How Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Chambered Nautilus Set the Bar Low for American Architecture

[mallorys_camera]

Only sometimes very early in the mornings can you tell that Lawn Guyland (thank you nihilistic_kid) is an island. The ground mists come up. In my second floor eyerie, leafless branches of treetops are just visible through the gray swirl. There are whiffs of the sea.



This part of Lawn Guyland, which I suppose you would call the Hempstead Plains, was pretty much farmland until the 1950s. There are very few what you might call historical artifacts. That makes it boring from my perspective since natural history doesn't interest me in the slightest. I'm only interested in the covenant between man and nature.

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When I was a wolf cub growing up in Manhattan, Lawn Guyland was probably the largest enclave of Jews in the world, since Hitler had rather disobligingly wiped us out in Berlin and the great cities of Eastern Europe. Jewish families in the millions began fleeing from Brooklyn and the Bronx. The house three houses down from them had been sold (gasp!) to schwartzes! It was time to get out.

My own grandfather, Alfred Lord Tennyson Vogel, bucked the trend. After he sold the family homestead at 79 Lefforts Avenue to a nice black family, he moved to Manhattan. His new home was an apartment complex on 72nd Street and Riverside Drive called Schwab House. My grandfather may not have realized it, but the name was a big honking gob of spit in the eye to a 19th century steel magnate named Charles M. Schwab.

Charles M. Schwab (no relation to the brokerage guy) was Andrew Carnegie's protégé. In 1901, Schwab decided to sell out his mentor to J.P. Morgan, helping that financier wrest control of Carnegie's company U.S. Steel in one of the first recorded hostile takeovers in American business history.

Carnegie went on to find new fulfillment building libraries in small towns throughout the American Midwest.

Schwab went on to build a mansion on the wrong side of Central Park.

The mansion was inspired by the Loire River Valley chateau Chenonceau if you can imagine the graceful lines of Chenonceau recreated in hideous pink granite.

How hideous was the Schwab mansion? Really, really, really hideous. Its parlor was copied from the Petite Trianon; its dining room was a duplicate of Louis XIV's banquet hall. It was expensive, it was ostentatious and it was ugly. It was everything you might imagine the fantasies of an uneducated kid growing up in the tiny town of Williamsburg, Pennsylvania might entertain about wealth and privilege. Charles M. Schwab had been that kid once. A garrulous guy in his cups, Charlie would have been the first to tell you his business success was luck, just luck.

In 1929, Schwab's luck ran out. The stock market crash wiped him out. He closed the mansion and moved to a Park Avenue apartment – tiny, but on the right side of the Park, at least – where he died destitute and alone in 1939.

Before he died, he tried giving the mansion to the city of New York. He suggested it would make a nice residence for the mayor, whereupon Fiorello La Guardia is said to have rejoined, "What me in that?" La Guardia was reform-minded.

The mansion squatted empty on its upper Westside block until just around the end of World War II. After it was finally torn down, a utilitarian red brick apartment building was built on the site and dubbed— whimsically, I like to think —Schwab House.


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In the 50 years since I was a kid, Lawn Guyland's changed. Cassandra's suburban enclave is quite the international hub. People from China, Korea, the Middle East, Israel. Lots and lots of Indians.

You can always tell where the Indians live. As soon as they get any money at all, they build these enormous facades on the front of their house. No shit. The Indian houses all look like mausoleums and most of them have these huge stone statues of elephants out in front.

What is it about the human spirit that makes it find its ultimate expression in building big ugly houses anyway?

Build thee more stately mansions,
O my soul?

I think not, Ollie.

Comments

[anais-pf.livejournal.com]

So what do you think about putting that six foot tall inflatable elephant wearing a Santa hat, in the front yard?