out of the car. Of course if for some reason you didn’t have a car – say you were visiting from out of town – chances were you would probably have needed to utilize Broadway’s derelict & boarded up Bonanza Bus Terminal once in a while. There you could drop your bags, slump wearily onto a filthy plastic seat, and enjoy a cigarette amidst the exhaust fumes of the occasional bus while you watched a slow parade of defeated-looking fellow travelers – a number of whom could be counted upon to be drinking deeply from crumpled brown paper bags - shuffle by you in order to make use of the public restrooms.

For those of us who lived in town and did have transportation, there was less reason to go. Once in a blue moon it might have been necessary to stop at the Salvation Army to donate no-longer-wearable clothes. If you had the kind of job that required you to wear canvas overalls and steel-toed work boots, perhaps periodically you would have gone to Carellas’ Shoe Store to re-outfit yourself. If were hung over and not in the mood to run into anyone you knew at lunch, you could always join the municipal work crews for a burger and a bag of chips at the Star Lunch counter, an establishment whose customer base seemed to consist almost entirely of men, ardent devotees of anonymity and heavy smokers all. Gas was still being pumped at the Gulf station. Litter swirled around on the sidewalks like tumbleweed on the desert, at least until midwinter, when the dirty unshoveled snow held it firmly in place until spring. When a small, unimposing Chinese restaurant finally opened up across the street from City Hall in the mid-late 1980s, it was NEWS. The unspoken consensus on the part of the locals was that the modest but clean Dragon Express added some much needed tone to the neighborhood.

That was the neighborhood. Grimly utilitarian, a Flint Michigan of the soul, the kind of place that could throw you into an existential funk faster than a Bob Dylan tune. Which is why Broadway’s SoBo, NoBo, NewBo transformation of the past decade or so astounds me still. The turning point was when they tore down the old bus station and built the new police station in its stead. Then the Salvation Army store caught fire, burning to the ground, damaging neighboring businesses and emptying surrounding storefronts. In came the pioneers. First was the funky, grunge-inspired Salvation Café, which set the eclectic/alternative standard for much of what followed. Tucker’s Bistro. Norey’s Café. Island Arts. Portobellos. Pop. Spark. Freaky Burrito. Pour Judgement. Artists began to hang around, then moved in. Real estate started happening, buildings were re-habbed, condo conversions took place. Little white twinkle lights started going up in the trees. Restaurants started putting in window boxes and setting tables on the sidewalks.
It was crazy!

All of a sudden, this moribund neighborhood was exploding with youthful energy. Who were these people? Newporters. People – many of them just kids - with ideas & business plans & tons of energy who were attracted by cheap rents and undeterred by the prospect of failure, people who actually found the depressing nature of the area exhilaratingly authentic and used it as the raw material for something altogether different, something distinctly alive. It’s more than just urban renewal, it’s psychic energy in action; Broadway has become Newport’s collective response to a downtown core that has grown maniacally tourist-centered and more and more inhospitable to its year-round residents. What these businesses have given us isn’t so much goods and services as a town itself, a town that tourism almost took away. And what they’ve made is really, when you get right down to it, not a commercial district at all but an anti-wharf, a secession from the prevailing mind-set: a place for, by and about locals.

A life in crime

Abandoned houses have long exerted a peculiar fascination over me. When I was three, we moved from our house in Brooklyn to a quiet suburban neighborhood which had a “haunted house” located diagonally across the street from us. If I stood at our front door, it was one of the first things I saw, and I never contemplated it without a shudder. As a derelict building, it was a classic of its kind – crumbling red brick, broken windows, graffiti, overgrown lawn, an obligatory “For Sale” sign, the works. The place was of course a magnet for every beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, making-out teenager within a 10 block radius. At night you’d see the flickering yellow lights of matches being struck or flashlight beams bouncing dementedly around., a sight that did not inspire confidence in my three year old mind. And sometimes there were…sounds…voices. Who knew what was going on in there?

Gentle reader, you must know where I’m going with this…One day, a couple of my friends organized an expeditionary break-in. Filled with fear and trembling, but in the grips of an irresistible compulsion, I followed them in. Next thing I knew, I was running out screaming my head off like a victim in a horror movie. What transpired in between I have no idea; where that memory should be is a total black-out. Was I transported to the mother ship? Is that when the probe got implanted in my brain?

Could be.

But the experience – whatever it actually was – failed to break me. Five years later, me and my friend Eileen Jones were gleefully breaking into an abandoned carriage house. First we had to grapple our way hand over hand up the twisty ropes of ivy totally obscuring the facade, and then we had to squeeze ourselves in between the long pointy shards of broken glass of an open second story window. It was tough getting in there, let me tell you. Ivy Cottage, we called it. Off-limits, is what my mother called it. Too bad for her, I grew up. Or at least grew more careful.

Because once you get a taste of that B&E frisson, it’s hard to give it up. Just like how for some people, smoking that first joint plunges them directly into the ravages of heroin addiction, or an innocent sip of their Dad’s beer is the irrevocable step #1 leading them straight into the heart of the worst kind of Bowery-bum type alcoholism, some of us should NEVER be allowed to get that first taste. Because it didn’t stop with Ivy Cottage. Next it was Horman’s Castle on Howard Avenue. The Staten Island Monastery, also on Howard Avenue. The old Gramatan Hotel in Bronxville. An abandoned factory in White Plains. The University of Miami’s Experimental Agriculture Lab.

Now I’m a realtor and I can enter abandoned buildings at will, without having to worry about being arrested. Other people actually unlock the doors for me, hand me keys, give me the lockbox codes. Do they understand who they’re dealing with? Evidently not. So lots has changed. But one thing hasn’t. Every unopened door still holds out a promise for me, a mystery that dangles just out of reach. It’s like getting the answer to a question you didn’t even know you had. For a second, opening that door feels like it has the potential to change everything. It’s huge, that moment when your hand is on the knob and you feel the door push open. Because anything could lie on the other side. Anything.

Sheep may safely graze

Reality is in short supply these days, and nowhere is that more true than in Newport, a town that makes it’s living by celebrating - and selling - its own history. Or versions of it. From Queen Anne Square (a fiction from top to bottom) to the beautiful but unfortunately reproduction 4500 square foot “colonial” McMansions to the quaintly cobblestoned “wharf” areas (a Timberland store is in keeping with the historical record of the wharves? I think not), the lies are so deftly intertwined with the truths that it sometimes seems like I live in some kind of Truman Show of the collective mind. What’s real? What isn’t? Even us townies can’t always tell.

Take for example Queen Anne Square, that bucolic & totally quintessential New England town green. There’s the perfect whitewashed steepled church…there’s the grassy commons…there’s the ring of centuries old houses and shops surrounding it. Can’t you just see the flock of sheep crossing it, bells sonorously a-twinkle? It’s all so perfect. So post-cardish. So exactly what you’d expect to find. And so totally fake.

Historically, Newport never had a commons or a town green – in fact, that was pretty much the whole point of the place. Towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had town greens featuring a church at one end because they were theocracies in which every facet of life was dictated by or organized around the Congregational Church. In contrast, Newport – and the rest of Rhode Island – was founded by renegades & exiles from that Puritan society, dissenters who opposed those autocratic beliefs with their very lives, who hacked their way down here through an Indian-filled wilderness all the way from Boston in order to institute their very radical, very utopian, “lively experiment”. Their goal was to found a community that was NOT organized around a single church, but in which worshippers of ALL faiths were welcome. Puritans. Jews. Quakers. Baptists. It’s the one single moment in this state’s history of which we can all feel unreservedly proud. No single church would be allowed to dominate in Rhode Island. The point of Newport was that there wasn’t a town green.

Except of course now there is. Queen Anne’s Square appeared about 40 years ago under the aegis of an urban redevelopment plan. The area in front of Trinity Church was bulldozed of dozens of old buildings, buildings consisting of exactly the kind of real “historical reality” that we’re all so sanctimonious about these days, and in its place, voila! An insta-green was created. And as if that weren’t enough to confuse everybody, this Disneyesque stage set was ringed with authentic 18th century buildings, a reinforcing of the false by means of exploiting the true, and then the whole illusion was cemented into place – rather brilliantly, actually - by branding the result of these efforts “Queen Anne’s Square”, a name of which effectively conjures up misty, vaguely Shakesperean images, of simple English folk wearing big white ruffs, wimples, leather helmets, big-buckled shoes. Sheep on the green.

But let’s not get too down on the enterprise. The entire construction reveals a lot more about the values of the 20th century than it does about the 18th. So I say, let’s keep it around. We’ve actually managed to create an artifact of ourselves for future generations, if they can only manage to sort through all the conflicting messages and layers of meaning - and if we can only manage to resist the temptation to tweak the truth just a little more.

The grammar of money

That $700 billion dollar bailout… the first question everyone wants to know is, “will it work?” Actually, that’s probably really only the second or third question. For just about all of us, the number #1 question is, “what should I do with MY money?” At least that’s the question that’s been on my mind these days. To all of you who’ve been asking the same thing, I have only one suggestion to make: Spend it. And hurry. What are you waiting for?

I went out and bought a ruby ring last week. Heck, why not? My 401K lost $6000 in a single day last week – what am I hanging on to the money for? Six thousand dollars. I could have gone to Europe, gotten a face lift, put a flat screen TV in every room of my house, bought Manolos & Jimmy Choos & Louis Vuitton handbags. I could have gotten a dozen Botox treatments. I could have put down the money on a BMW, like all the rest of you realtors are driving, and scrapped the whole dinged-up Toyota Echo aesthetic. But no. I had to “save” it. I had to “invest” it. I thought I could make my money “work” for me. The mistake was mine. I believed that money could act like a verb. It can’t. Money is a noun, and nouns are what it does best. Real estate. Jewels. Cars. Vacations. Treat it like a concept & it’ll act like a concept, shifting ephemerally with every breeze. Treat it like the material object that it is, and it’ll reward you with other material objects. Concrete things. Solid, tangible pieces of actual reality. It’s simple, really.

So go out and buy that big house. Test drive that brand-new car. Speak to me, Harry Winston. Because I’ve learned my lesson, and learned it the good old-fashioned hard way. You CAN’T take it with you. And what a relief, at long last to finally be able to stop trying.

That Old Black Magic

Do you sometimes need a little help? I know I do. That’s why I got so excited when Erzulie’s Authentic Voodoo Shop, over on Franklin Street, opened earlier this year – thank god, I said to myself, at last there’s a pipeline to major supernatural powers right here in town. No more dithering around with those weak & ineffective mainstream religions. It takes the Black Arts to sell real estate in this market! Naturally, I immediately ran over there to check it out.

One thing you should know right off the bat, if you go: Don’t touch anything. I mean it. There are stern signs all over the shop commanding you not to. If you want to pick anything up, open a book, examine an object, sniff an essential oil or a soap or a candle, go to the “sample tables” in the back room. Non-compliance with this rule will earn you a brusque, whats-the-matter-with-you-can’t-you-read type of scolding from Anna, the proprietress, a gorgeous, red-headed goddess-type who, for some obscure reason, goes by the moniker, “Root Queen”. I was an immediate fan of her you-idiot approach to the buying public, and if you’ve ever spent five minutes behind a cash register, you’ll be too. A no-nonsense, early thirties-something type, Anna is the brains behind the whole operation, with shops in New Orleans and London and now Newport, RI. In whatever that leaves her for downtime, she’s also a practicing Voodoo priestess, and claims to be able to voodoo-istically help you with ANYTHING. That’s right, ANYTHING.

Tempting, no?

But for those not yet quite ready to turn their lives, their hearts, and their immortal souls over to the Root Queen, Erzulies offers plenty of items for the do-it-yourselfer. Wangas (what’s that you ask? I say, go in yourself & find out!), voodoo dolls (what the heck, I bought two, Papa Legba & Sirena), fetishes, charm bags, handcrafted oils and essences, ritual candles, and several truly fabulous sequined cult flags from Haiti, works of art in themselves and serious dream finds for the ethnographic collector. I don’t know if it’s magic-magic, but it sure is shopping magic; Eurzalie’s is probably the most interesting new store to open in Newport in years. And top it all off with a resident high priestess who can disappear all your troubles and you’re talking about a force to be reckoned with…!

The tower of power

The symbol of Rhode Island par excellance has for me always been the Old Stone Mill. When I was growing up, in New York, for many years my mother - whose father's family came from Newport - had a Newport souvenir letter holder/bucket-y sort of thing on her desk in the bedroom, and decoupaged on its side was a misty, greenish image of the Old Stone Mill. Whenever I would go into her bedroom to fiddle around with the things on her desk, I used to examine it closely, in the curious and accepting way of children, wondering to myself WHAT exactly was being depicted, although I can't recall it ever actually occurring to me to ask about it. The letter holder just sort of sat there, day in, day out, one of the insoluble mysteries of the adult world that would one day stand revealed in all it's glory to me.

That day is now here. Yikes. It's almost like that letter holder foretold my future. For the past 30 years, there probably hasn't been a day in my life that I haven't driven past the real Old Stone Mill, ensconced there in all its legend-shrouded glory behind it's railing in Touro Park.

Like all good symbols, the Old Stone Mill has always succeeded in being all things to all people. Pick your romance. Viking raiding tower. Remains of a Portuguese settlement. New England Stonehenge. Native American meeting place. Colonial windmill. Each successive Newport generation has had its own version of the Old Stone Mill. A thousand years from now they'll probably be interpreting it as a cell phone tower. These days archaeologists and scholars are convinced that the mill was originally a wind-powered grinding mill, built by Governor Benedict Arnold in the 1660's; back then it would have been faced with "parjet", a stucco-like covering, & would have had a large wooden superstructure that connected the wind-driven sails to an enormous grindstone within. Nowadays the only things moving inside are the indefatigable flocks of pigeons that call the place home, but in Arnold's day the area would have been a hub of bustle and activity, supporting a lifestyle most of us can barely imagine (grinding corn? when was the last time you needed to do that?).

But whatever the Old Stone Mill once was, it has the amazing quality of having survived all the intervening centuries, and moreover of connecting us to them and to ourselves and to the stories that are important to us. Behind that black wrought iron railing in Touro Park, link upon link pile up, some meaningless, some not, the past, the present, the real, the imaginary, all jumbled together. The Vikings. Portuguese dreams of exploration and conquest. The flickering flames of a Native American camp. Governor Arnold- progenitor of the notorious & much later Benedict Arnold - cutting his way up through the trees and the brush, from his roughly clapboarded house on Thames St to what is now Bellevue Avenue. The actual truth matters far less than these other, more symbolic realities. I look at the tower and for a second I'm carried back into my own distant past, a little girl again, with a letter holder in my hands. The sails might be gone, but the wheel still turns.

Phone duty in Newport

Phone duty. Ever wonder about the people who call in?

This afternoon a man called up inquiring about a couple of properties listed on Ocean Ave in Newport. He introduced himself & said he was here on vacation from D.C. and just driving around. Looking at houses, had a few questions...which of course were about the usual suspects, Sandcastle and Wrentham House. Anyhow, we chatted a little, and he suddenly interrupted whatever it was we were talking about and said, "Excuse me, but can I ask you a serious question?". Well OK, sure. "Well then," he continued, "do you have alligators here in RI?"

I assured him that we didn't.

"Oh, but I think you do," he pressed on, "because there's a huge alligator right here in the road in front of me - Jeez, it must be 15 or 16 ft long...! Wait, now it's sliding into the Cove...there it goes!"

I was speechless. Yet right up until then he'd sounded so...normal. Who was he? For that matter, who are any of these people we talk to? Was this guy some kind of nut case? An urban myth disinformation terrorist? An actual eyewitness to a 15 foot alligator roaming up and down Ocean Drive? Do you know how BIG a 15 foot alligator is? That's practically Guiness Book of World Records material - I don't think they even get that big in the jungles of South America, that's huge.

So. That was my day. How was YOUR last phone shift?

Renovating the HDC from the inside out

For many years now, the City of Newport's Historic District Commission has been the bane of the existence of those who own property in the neighborhoods within the Commission's jurisdiction. The absence of any real qualifying professional standards for Commission members, the utter lack of clear guidelines, an arbitrary, capricious, and nepotistic approach to enforcement, application & fee structures without rhyme or reason, and of course, the hell of having to sit through interminable Commission meetings, waiting for your name to be called in order that you might present your "case" for replacing that old window in your garage or rebuild your front steps - these are to name just a few of the procedural inequities that have turned this initially laudable effort at architectural preservation into a mind-blowingly hateful experience that smacks of Big Brother. Untold hundreds of Newport property owners have suffered untold annoyances at the hands of these fools. The received wisdom around town was that if your interior decorator or your contractor or your next door neighbor didn't sit on the HDC, you were pretty much out of luck.

But hopefully, all that is about to change. Late last spring the City Council empaneled a task force whose purpose is to review and REVISE the historic district ordinance. This task force - which has been meeting regularly several times a month - is comprised of a group of selected residents with professional backgrounds in the fields of architecture, building, history, preservation, and law. That group subsequently split into several sub-committees, which have been meeting once a week. All of the meetings are posted and open to the public. Save for the committee members themselves, the meetings are invariably poorly attended. Come on, folks! For all of you who've been complaining about the workings of the HDC - or have ever complained in the past - this is your big chance to help these hard-working volunteers set things right, finally and once and for all.

in praise of the vernacular

Prior to entering real estate, I was a total architecture snob. I couldn't imagine myself being interested in any kind of house other than an authentic & historic colonial - or a romantic Victorian, with a light & shade streaked porch & a polychrome slate roof - or possibly something in a clean looking McKim, Mead & White-ish colonial revival idiom. In other words, I yearned for something classic, pedigreed, and expressive of my values. However, life being the great teacher that it is, no sooner did I enter real estate than I found myself knee deep in ranch houses. Ranch houses. And not just any ranch houses, but ranches from the 60's and 70's, houses of that exact period & style that I'd always disdained as exemplifying the worst kind of vernacular architectural banality that there is. Yet here I suddenly was, expected not only to like them but to SELL them. Whatever, I told myself as I waded in, whatever.

Now, six months later, I'm a fan. Because what I've discovered in that time is that the ranch houses I've been dealing with provide me with something far more essential than sophistication or image - they feel like home, pure & simple. I grew up in the 60's. My friends & relatives lived in houses like these. There's a heady combination of vague smells in these house - the smell of thickish plaster & waxed hardwoods & dusty screens, of Old National Geographics & Readers Digests, smells redolent of boring Sunday afternoons & interminable family dinners - smells that seamlessly blend into the one single uber-aroma pervading my entire childhood; it's the smell of a thousand and one people, places & things I'll never see again.

So there's that. Then too, there's that hunkered down feeling of safety inherent in the low rooflines - kind of like huddling under an umbrella - that's as satisfying as playing under the dining room table on a rainy day. An attenuation in length that makes these one-story & split-levels seem more firmly entrenched in the ground, more truly dug in. Practical, no-nonsense structures, the design of which spells safety - comfort - shelter - as elemental as a house made out of wooden blocks. No doubt all these subliminal impressions are fueled by some last surviving vestigial remnant in me of childhood's most comforting illusion, the belief that hiding somewhere in the wings is a competent and sensible adult, efficiently running the whole show. Someone capable & trustworthy is in charge. Thank God. And would we all that it were so. Because of course, in the end it turns out there is only us.

So like I said, I'm a fan. I find myself looking forward to visiting and showing these house like you'd look forward to a visit to a spa, or a drink, or 10 milligrams of Valium after a long & brutal day. I can feel my blood pressure go down the second I push open the front door. And it's helped me recognize that what maybe I'm really looking for, as I endlessly search for the "perfect" house, is not an actual dwelling place, but rather a long-denied psychic balm for this one weary, middle-aged soul.

The miracle of real estate

Ok, riddle me this all you more experienced agents: What is the scoop on the whole burying of St. Joseph upside down? What does it mean? Why upside down? Everyone seemingly has a different take on it...Some say it started with St. Theresa burying St Joseph medals on a parcel of land her convent was trying to buy; others claim that it's because St. Joseph is the patron saint of homes and carpenters. Others claim it has nothing to do with the saint at all, that the efficaciousness is the result of the prayers sent heavenwards while the little burial ceremony is taking place. It FEELS like it might be an Italian-American thing, although I don't have any proof. But the Italians are big on St. Joseph...very, very big.

My own brush with the phenomenon came not as a realtor, but as a seller. My boyfriend Ron put his house on the market last summer, and it promptly languished there for the next 6 months, without even a flicker of interest from the outside world. By January we were beginning to feel desperate. He'd gotten a St. Joseph statue as a joke stocking stuffer for Christmas, and one day I thought to myself, "Oh, why the heck not?" and went out there and buried it in the front yard. Two weeks later the house was under contract.

Lynn Freeland swears by the St. Joseph miracle, although distressingly, just the other day, she informed me that you have to dig the statue back up afterwards. Uh oh. Who knew? Not me - mine is still buried by the front steps of Ron's old house. Am I headed for disaster? It's kind of worrying, since the good magic so obviously DID work...and I can only conclude that any reversal of its power will be equally effective, devastatingly so.

Investment advice from a poor realtor

My friend Erica has been house hunting, and so every Monday we have a standing date to go out and look at the cheapest, most "value"- laden properties in Newport - you know, the ugly places that are truly great deals if you can get beyond the 30 or 40 thousand it would take to make them even remotely do-able from an aesthetic standpoint. And what an education THAT'S been...there's a low-end smorgasbord going on here right under our noses!

People keep saying sort of vaguely that "this is a great time to buy" - we'll I'm here to tell you they're not lying, it IS. When Erica first started her search 5 months ago, there was not even ONE single- family house to be had for under $260,000, but now there's a whole bouquet of them to choose from and that list is seemingly expanding daily. This week we saw an almost 1600 square foot house, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, built in 1900, full basement, updated electrical, slate roof, reasonable neighborhood, big yard that was listed for exactly $250 - and that's asking price, you know it'll go for less - right here in Newport. It was ugly as sin of course, but the defects were all cosmetic - green vinyl siding, mucho fake wood panelling - and underneath that unfortunate appearance, all the things that counted looked to be rock-solid. Erica ultimately decided she didn't want to live there, but what an investment for the right person. If I weren't a starving realtor I'd buy it myself...

Who you gonna call?

For the past week or so I have been living the lost pet nightmare. My cat, Neeve-peeve, is missing. He's a tiny, scrappy, dark gray & white tabby, and his eyes are almost completely clouded over with what appear to be cataracts, but which is actually a congenital defect of both of his inner eyelids. His vision has GOT to be compromised, but its never seemed to slow him down any. Certainly it never stopped him from tearing up the front walk and flinging himself at the screen on the front porch, where he'd hang like Velcro Cat, peering into the house until one of us would finally have to go outside & painstakingly pry him off, sharp little claw by sharp little claw. The screen now looks as if it's been sprayed by gunfire.

My search for Neeve has taken me to many places this week. I've wandered everywhere calling & calling him - contacted the animal control officer - put posters up all over town - dropped flyers in every mailbox within a 3 block radius - brought posters in to every vetinarian's office on the island - and of course, I've been out to the Potter Shelter in Middletown several times.

If you live on Aquidneck Island and have a missing animal, the Potter Shelter is who you call/where you go, plain and simple. It's pretty much the only real resource we have. We should all be grateful it exists. I adopted my last two dogs from the Potter Shelter - Dexter & the incomparable Zoe - and two of my cats passed through there on their way to me as well.

Staffed mainly by volunteers and funded primarily by donations, this no-kill shelter (their official name is the Robert Potter League for Animals) has been helping save lost and abandoned animals since its inception in1929. Their efforts deserve our deepest support. I was there the day before yesterday to drop off a photo of Neeve, and as I stood at the counter, tears in my eyes, waiting for the desk volunteer to get off the phone, I had this epiphany...these people & this organization have been directly impacting my life & impacting it for the better ever since I got to Newport. I think I may need to start doing something for them. Because when you get right down to it, when the chips are down for YOUR pet, who else are you gonna call?

Laborare est orare

Newport preservation question du jour: Why has the Belmont Chapel at Island Cemetery been allowed to slip into such an appalling state of decay? Commissioned by famed 19th century financier August Belmont in memory of his daughter, and donated by him in 1886 to the trustees of Island Cemetery for use as a "public mortuary chapel", this red sandstone structure was built by George Champlin Mason, Sr., and later renovated by Richard Morris Hunt. It is surrounded by monuments created by important 19th century architects and artists such as Augustus Saint Gaudens, John LaFarge, Karl Bitter and Hunt. Elaborate memorials to Newport's social elite surround the building, clamouring for attention. In fact Hunt's own grave lies nearby, a flat granite slab inscribed "laborare est orare" (work is prayer).

If only it were so. In reality this work by Mason & Hunt is crumbling faster than a toddler's sandcastle on a rainy beach. Terra cotta relief tiles lie smashed on the floor. Polychrome flooring has been prised out of its setting. Furnishings & fixtures have long since been stripped away. The roof is partially collapsed and reveals wide blue patches of open sky, and birds fly in and out and leave droppings everywhere. A thick blanket of vines & weeds is seemingly all that holds the ediface together. The chapel is no longer a memorial to anything beyond the power of time to erase all things and to undermine our best efforts, even those of the very wealthy. Belmont's gift to us of a "public mortuary chapel" may well be beyond all saving. I suggest you hurry over there to check it out before it's totally gone.

Newport serendipities

There's a subtle kind of Newport serendipity, in which the past & present never seem to be quite finished with each other, but instead keep on combining with each other in new and unexpected ways...Or maybe it's nothing more than our own minds forging the links in this chain, I don't know.

One such link for me is that in 1860 Richard Morris Hunt, architect of Wrentham House, currently listed with us, met his wife-to-be Catherine Howland at a party at Oaklawn, also currently listed with us. Ever since learning of it, this factoid has seemed infused with an inexplicable metaphysical significance for me. But is it the facts themselves, or is it just me?

A famous 18th century Newport visitor, the philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (pronounced "Bark-lee" by the way), claimed that when we deal with the extraneous world we may THINK we're connecting with an outer reality, but we're really only connecting with our own ideas. Ever. Berkeley's position is that what we think of as "reality" doesn't even exist at all - his bottom line is that the world itself doesn't exist - and that only our perceptions & ideas have existence. He says: To be is to be perceived. In other words, the whole thing is just your basic hall of mirrors (which hardly comes as news to some of us - especially us realtors).

What Berkeley would make of this admittedly ephemeral thread connecting Wrentham House with Oaklawn by way of Lila Delman I have no idea, but astounding the thing is to me and astounding it will remain. Reality or no.

Happy Fourth of July

Happy Fourth of July!

We in Rhode Island should be triply proud - Declaration of Independence signers William Ellery, Stephen Hopkins AND the famed songwriter George M. Cohan all hail from the Ocean State!

In fact, William Ellery's grave is right here in Newport's Common Burying Ground. Today would be a great day to honor him by visiting it. On the other hand, it would also be a great day to sit around an eat hotdogs.

Either way, have a great holiday.

Flower power

For some time now, the one thing that says "summer" to me more than anything else is the annual Newport Flower Show. Put on at the end of June by the Preservation Society of Newport County - this year its being held at their most Gatsby-eque property, Rosecliff - the show is a celebration of everything that's best about summer in Newport, and is the closest thing to a county fair that we have here. But what a county...! Instead of 4-H displays and agricultural charts, you'll find sumptuous six-foot tall flower arrangements - playful topiaries - numerous horticultural lectures and demonstrations - and my own personal favorite, dozens & dozens of booths featuring all kinds of unique, high end shopping opportunities. Want one of a kind, artist-designed jewelry? Check. Want exotic garden accessories? Check. How about some scrumptiously colorful designer clothes - like Nina Mclemore's showstopping summer collection? Check and check again. It all can be found right there at the Flower Show.

All of Newport turns out for the fun, and for one glorious weekend social divisions fall by the wayside. Ladies who lunch rub elbows with tattooed bikers. Baileys Beach mixes it up with Broadway. Even the chauffeurs chat with the bus drivers. Everybody goes, and all go for the same reason - to step out of the confines of their usual day-to-day, to marvel at the returning miracle of summer, and to mingle on the empyrean lawns of Rosecliff. Down in front of the balustrade that divides the fairgrounds from the foaming Atlantic, the band strikes up. And another summer begins.

the relatively affordable price of happiness

Anybody who thinks that money can't buy happiness has obviously never shopped at Down Under Jewelry on Newport's Lower Thames Street. That little store has the most comprehensive selection of affordable happiness I've ever encountered - necklaces made up of chunks of yellow jade the color of marigolds, rings made out of brilliant fire-streaked antique glass buttons from Czechoslovakia, bracelets of watery aquamarines so clear and limpid that you can almost feel those hard knots in your soul start to dissolve...Everything in there is individually designed, hand made, unique, beautiful. Much of it is very affordably priced (under $200) and some of it is downright cheap (under $25).

My boyfriend calls me an shallow materialist & a shopaholic. You know what I tell him? SO WHAT. Why is it that everybody pretends to have so much contempt for THINGS? People forget that there's a power in beautiful, well-made things - be those objects jewels, paintings or houses - that verges on the supernatural. Beautiful things have the power to heal, to soothe, to bring joy and ease. These strike me as being no small achievements in this difficult world. But I suggest you go over to Down Under Jewelry and decide for yourself. Bring your wallet. Open it. And get happy!

More time-travel in Newport

Another one of my favorite totally free things to do in Newport is to wander through the Common Burying Ground, which is located on a soft grassy hillside along Farewell Street just as you drive into town. I COULD claim that I love it there for the historical interest - with over 8000 internments in total, it contains more intact colonial-era gravestones than any other cemetery on the East Coast - but the truth is that I find a sense of peace and ease there that I seldom manage to achieve anyplace else.

The entire right hand side of the graveyard consists entirely of colonial stones, with the earliest of them dating to the 1680s. Name after name, date after date, stone after stone, march up the hill. Some of the stones have weathered into unreadability, but many are as as crisp & clear as if they'd been cut yesterday. Every stone there stands for a life lived, felt, breathed. The air always smells like cut grass and dirt. Bees and butterflies abound all summer.

Over towards the back fence, under a stand of magnificent & ancient cherry trees, lie numerous menbers of Newport's 18th century African-American slave population. It is about as far away experientially as you can get from the bars and the t-shirt shops, the wharves with their Black Pearls and Candy Stores, the whole frantic reality we depend upon to distract us from the slow unrelenting truths to be found on quiet New England hillsides such as these, where nothing ever lies to you.

Time-travel in Newport

Visitors to Newport always think it's going to be SOOOO expensive...Well, it isn't - or at least, it doesn't have to be. There are plenty of great ways to enjoy Newport with little or no money, and actually, many of them are the best ways to experience Newport, period.

My personal favorite is the Cliff Walk. Put on your sneakers, pack a sandwich & a bottle of water- if it's a really nice day, maybe even put on a bathing suit - and head over to the Chanler Hotel overlooking First Beach, which is where the famed 3.5 mile National Recreation Trail begins.

This scenic walk manages to incorporate the best of just about everything Newport has to offer. A rugged windswept coastline - lined with magenta wild beach roses - strewn with giant smooth boulders, perfect for lying back on and sunning - crashing waves - glorious world-famous 19th century "cottages" - impossibly manicured lawns - the empty heaving brightness of the Atlantic Ocean - and above it all, the seagulls, soaring and cawing over the heads of rich and poor alike. It's a place where past & present fuse...a place where for 150 years, people have been travelling just this path, for just these reasons, and now you too are one of them.

Got lunch?

Ever wonder where to go to lunch when you're in Newport? Look no further than Pasta Beach, right next door to the Lila Delman office on Memorial Blvd. They have the best pizza this side of Rome - in fact, it might even be better!

When I went to Rome two years ago, I stayed in the "Centro Storico"(literally means the historic center), just two doors away from Bafetto's, arguably the most celebrated pizzeria in the city. Since my companion and I had a thirteen-year old in tow, we ate there virtually every night.


What makes for great Roman pizza? A super hot grill, a super thin crust and of course, the freshest of ultra-fresh ingredients. Last week I tried Pasta Beach's proscuitto and arugula pizza, and it actually surpassed anything I can remember tasting across the Atlantic. It was so thin I could practically see through it, and the chef had lightly drizzled it with just a little tomato sauce, some fresh mozzarella, a couple of handfuls of arugula tossed with extra virgin olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar, and then he'd layered every inch of the thing with the thinnest slices of proscuitto di parma imaginable...YUM!!!









So next time you find yourself at the Newport Lila Delman's, shopping for the house of your dreams, be sure to stop in at Pasta Beach. You won't be disappointed!

An existential moment in Newport

One of the best things about living in Newport is the way history seeps out of the sidewalks, usually when you least expect it. Ghosts are everywhere...

Yesterday morning I took my dog Gwen for a walk. We were headed to Island Cemetery to check out the gravestone of Richard Morris Hunt, the architect of Wrentham House, which I'd just been to see a couple of days before & which had blown me away.




Anyhow, on the way we passed some guys from the Department of Public Works replacing a stretch of pavement. Naturally Gwen dragged me over so she could sniff out the excavation trench, and there, right smack at the bottom of it, were the broken but clearly recognizable remains of a colonial clay tobacco pipe, just lying there in the dirt for all to see. The sight immediately unmoored me from my normal reality. Who'd dropped it? When? What was their life like? What IS time?

How very odd, that they were there & now they were gone & I was there instead...and someday it will be my turn to be gone, and someone else will be standing on this street corner, scratching THEIR head over this same existential riddle. Because no matter how I sliced it, there was no denying the fact that there at my feet lay a small clay pipe - proof that time exists, reality exists, that life and death are unutterably & irrevocably real. Really real. Almost every second of every day we allow ourselves to forget that.

Overhead fluffy white clouds slipped unconcernedly and implacably by. So what else could I do? I walked on, to the cemetery.

Historic Newport

It always irks me that visitors to Newport - locals too, for that matter - put so much emphasis on the mansions, and focus so little on what really makes Newport special - the spectacular richness of its everyday historic properties.

Probably the single most little-known fact about Newport is that it contains more intact colonial architectural fabric than any city in the country. That's right - in the entire country! More than "Colonial" Williamsburg...more than Boston...more than Savannah, or Salem, or Plymouth, or any other historic city you can name

Newport's streets are lined with literally hundreds and hundreds of historic structures, from private vernacular-style residences to notable public buildings to nationally-known architect-designed buildings from the 18th, 19th & 20th centuries. Not only that, they're still in use, these houses are still alive, not just living on as museum sets or recreations. Scholars from all over the world come to Newport because there is such an abundance of significant early American material still here, in everyday use, material embedded into our every neighborhood and streetscape, the same neighborhoods & streetscapes we drive through evey day and routinely ignore.

If you live around here, authentic 18th century buildings start to seem like they're a dime a dozen, ho hum, and building restrictions & guidelines imposed by the Historic Commission are nothing more than an annoying impediment to getting things done. Few of us ever stop to consider the uniqueness of the almost unbelievable historical authenticity that underlies the facades surrounding us. Does anyone even know or care that Newport is currently seeking inclusion in the list of World Heritage sites? I doubt it. All I ever hear anyone talk about are the mansions...