Summer camp...and the livin' is...

...easy at times, rough at others, depending on the approach the camp's architects take toward use of its natural resources to craft its lodgings: conservation, or "wise use." The latter gives campers rooms (easy), the former sticks them in tents (rough), and a compromise yields them cabins (midway). Either way, all are subject to daily morning inspection, so no one gets off easy.

Duncan's dreamscape
 

But I had it pretty easy at my first summer camp, Camp Duncan in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, in the summer of '73, as we Bretton Woods Boy Singers were lucky to get the spiffy quarters of the golf-caddy camp of the Maplewood Hotel (above, in 1904) after a snowstorm collapsed a roof at the original 1911 Camp Duncan in 1969 and the hotel had burned down in 1963. (Strangely enough, the Singers gave their first concert at the Maplewood in 1911—a harbinger of our housing-to-be?) 

Set in the vast, rolling, pastoral landscape of the White Mountains / Crawford Notch / Franconia Notch area of New Hampshire, our camp was virtually the region itself—not just for the forested, mountainous views constantly before us, but also for the far-and-wide concert tours that ventured us into the far reaches of New Hampshire's picturesque forestry, greenery, topography, craggy cliffs, and golden-age hotel architecture.
 

Theater of Operations, Marfa Army Airfield, Texas.

Like the hotel, the caddy camp was U-shaped. Junior and Senior wings were linked by a central section housing the "all hall" (see below), dining hall, infirmary, store, lavatory, laundry, and counselors' bedrooms.

Presque Isle Army Air Base Barracks, Maine.

Likely modeled on army barracks like those pictured above and right, this one-stop configuration handily accessed all campers to all facilities while keeping us cozy under the running roof at all times, sparing us the regiments in the rain and marches in the mud from bunk to bathroom to breakfast that many camps mandated. Overlooking an incline down to the sports field and wilderness beyond, each wing's end balcony-stair gave the junior (soprano and alto) and senior (alto, tenor and bass) campers their own direct entrances to their bunks. These entries also provided launching pads for toy airplanes and crow's-nest perches for counselor cries of "Todd, get on your bunk!" if we were "bunked" for bad behavior. (The guy who yelled that was really a junior like me, just fooling around — and leaving me laughing like you'd never believe.) To boot, a 25-by-50-foot backyard swimming pool lay right outside our bunk windows—a swanky suburban alternative to the lakeside or swimming-hole setting of many summer camps (including two I went to later, and the original 1911 Camp Duncan, where the boys had to milk cows, fish for food, and swim in the 60-degree Ammonoosuc River).

Cabin room, Folk Project Acoustic Getaway, Hackettstown, New Jersey.
Photo courtesy of www.folkproject.org

Our bunks looked something like this, two rows of knotty pine-paneled alcoves with single windows (one two-bed bunk each) facing each other across the central hall to the balcony-stair at one end and the facilities at the other. This open plan reinforced the camp's community spirit and the collective power of our choral concerts (and facilitated morning inspection for the counselors), yet left us susceptible to having our beds short-sheeted or our mattresses flipped without warning.

Dining hall, Camp Workcoeman, New Hartford, Connecticut. Photo courtesy of campworkcoeman.org.

This was roughly what our "all hall" resembled—a nice big open space, structured by a pine-plank-concealed rafter-purlin-hammerbeam roof framework that rendered the floor column-free for all uses imaginable: choir rehearsals, chess and cribbage tournaments, Sunday night Bingo or movies, concerts on Parents' Visiting Day, and the music-folder arrangement punishments we were subject to for chatting during our no-nonsense rehearsals or forgetting to pick up our laundry on schedule. 

But we used the space to best advantage when we jettisoned our sacred/classical/pops tutelage to dance the night away with local girl campers to The Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein," The Sweet's "Little Willy," Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," and other AM/FM blasts of the rock-funk-disco wave that was washing away our old-school musical traditions (and contributing to curtains for our combo by the following year).

Bedecked in the naturalness of knotty pine, the "all hall" truly betokened the "woods" of our namesake, as an example of architecture that didn't stray us too far from nature despite the formality of its structure, as well as its wide variety of uses, ranging from stiff and formal to wild and crazy.
 

Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, Whitfield, New Hampshire (1872, 1911-1912)

And the outcome of our grueling practices under those idle pines? Our tuneful, boisterous pops concerts at New Hampshire's super-formal hotels and resorts, where, amid classical columns, crown moldings, coffered ceilings, decorous draperies and fine furnishings, audiences applauded our vibrant vocalizations of (does anyone remember any of these?):

• "It's a Grand Night for Singing" from Rodgers & Hammerstein's State Fair...
• "You Came to Hear, Hear, Hear the Songs You've Always Loved to Sing" by a long-forgotten songwriter (if anyone remembers, speak up)...
• Jack Owens' "Hi, Neighbor!" from the 1941 film San Antonio Rose (featuring Lon Chaney, Jr. and Shemp Howard as a faux Abbott and Costello)...
• Paul Evans and Paul Parnes' seasonally sensible "Think Summer," made famous by Roy Clark (we sang it three years before it made the country charts!)...
• Paul Weston and Paul Mason Howard's hoedown ditty "The Gandy Dancers' Ball," made famous by Frankie Lane in the '50s...
• the lilting Czech folk song "Waters Ripple and Flow"...
• Franz Schubert's thundering hymn "The Omnipotence" (featuring a resonant soprano solo by the late David Edmonds from the Chicago Children's Choir);
• William Dawson's spirited a cappella arrangement of the spiritual "Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit"...
• a smorgasbord of showstoppers from the Broadway musicals Hello, Dolly, Brigadoon, Fiddler on the Roof, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Oliver, The Music Man, and Man of La Mancha...
• Natalie Sleeth's pop-gospel anthem "Hallelujah Day"...
• Peter J. Wilhousky's classic take on "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"...and...drumroll...
• a closing barbershop number aptly titled "That's All There Is."

Our bus rolled us all over the Granite State's rustic roads and ranges to such classically grand, endlessly sprawling, gable-sporting, dormer-popping, shutter-bedecked, verandah-welcoming idylls as the Mountain View House (now the Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa) in Whitfield... 

Sunset Hill House, Sugar Hill, New Hampshire (1880, demolished 1974)

...Sunset Hill House in Sugar Hill, a titanically turreted Second Empire edifice built in 1880 to greet the new local rail service with New Hampshire's longest side porch, unfortunately razed in 1974...

Crawford House, Crawford Notch, New Hampshire (1859, destroyed by fire in 1977).

...and Crawford House, a multi-gabled, 400-guest spread across and above the plains and waters of Crawford Notch. The White Mountains' largest hotel when rebuilt from a fire in 1859, it was lavish with its landview porches and interior decoration (I remember a giant Beacon Hill gas lamp), which was all auctioned off when the Recession of '74 closed it down in 1975 before its destruction by fire in 1977.
 

Lin-Wood Public School, Lincoln, New Hampshire (1963). Photo by Ken Gallagher, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Our concert stops also had their moments of such modernist plain vanilla as Lin-Wood High School in Lincoln. 
 

Ivie Memorial Chapel, Bethlehem, New Hampshire (1931, Jervis Frederick Larson)

True to our sacred side—most of us sang in Boston's St. Paul's Cathedral Choir, which ran Camp Duncan—we sang in Sunday services, too, mostly at Ivie Memorial Chapel in Bethlehem. Built in 1931 by Alvin F. Ivie in memory of his daughter Florence Ivie Abbot, it is an English Perpendicular Gothic gem that seemed older than its years and larger than its shell...

Ivie Memorial Chapel interior. Photo by Christopher Whiton.

...once we were echoing our celestial voices off its swooping limestone arches and solid timber hammerbeams and purlins. Choir member Pat Lindley's harpsichord rendition of Claude Débussy's La cathédrale engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral) truly made the chapel seem to grow heavenward (or sink earthward) to cathedral proportions...

Ivie Memorial Chapel interior. Photo by Christopher Whiton.

...as did our resounding renditions of choral standards like Randall Thompson's Alleluia, Horatio Parker's Jam Sol Recedit, T. Tertius Noble's Grieve Not, the Holy Spirit of God, and Edgar Bainton's And I Saw a New Heaven in our Sacred Concert, the upshot of our hardest hours in the "all hall." But I don't think we ever got every note right, especially those bars in Alleluia when the sopranos sang below the altos, and that high B-flat in Jam—1.5 ledger lines above the treble-clef staff—that not all of us could reach, particularly if our voices were cracking in transition to a lower range. So you can imagine the sigh of relief I respired when the minister announced, "Let us pray," signaling the finis of our most Herculean ordeal that summer. (No easy livin' there.)

Chapel of the Transfiguration, Bretton Woods, N.H. (1907).

Some Sundays took us to the Chapel of the Transfiguration in Bretton Woods, built in 1907 in memory of Mount Washington Hotel builder Joseph Stickney in a more domestic form of the English Gothic. The hammer-beamed roof gable, random ashlar stone and Craftsman gabled entries give it more of a homey feel...

...especially inside, where the beams and rafters are more prominent, like in a medieval banquet hall—which befit a lyric in our performance of Edward Bairstow's I Sat Down Under His Shadow: "He brought me to the banqueting house..." But the chapel's rock-hard kneelers didn't exactly make me feel at home, nor did the dwindling congregation, an omen of an era about to end.

Yes, changing musical tastes and travel patterns, declining hotel business, financial pinches, our choirmaster's retirement due to illness, and the Recession of '74 all combined to make this the Bretton Woods Boy Singers' final season after 63 years (which had included a performance at President Eisenhower's 1955 dedication of the [now crumbled] Old Man of the Mountain as a historic site). So St. Paul's Cathedral and fellow Episcopalian institution Trinity Church in Boston had to pool their resources together and relegate us to sharing rougher, tighter quarters with Trinity's own summer camp on Bow Lake in Strafford, New Hampshire.

To be continued...

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Not to be outfoxed

Fox Theatre, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A., 1928, Charles Howard Crane. Photo by Michael Barera, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Fox Theatre lobby staircase, 1930s-1940s.

For movie palace magnificence like you’ve never seen, step into Detroit’s Fox Theatre and enjoy a Broadway show, magic act or celebrity concert amid a sweeping spectacle of Middle Eastern majesty. 

The nation’s second largest theatre (after New York’s Radio City Music Hall) in its time, the Fox was one of five Fox theatres built across the country in the 1920s by William Fox, founder of Twentieth Century-Fox. 

Architect Charles Howard Crane designed Detroit’s Fox with eye-popping embellishments of Burmese, Chinese, Hindu, Persian and Siamese inspiration, including gilded elephants, arched colonnades, and a canopied ceiling decorated like durbars in India.

Fox Theatre auditorium. Photo by D. Dohler, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The auditorium, 110 feet high and 175 feet wide, contains 5,048 seats over three levels; 126 more seats can be installed in the raised orchestra pit. The canopied ceiling adorned like Indian durbars is its main attraction until the house lights go down and...

Fox Theatre gallery. Photo by John Clark, courtesy of Pinterest.

 ...the curtain goes up. 

The gallery is hardly the peanut gallery, despite its cheaper seats. Richly gilded Far Eastern décor seems to give the lower-priced ticket holders a royal welcome from the King of Siam, and the in-the-round configuration contrasts the vastness with more of a sense of intimacy.

Fox Theatre Lobby. Photo courtesy of Barb Carter, Pinterest.

The six-story lobby is an extravaganza of ruby-eyed lions, jeweled Asiatic idols, blood-red marble columns, ornate capitals, and an organ above the brass-door entrance (below). Ornate capitals segue into multi-tiered brackets that give rise to an exotic ceiling fresco as a chorus of regally robed trumpeters introduce the king.

Fox Theatre lobby organ. Photo courtesy of Yelp.

The Fox opened on September 21, 1928, showing Frank Borzage's silent film Street Angel, starring Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, and Alberto Rabagliati. Before the film, the 60-piece Fox Grand Orchestra rose out of the floor and performed the Star-Spangled Banner, followed by high-kicks from the 32-strong Tillerettes, Detroit’s own Rockettes. 

“Detroit’s Fox Theater has the largest clear span balcony in the world,” reported the Detroit Free Press. “The stage proper is larger than the Roxy Theater in New York, and has the largest and finest projection room and equipment of any theater in the world.” More Foxy than the Roxy, the theatre boasted the first built-in equipment for showing sound films, to accommodate Fox Film Corporation’s patented Movietone soundtrack system, which accompanied Street Angel. Its sound quality was greatly enhanced with its acoustic treatment with "sound-absorbing material," as this 1929 image notes.

 

Fox Theatre, 1946.

The Fox was Detroit’s main movie mecca for decades. During World War II it took $75,000 weekly, boosted by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Jack Benny, Kate Smith, Sarah Vaughn, Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman's orchestra. In 1953 it premiered Michigan’s first CinemaScope film, The Robe, shot with Henri Chrétien's original Hypergonar anamorphic lenses.

Elvis Presley at the Fox Theatre, 1956.

In 1956, the Fox hosted Elvis Presley before a total of 12,500 screaming fans. In 1964, the Fox broadcast Muhammad Ali winning his World Heavyweight Championship boxing title over Sonny Liston on closed-circuit TV. Throughout the ’60s, Motown — which Berry Gordy founded in Detroit in 1959 — held its Motown Revue at the Fox, showcasing such homegrown talent as the Temptations, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

Following a period of decline as a kung fu and horror movie house in the 1970s, Little Caesars owners Mike and Marian Ilitch restored the theatre for $12 million in 1987 and headquartered Ilitch Holdings Inc. in its 10-story Art Deco office building. “The Detroit Fox is the most spectacular, over-the-top movie palace ever built,” said theater preservationist Ray Shepardson, who oversaw the restoration. Its 60^th anniversary reopening on November 19, 1988, featured Smokey Robinson and the Count Basie Orchestra.  

Fox Theatre crowd. Photo courtesy of Yelp.

Not only was the Fox ranked “the No. 1 theater in North America” by industry trade journal Pollstar for having sold 642,000 tickets in 2002 — surpassing Radio City Music Hall — but its restoration also revitalized its once-depressed area. It brought Compuware’s headquarters downtown from Farmington Hills in 1999.

Fox Theatre from Comerica Park. Photo by Mike Russell, courtesy of Wiki.

The Fox also led to the erection of Comerica Park for the Detroit Tigers in 2000 and Ford Field for the Detroit Lions in 2002, as well as the renovation of General Motors’ Renaissance Center headquarters in 2004, which included a Wintergarden for public riverfront access. 

Another major urban revitalization project the Fox Theatre has spurred into action is the long-overdue renovation-restoration of Detroit's 1914 Michigan Central Station by the Ford Motor Company, after 30 years of neglect and decay.

“Detroit may be the most vivid example of theaters leading the way in redeveloping a downtown,” said Doug Kelbaugh, dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

Now that's a theatre not to be, well, outfoxed.

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A ranch with all the dressing

Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, Vatican City, 1505-08.
Photo by Snowdog, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Durham Cathedral, Durham, England, 1493-1590.
Photo courtesy of the Cornell University Library.

It's easy to get googly-eyed over a work of architecture that aims to inject you with a holy-Toledo impression and awe you with a rollercoaster of wild wonder.

Corn Palace, Rapp & Rapp, Mitchell, South Dakota, 1891-1937. Photo by Parkerdr, courtesy of Wiki.

If you've experienced the fervently frescoed dome-ceiling of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Vatican City (top left), the Gothic gargantua of Durham Cathedral in England (top right), the festive festoonery of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota (right), or the soaring spacebursts of Frank Gehry's Stata Center at MIT (below), you know what I mean.

Ray and Maria Stata Center, Frank Gehry, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004. Photo by King of Hearts, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But it's easy for me to appreciate that which is simple, low-lying, functional, homey. Even an architecture aficionado like me couldn't help admiring the pictured ranch while living in Allston, Massachusetts, and how its owners could do so much with so little.

First of all, notice how its grounds give proper meaning to its type: a ranch-like hand-hewn post-and-rail fence (which has clearly seen better days) conjuring up images of the wild, wild west the term originated from, and an expansive lawn of the kind that befits a true ranch freestanding on the open range. The well-manicured topiary, however, lends a touch of French Tuileries chic in a way more pretentious than the house's mobile-home simplicity conveys, but it shows how a simple prefab home can be transformed into something a little upper-scale.

The one-level configuration, too, contains all of the bare necessities for living comfortably—no stairs to climb or elevators to get stuck in, so one can age well in such a layout. The off-street parking and corner location further increase the curb appeal.

Yes, this Allston ranch exemplifies affordable single-family living with gardening and expansion space, in the homesteading spirit of the pioneers of the past. This could reduce the housing crisis as an antidote to architectural extravaganzas that grab our gazes but beat our bank accounts. After all:

'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

— John Howard Payne, "Home, Sweet Home," 1823

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And to think that I saw it on Mt. Vernon Street

Dr. Seuss's classic tale of a boy who balloons his imagination to inflate "a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street" into a grandiose procession parading down the street to beat the band is quite applicable to a recent scoop about a building I once lived across the street from. Only this time the inflation is real—regarding property values, price, and space.
 

A spiffy, spacious condo in this 1917 Georgian Revival building at 39-41 Mt. Vernon St. sold for $5.5 million, the highest offer for a Boston home the week of July 21. To boot, its pre-construction penthouse broke Beacon Hill's condo record on July 2: $15.11 million. All including 24-hour concierge, doorman, elevator, and valet parking.

And to think that I faced this building from my bedroom getting up for school every morning and eyed penny-loafered girls arriving to work at its columned central archway—which symbolized career aspiration and literary tradition then but denotes nouveau riche now! Back then it housed Houghton Mifflin (HM), one of three nearby book publishers (Little Brown and Beacon Press were the others) intellectually inspiring all ilks of Bostonians from Brahmin to break-even (the Hill's demographics then), particularly with their curbside disposals of book proofs, overstocks and discards, which I scooped up eagerly.

Now, rechristened Maison Vernon to reflect its new use and target clientele, its entry has been fancily retrofit with the twirling topiary, brand-name banner, cast-iron grillwork, striped herringbone marble flooring and détails classiques befitting the haute couture française that inspired its overhaul. Regardez:

The arts décoratifs of its seven luxury floor-through flats encompass authentique French oak herringbone floors, handcrafted Français inspiré plaster moldings, and even Sélection Maison Vernon, an assortiment of wines and liqueurs "exclusively sourced in France for Maison Vernon residents," as its website boasts.

Architects Meyer & Meyer boast the equivalent on their site: "Maison Vernon simultaneously embodies the essence of historic Beacon Hill in its grandeur of yesterday, today and tomorrow. The result is seven iconic residences which we hope to leave as the new reference of Bostonian elegance.”
 

Yes, they've splendidly infused the interior with the classical spirit of the façade, for the outside-to-inside continuity HM's cramped offices, fluorescent lights and piles of books awaiting shipment (or disposal) didn't allow. But this is hardly the "grandeur of yesterday" of my youth, when we lived a few doors down at 61 Mt. Vernon St. in the early '70s. 

First built c.1850 (as its curlicued cast-iron gate and rails with granite posts and frames signify), it was rebuilt in Beacon Hill bowfront style around World War I to accommodate five French flats extending back to Pinckney Street. This yielded the convenience of one-floor townhouse living without the stair-climbs the traditional rowhouses necessitated (further mitigated by an Otis elevator and a dumbwaiter).

But this commodity came at a price for us. Though splashed with some of Maison Vernon's delicate detailing, our first-floor condo unit was cramped with the spatial compromises that come with affordability. Two dark parallel corridors connected the foyer and kitchen with the back bedrooms, having little more use than to get us from point A to point B.

Still, this was Beacon Hill. And I had an additional rare privilege: two bedrooms, courtesy of the old servants' corridor that accessed my colorfully painted, pompon-festooned "circus room" en route from the kitchen through my father's home office to the hall to my larger, brighter Pinckney Street bedroom.

From there, stories spun before me, ranging from pleasurable to pathetic. The former included an ogling of my first crush, my upstairs neighbor Celia, tomboyishly sporting a football jersey. The latter was as downbeat as the rain that fell on the little brother–big sister row I witnessed from my window: "I'm gonna tell Mommy on you!" "Oh? What are you going to say?" He screeched something like "Shut up!" She ran off, leaving him walking in the rain, bawling, with no head covering. I wanted to cry for him.
 

Photo courtesy of the City of Boston Archives

But Mt. Vernon Street had much more for me to cry for. A few more doors down what Henry James deemed "the only respectable street in America" is the stately second home of Boston lawyer, statesman and grandee Harrison Gray Otis at No. 85. Designed by Charles Bulfinch in 1802, it was the last of the freestanding Federal mansions the Mount Vernon Proprietors had conceived for Beacon Hill until rising land values made rowhouses the norm of the neighborhood. 

The well-proportioned beauty of the house's tall living-room windows, Corinthian pilasters, oriental cast-iron balcony fretwork, classical balustrade, octagonal cupola and cobblestoned entrance court made me envy David, the schoolmate who had the privilege of playspace unlimited. Nor did I feel he deserved it, after the time he taunted me and stuck a piece of tape on my knapsack as I passed by on the way home from our school.

Another enclave of envy was here at No. 87-89, first built in 1805 by Bulfinch, and demonstrative of the gradual mansion-to-rowhouse transition that evolved Beacon Hill as its land values increased. No. 87, the only remaining Bulfinch original, echoes No. 85's diminishing fenestration according to the importance of the rooms on each floor. Its bracketed lintels (also used on Otis's third home on Beacon Street) add touches of class that befit the intellectual depth of its occupant, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

No. 89 was rebuilt in brownstone in the 19th century and redesigned in brick in 1925 to make it more "Beacon Hill." At first I was fooled into thinking it was a Hill original; the giveaways of its age are the anachronistic lintel arches, the equality of the window sizes on the top two floors, and the three-door garage, designed for the unheard-of in the Hill's heyday: the automobile.

Which made it an ideal setting for the aptly titled but ineptly scripted 1975 TV series, Beacon Hill. Modeled on Upstairs, Downstairs, this short-lived show concerned an upperclass family, the Lassiters, at the time of Prohibition in the 1920s, and their up-and-down relations with their servants, with whom they shared a common Irish heritage, slightly narrowing the caste gap.

The evening the show debuted, my other upstairs neighbor Chris was staying overnight with a friend nearby, which put Chris in the right place at the right time to be a handful of Beacon Hill residents interviewed by The Boston Globe on their reactions to the show. With the unusually effete eloquence for an 8-year-old only child I envied him for, Chris told the Globe that the characters were "a boring class of people who don't get on with each other." ("Did TV find 'Beacon Hill'?", The Boston Globe, August 26, 1975) Which may have made him a spokesman for the Hill's viewers in general, for the show was canceled after 11 of its 13 episodes.

And now, as a correspondent for Boston Homes magazine who writes about pricey luxury properties for sale in Boston, I can't say that I can find Beacon Hill either—because I can no longer afford it.

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