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.

The Library Comeback

Libraries - dusty and musty no more.

Libraries are back in Style.

Big books, old books, red books, green books, leather or paper, used or rare, it's a fashionable stylistic mash up. A recent article in the The Wall St. Journal reports that people are not reading more books, but the library is staging a huge comeback. Why? A desire for a sanctuary, a picture room, a 'memory room'.

What is the most popular room in new big houses? What d0 63% of home buyers (according to the National Assoc. of Home Builders latest survey) consider essential? - The library. Craftsmen are building elegant libraries in exotic woods, even with secret doors. Sometimes two! His and hers libraries, why not? My favorite books are cherished and my husbands books are what made him smart, he is a veritable walking encyclopedia. His collection fills a room , and the floor.... and I know better than to disturb. Our books do not commingle, I expect to find my books exactly where I place them on my bookshelves, and I marvel that he can find anything at all. We're perfect candidates for his and hers libraries.

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me" - C.S. Lewis, I'll second that.

"A library may suggest a certain level of erudition, but only if the books have actually been read", - my husband. A big room, housing a big library, means a big adventure. Classics, children's books, dictionaries, Gatsby and Ulysses, first editions, cover worn dog-eared paperbacks, rare gems, and poetry. Careful not to touch! Those old leather backs are trouble, not to mention messy, they can disintegrate in your hands.

For those who do not want to reveal titles, some bibliophiles turn the spines to the wall showing only the mysterious ivory pages of the books. Now that is a look, I admit never to have seen, my husband says it was a popluar thing to do at Columbia. You have to know exactly where every book is placed, or just like the rich warm color of paper.
To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.- Cicero

A perfectly wonderful library is found in Wrentham House. This 1891 Richard Morris Hunt stone mansion on the highest elevation along Ocean Avenue, has a soul and then some.

The Wrentham House mahogany library, with wood carved fireplace, high plastered ceilings, circular tower room with built-in seats, and spectacular ocean views, is ready to be filled with books and memories, why not make them yours?

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?

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.

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.