Kragsyde

This isn’t Architecture Wednesday but this house is, without a doubt, one of my favorite houses, ever. One that existed for a time, then it didn’t, and then it was resurrected. I first posted about it in May 2013, but have since found more photos of the original and of Kragsyde II, and more information about the original owner.

The original Kragsyde, built on Smith's Point at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts in 1883, was commissioned by George Nixon Black, Jr. and built by Peabody and Stearns, and is generally regarded as the zenith of "Shingle Style," a subtype of American Queen Anne architecture. Rambling, haunting and evocative, the beautiful house was set high on a dramatic headland; Nixon and his family occupied the house every summer from May until October to the end of their lives.

Kragsyde's footprint followed that of broad "V", with the massiveness of Kragsyde hidden, its broadest facades facing the ocean but that wasn’t done specifically for the views but for the house to be able to capture the cool sea breezes since the three-and-a-half-story main house faced the Atlantic Ocean; a secondary wing was set at a 45-degree angle. The house's most dramatic feature was a massive arch that formed a Porte cochere and supported the loggia, or open porch, and glass-enclosed billiard room above. Guests arriving by carriage would be dropped off under the arch, enter through the front door, and climb an interior stair to the main floor, which featured formal rooms for entertaining.

Service rooms and the kitchen were located on the ground floor, and a service stair kept the servants out of sight. A dumbwaiter carried food from the kitchen to the butler's pantry on the main floor. A piazza, the length of the house faced the ocean, and a covered section cantilevered out over the rocks. The parlor was surrounded on three sides by the piazza and an L-shaped covered porch. Stairs led down from the loggia to a series of terraces.

The second floor contained bedrooms for the Blacks and their guests while the third floor contained bedrooms for servants. The terraced landscape surrounding the house was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York City and the Biltmore Estate gardens in North Carolina.

Separating the service court from the front of the structure was a wing dominated by a massive arch. Within the arch was an entrance into the house on one side, and access to a billiard room on the other. A single room, with windows on three sides, was situated above the arch along with a private loggia. Stairs from the loggia led down to the property below helped to add length to the structure.

Kragsyde was, gulp, destroyed in 1929 following the death of George Nixon Black Jr, in 1927, when the new owners who considered the iconic late-19th-century shingle-style masterpiece outdated chose to tear it down.

But then came Jane Goodrich and resurrection.

Goodrich first saw Kragsyde in a book when she was a child. She found it again, in the same book, as an adult, and showed her husband, Jim Beyor, a builder. They became ‘fascinated with that era of seaside life’ and set out to find the house, only to discover it was long gone; that was when they decided to build a replica.

Luck was with them and they found the original blueprints for Kragsyde in the Boston Public Library, where they had been deposited by a professor at Northeastern University, Wheaton Holden, but they needed his permission to see the plans. Goodrich called him from the library basement and said, ‘I’m going to build Kragsyde’ and he said, ‘Fine.’

Even with plans in hand, finding affordable seafront property proved difficult. A two-year search finally took them about 200 miles north of the site of the original, to Swans Island. The setting is correct for the style: a rocky shore with views of Mount Desert Island and the ocean.

Kragsyde’s twin is identical in almost every way and is a large house by even today’s standards. It has 13 principal rooms and, like the original, the new Kragsyde has a library with a reading porch; a large parlor opening onto a covered porch, or piazza; another piazza, this one open; a dining area; 4 large bedrooms; a kitchen; and 10 servants’ rooms on the third floor. Kragsyde is a 6,000-square-foot house with 4 chimneys and 13 fireplaces, and it is sheathed with 130,000 square feet of shingles that named the style.

It is hard to say what such a house would cost when Goodrich and Beyor began the build; some say it would have been upwards of $800,000 in 1988 dollars. But since Beyor is a builder, he and Goodrich took on construction of Kragsyde II by themselves, working on it nights and weekends for six years, and built the home for less than $200,000, which included the cost of the two acres of seafront property.

Beyor’s skill and experience have made the construction of the house possible. He bought all the lumber from a mill, not from lumberyards, thus saving nearly half the cost, and personally milled it all himself; he also built all of the windows. He used no shortcuts; he used no structural plywood. Instead of using plywood in the floors, as is common, he used seven-eighths-inch boards.

There are a couple of differences. The floorplan was flipped to have the piazzas face the sea and the exterior walls are 6 inches thick, instead of the 4 inches in the original. The foundation is poured cement, not stone as in the original, although it will be sheathed in stone.

Other than that, it’s the same glorious house brought back to life.

Jane Goodrich has since written a book about the house and their experiences called The House at Lobster Cove:

“Coup de foudre, the French say, literally “bolt of lightning” but meaning love at first sight. How better to describe the instant when a chance meeting alters a life? For who can ever expect the sudden place, or glimpse, or turn of the page that will change everything? I first met Kragsyde in an old box of books my father brought home. I was barely a teen, and paid little attention to the text or the title of the book, but the photographs and drawings gave me goose bumps. These were the most beautiful houses I had ever seen. Not impossible fantasy castles, nor the monotonous ranch-style structures of my own time. Shingled and playful and shaggy, like a favorite dog, full of mysterious rooms placed at odd angles. Fanciful windows I longed to peer from, deep cool porches, turrets with pennants flying from spires, promising endless summers. And the names: Grasshead, Sunset Hall, Wave Crest, Seabright. I studied them all, but even then my eyes could discern the masterpiece: Kragsyde. With its fantastic arch large enough to drive through, its beautiful stones, its romantic perch above the sea, this was the pinnacle. Completely beguiled, I clipped the photograph from the book and pasted it into a scrapbook. The sepia photo, held in my hands for the first time, was both a daydream and a seed.”

For me, one of the most interesting things about the house is George Nixon Black. As Goodrich and Beyor researched, and then built, Kragsyde II, she thought she might uncover something about him that was nasty or cruel, and she never did.

The George Nixon Black she discovered was a gay man living in an era where coming out wasn’t even a concept and yet she believed Black’s sexual orientation was an open secret. In his will, Goodrich found further evidence of both his goodness—he gave liberally to his former servants and to charitable causes—and his gayness—he left a large portion of his estate to his longtime companion, Charles Brooks Pitman, with whom he lived happily for 34 years.

She tracked down Black’s letters and documents, and with the same determination that allowed her to build that grand house, shingle by shingle, brick by brick, Goodrich reconstructed the story of George Nixon Black.

On the ceiling of Goodrich’s office at Kragsyde, she has painted the constellations—a furry great bear, a scaly dragon, a muscular Hercules.—arranged exactly as they would have appeared on the night of July 11, 1842, when George Nixon Black was born. It was in that office that she wrote, by hand, The House at Lobster Cove:

“If you’ve built your own space, it’s a little like living inside a giant piece of art that you made. Remember when you were little and you would make your own fort? That’s the same feeling.”

So, whatever happened then to the site of the original Kragsyde house that was unceremoniously demolished? Well, three subsequent homes have been built upon its foundations: in the 1930’s a stuccoed house built by Boston lawyer Pierpont Stackpole sat on the site, but it, too, was demolished in later years.

In 1975, a home dubbed The General's House was built, and like the original, it featured a wing with Porte cochere set at a 45-degree angle to the main house. It was built for Georges Doriot, founder of American Research and Development Corporation, and his wife Edna.

In 2014, a fourth Kragsyde was built upon the original's foundations, and still exists to this day, though for me it holds none of the charm or mystery or allure of the original.

This is the current home sitting on the site of the original Kragsyde, Manchester-By-The-Sea. A midcentury modern take on the original.

The Funny Papers

Clay Bennett, Pedro X Molina, Lalo Alcaraz, Matt Wuerker, Trevor Irvin, Nick Anderson, Robert Unell, Tim Campbell, John Branch, Daniel Boris, Barry Blitt, Dennis Goris, Mike Luckovich, Michael de Adder, Jesse Duquette,

Why Is It ...

… that people need to remember that I don't think I’m right all the time, but I am and that’s why it comes off that way

… that I may be laid back but I lean forward very quickly

… that people don’t understand that when I say I feel like Barbie, I mean that my hip is making that clicking sound

… that when it comes to a text chat I am either fast Replier or Never Answer

… that this snippet of advice always gets me in trouble because I say, whenever you get angry at someone bite them; just bite them and walk away. I guarantee they’ll never speak to you again

… that no one realizes that my ability to find the comedy in every crisis is a sign of deep inner peace or a warning that my last marble has officially left the building

… that when people ask what kinds of music I like all I can say is it’s every song except the ones I don’t like.

… that some days my brain is a powerful machine and other days it’s just two racoons fighting in a garbage can.

… that the new girl at work wanted to chat and chat and chat and I finally said, “Let’s skip the talking stage and you can go right to blocking me.”

… that I just learned that therapy is like some stranger walking around my brain and saying, “This is how you live?”

I Didn't Say It ...

Gabby Williams, WNBA player for the Golden State Valkyries, on transgender players on her team or any other in the league:

“I think it’s trans, trans rights, right now, is our new battle. We see trans people’s rights being stripped away from them; there’s a lot of discourse around trans athletes and what they can compete in. I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime. I don’t think it’s a problem in the world. It’s just another way to kind of attack trans people. We’ve seen players like Layshia Clarendon, who stepped into that forefront, and have been brave enough, and courageous enough, to step up. So I guess that’s the next battle we have to fight as athletes.”

The number of trans athletes in women’s sports is miniscule but the GOP’s fear-mongering of trans-women makes it seem like they’re taking over the world.

They want to live their lives and they choose, playing sports or not.

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Abdul El-Sayed, Democrat candidate for  Senate from Michigan, on the right using his name against him:

“When you don’t have any ideas all you have is hate. My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not the reason we’re in an illegal war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford healthcare, rent or insurance. If the best they’ve got is to point to my name and say they can’t pronounce it, then we’re going to have a good time over the next thirteen weeks.”

Learn to say his name because you may be saying it for years to come. His name is not a crime, his religion is not a crime, and neither are responsible for the mess we’re in … that name, as we all know, is He Who Shall Not Be Mentioned.

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Jon Ossoff, Democrat Senator from Georgia, on restoring America after the midterms:

“We won’t just restore checks and balances for the next two years. We will rebuke him so decisively that no President will dare try this kind of brazen corruption and abuse for centuries.”

Work on getting things done for We The People and work on putting Cankles and his criminal regime in chains.

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Jeff Tiedrich, political blogger, on the new dead muskrat on Cankles’ head:

“I guess the fucking idiot didn’t want anyone asking him about the desiccated badger pelt he had hot-glued to his fat water-logged head, and because the fucking idiot kept himself far away from the reporters, not one of them had the opportunity to stand up and ask, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’”

I would have played that question on a loop forever … “Mr. President? What’s with the new rug?”

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Seth Abramson, journalist, on Iran taking a rational approach while Cankles is the unhinged despot:

“Yesterday the Islamic Republic of Iran essentially declared that [Cankles] is too mentally deranged and pathologically deceitful to negotiate with … so they won’t. And you know what? They’re right. That’s a normal, rational, adult position. So why don’t we see it in the US?”

I think many of us see it, but the GOP is too afraid of what Cankles’ might do to them to speak up, and the Cult of MAGAt is simply too stupid to realize they’re stupid.

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Joe Walsh, former GOP Congressman and talk radio host, Cankles’ crimes:

“He’s most likely a pedophile. He initiated and is overseeing a massive government coverup to keep his name and the names of all the other Epstein class predators hidden. He was handed the strongest post-COVID economy in the industrialized world and has singlehandedly fucked it up. He’s put masked federal thugs on our streets who are lawlessly terrorizing immigrants and citizens. He’s launching wars and pushing regime change all over the world. And that’s just the start. He should be in jail, not the White House.”

Everything is distraction, deflection and lies, about Epstein, jet planes, ballrooms and arches and crypto. It’s all lies.

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Van Lathan, journalist, producer, political commentator & LGBTQ+ ally, on trans acceptance:

“If you cannot gift trans people with visibility, humanity and acceptance, could you at least gift them with silence? Could you at least shut the fuck up about it.”

It’s very much like when straight people said The Gays were shoving their “lifestyle” in straight peoples’ faces when all we were doing was living our lives. Trans people are living their lives as they are, and it doesn’t hurt anyone to know that.

It’s simple respect.

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Bobservations

We’re in a bit of a fire warning stage here in South Carolina because of the heat and while Carlos and I were out running errands on Tuesday we must have seen four or five fire trucks racing down the roads and here’s what gets me …

PEOPLE DON’T GET OUT OF THE WAY!!!!!!

They speed up and maybe move slightly to the right but they keep driving and it pisses me off so I began a rant to Carlos about people not getting out of the way. As you know, my rants go on and on and on and how I think fire trucks should have cameras and any car that doesn’t get out of the way their license plate should be tagged and they should be fined. When I finished I looked at Carlos for his reaction.

Asleep.

“Are you sleeping???”

“No!”

“What did I say?”

“You were talking about the drivers.”

And so I guess he was awake but then I thought again …

“What about the drivers?”

“That they all drive too slow and brake too much.”

“And the fire trucks?”

“What fire trucks?”

Gotcha!

This Tale of Tuxedo is from January 2011 …

You know, what goes around........

Tuxedo was my feline caregiver when I was sick--with Carlos being my human nurse. He was sitting at my side, or rather, he would sit on me, leading me to think he was one of those Death Cats, waiting for me to, ahem crossover. Now, I know that all he wanted was for his Daddy to get better.

And I am getting better.

So, when Tux needed a little pampering, well, he got it. He curled up in a Afghan my mother made for me, and napped, while I periodically checked on him, and brought him snacks, and sat on him, well, by his side.

Here's to my Round-The-Clock Nurse, Tuxedo.

Ian Charleson [left] told the theater company he was recovering from sinus surgery when he was actually dying of AIDS and had just agreed to play Hamlet at the National Theatre. The part became available after Daniel Day-Lewis walked off the stage mid-run, collapsing during the scene where Hamlet meets his father's ghost; Day-Lewis later claimed he had seen his own ghost. So, Ian  Charleson took over, and outside a few close friends only the director, Richard Eyre, knew what it was costing him to stand up there.

He opened on 13 November 1989 and actor Ian McKellen was in the audience that night and so overwhelmed by Charleson’s Hamlet that gifted Charleson his own Best Actor award. But after that first night Charleson never appeared on a stage again. He died eight weeks later, on January 6, 1990 at age 40.

But this isn’t about his brilliant performance it was about what he did after he died, something nobody in Britain was doing in 1990: he left instructions that his cause of death, AIDS, be made public and his was the first show business death in the country openly attributed to AIDS.

A hero and an icon even in death.

American audiences know Charleson from Chariots of Fire, where he played Eric Liddell, the Scottish runner who wouldn't race on Sundays. And now Andrew Scott [right], an out gay actor and quite a handsome fella, is playing him now in Elsinore, the story of Charleson’s life and death, which opens in London in October and reaches US theaters in November.

I only found out the neighbors were having a party when the cake deliveries began showing up … I’m looking forward to my invitation.

I’m gagged … South Dakota ex-Governor and ex-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi DogKiller Noem has unveiled a statue of herself.

Seriously. But the best part of all this was the influx of alternate Noem statues with her cross-dressing husband, or her love of plastic surgery, or her audition statue to play Freddy Krueger, or the one of her killing her dog.

The only one I couldn’t find was of Kristi on all fours taking it from behind by her married lover Corey Lewandowski.

Noem is said to be mulling over her future in politics but I think she’s better suited to statuary.

Recently, under orders from DUI Hire Pete Hegseth the Navy ended a 43-year contract with The Sewing Box, a Black-owned family business who made the Blue Angel uniforms. The last five-year contract with The Sewing Box paid out $400,000 to the business but rather sticking with a long-term arrangement Hegseth signed a new contract with another company and is paying them $1.69 million.

Sounds about white for a racist, misogynistic, transphobic drunken former Fox News talking head.

Taylor Fresh Foods (Taylor Farms) has issued a recall on 20 ready-to-eat products containing jalapeños due to potential Salmonella contamination. The recall follows a prior July voluntary recall of iceberg lettuce over Cyclospora concerns.

Boycott Taylor Farms until they can prove their products are safe.

It's not so much that Cankles snuck away in a catering container because of some threat that Iran was going to shoot the plane down; it's that he left the entire Air Force One crew and the innocent Press Pool behind as decoys while he crawled into a food truck.

He doesn't have a single moral fiber in his body though he does have an ass the size of a VW that had to be lubed with Hellman's Mayo to squeeze it into that food cart! 

Antonio Ortega is an international fashion model represented by top-tier agencies such as Wilhelmina, Next Management and Modelwerk; born in Mexico he is 6’1” tall with brilliant green eyes which seem to ask, Would You Hit It?