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.

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?

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.