As a child and well into my thirties I spent almost every weekend at a large house on the Eastern Shore. It was an enormous place with a supposed thirty six bedrooms (no one every really counted them, there were so many) and it faced a secluded creek on the bay. It had a dock with a few sail boats moored there, a family graveyard on the crest of a hill overlooking the water and the remnants of formal gardens with ancient wisteria vines strong enough to climb on. It had been, in it's heyday, a bustling hotel for the people who came over to the Eastern Shore from Annapolis and Baltimore to take a train to the ocean. This was before the advent of the Bay Bridge. There were many ferry villages like this one- Betterton, Tolchester Beach, Rock Hall , and probably many"boarding houses" as they were called like this one. The reason I am not naming the house (it has a name, like many estates on the Bay with Anglophile pretensions) is because it is in the process of being demolished this week. It was bought by a lawyer from Richmond who decided that renovating it was too expensive and too problematic and the best thing to do was just raze it and build something new.
The reason why I am writing about this on my PollySue's blog is because my dismay at the thought of the destruction of a place that I have loved since before I could walk (my parents discovered it in the early sixties before I was born) has forced me to consider two very opposing views of the world- that of preservation of the old, and that of championing of the new.
My beloved hotel would be considered a bit of Victorian brick a brack to an English person who has a local church that has stones over the door that read 1300, or who lives in a thatched roof cottage that is a mere middle aged 1750. But in a relatively young country like America a house that was built in the 1860's is considered ancient, a bit of flyblown time preserved in amber. To the majority of people the thought of taking on the project of preserving and maintaining such a house is as pleasant as being flogged with damp towels in a snowstorm while seeing your money being stolen by unscrupulous "contractors." Yes, there are Amercian historic preservation societies many of whom I contacted to try and save this house from the wrecking ball- but they put many restrictions on the owners , and the former owners of this house didn't want to be told what to do with their own property. So the house , while listed as a "property of historic significance" was not designated historic, and eventually came to the point of no return it stands at now.
All this said let me take you back to a weekend when I was about seven years old. The excitement of getting in the family Ford Fairlane and going over the Bay Bridge after hours waiting in the beach back up traffic. The stop at Holly's restaurant to have crab cakes on Kent Island. The approach to the small town down the road from the hotel, slumbering in the humid July evening, seeing a racoon cross the road, it's eyes shining green in the headlights. And then, down the dark country lane to the house, rising above me magisterially , a circular drive and massive oak trees sheltering it, and blue neon bug zapper lights on sticks that formed a sort of whimsical signage complete with frizzing sounds of unfortunate mosquitos being drawn towards them.
Going in to the house, being warmly welcomed and shown to our rooms that did not have doors, only transoms and curtains that blew in the breeze of ancient steel fans that made clunking noises as they rotated. Our food put in 1940's era refrigerators that looked like hot rod cars somehow, with lots of curves and chrome. The furniture mostly Victorian Eastlake, with cut oak, marble top dressers. Light fixtures dangling from the ceiling, made of painted frosted glass, white chenille bedspreads, cotton sheets that had been dried on a line in the sun and somehow smelled of light. In the morning going down the creaky stairs and out into the lush canopy of a southern summer- swimming in the creek, lying in the grass, watching herons and snakes and minnows and crabs seeing the rippled sand under the water, hearing the gentle clank of the boat rigging. Napping in the hot part of the afternoon in the old house, wandering around the many rooms, going up staircases that appeared here and there to large unused rooms with fading floral wallpaper and half curtains, windows propped up with hardback books from Readers Digest. Climbing into the attic on yet another hidden stairway and looking at yellowed letters with spidery writing, old photographs, trunks of ancient clothes. Becoming aware that what I thought of as time wasn't really just now, but was also the past shadowing me at every step, watching over me, comforting me in the knowlege that I wasn't alone here, that many other children had been happy here and left that happiness somehow in the very floor boards and plaster.
I know it is because of my love of this place that I instinctively loved anything old, anything that had a story, a history, a bit of depth and interest that a brand new object lacked. The horrific pea soup and pumpkin coloration of the seventies apalled me, I wanted the deep burgundy and robins egg blues of the Chinese rugs, the delicate pastels of the china lamps and the patina of 100 year old mahogany. I was aghast at the earth shoe pale blue levis pants and tee shirts of my classmates, I wanted a white eyelet dress that blew in the breeze, that was of a cotton so fine it seemed like a spiderweb. I started liking vintage clothes because they connected me to the past that at this place seemed like such a better place to be than the Eagles listening kickball playing horror of seventh grade in 1977 urban Washington.
This is how I came to champion the old, to see the quality and charm in it, to feel that it was a crime to destroy something of beauty that was old just to have something that was new.
This house was to many eyes a delapidated wreck that got worse with time. Ceilings fell in. The foundation shifted and weakend. Mold developed, birds took up residence, racoons and squirrels slept in the abandoned beds and ate out the filling leaving it on the dusty wood floors. To the practical eye of the lawyer from Richmond the house was a tear down. Just shoring up the foundation so that the walls wouldn't buckle was a near million dollar prospect, and after that tearing out walls, replacing windows, leveling the floors that were so bumpy they looked like roller coasters rather than flat surfaces to walk on- money would evaporate into this house like water in the desert and it would just need more and more. A nice new house built with the latest design could maximize the gorgeous bay views and keep you nice and cool in summer, nice and warm in winter. Granite countertops and sub zero refrigerators, open floor plans and massive decks, all these things would be far superior to old cracked linoleum, antique refrigerators coated in rust, windows that opened and let in rain and screen doors that slapped closed instead of swinging on carefully calibrated magenitc hinges. Plus, the resale value of a site this prime would be far more with a new house than with some old decaying pile that only a fool would consider saving.
Old things ask more from you but they give more. They give the sense of continuity, of quality, of uniqueness, of depth. I am sure that the house built on this site will be very comfortable, and to many people just what they always dreamed of in their long careers working to be the kind of person who could afford to tear down an old house and build a new one. Many people want to be the first owner of something because the thought of those that came before them is somehow creepy, haunted, dirty, well....used. But to me, it is precisely because of this that an old place or object has a fascination, a beauty and a quality that far exceeds a Potomac worthy mansion with all the latest convieniences. I wouldn't trade my old cracked claw foot tub by the open window for a million double sinked marble crusted bathrooms. Living with the past is not living in the past. And this is a distinction that I think is very important.
My life will be my eulogy for this place that shaped who I am and helped me find a career that I love. And someday I hope to save another, (perhaps slightly smaller,) old house and bring it back to the present with respect, love and tact so that others can experience what I knew as a child in this wonderful, lost place that I will always carry with me in my heart.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
I have a need to save other people's histories. At the auction I go to there are often boxes of photographs, letters, diaries, bills of sale, dried corsages, ribbons from contests, programs from plays, old dance cards, graduation notices, postcards, report cards. This falls under the category of "epehmera" and is often discarded as having no resale value by the antique dealers who have bigger fish to fry.
Vintage clothing I suppose could be seen as a kind of fabric ephemera, telling a visual and sometimes olfactory history of the owner. We see the sweat under the arms of a wedding dress and the tear on the hem of a party gown as evidence of stress or hurrying down a staircase after having too much to drink. We smell the cigarette odor of a smoker, we find the ticket stub in the old purse.
But it's the actual physical archive of a family's history written down in black and white or printed in kodachrome that fascinates me and I save it, because if I didn't snatch it up the bulldozer that comes at the end of the auction will plow it down and take it to the dump where it will be lost forever.
"That's sad, to have your family photos end up like this" the dealers say as they sift through the birthdays, the weddings, the proms, the proud new home owners in front of their brick house, the beach photos of women in the twenties in their wool bathing suits, showing more skin than was probably ever seen before in history and looking sheepishly pleased about it.
The men in their boater hats with their school pennants. The children in white dresses and ringlets posing with the family cat. The color group school photos with the name of the teacher and the year, the platform shoes and bellbottoms, the tee shirts with their timely logos. That is the thing about ephemera. You can criss cross through the twentieth century with one family from great grandmother to the present day, you can trace the resemblence in the faces, you can see their embarassing bare bottomed baby pictures and the same person in a formal graduation shot with their serious picture in the yearbook and their accomplishments beside them.
You can read their letters to their mother from college asking for money. You can read their journals describing all of the movies that came out in the year 1947 and rated from good to excellent. You can go to Paris with a teenager in 1926 and shop for hats with her and talk with her father who comes to pay her bills and have what she calls "a talk fest." You can read between the lines when a lawyer in 1882 says that he enjoyed a lady's company "very much" and was annoyed when his coworker made him go back to the office. You can read the story of a single mother in New Jersey in the 30's written by her depressed mother she takes care of, citing the weather every single day and the laundry that she did, meals that she cooked, worries that she had regarding her granddaughter who was having trouble at school and was home sick often.
The journals are often dull and badly written, rarely do they show any literary merit or anything earth shatteringly novel. Rather they are the real record of lives lived, dutifully recorded on paper with a pen, and the fact that they are able to reach out to the present and connect with me, a total stranger in a different century, fascinates me.
With the internet you can do a cursory search and find out who the people were, if there are names with the ephemera. Often it is just boxes of photographs or albums with first names only so you can only surmise- upper class family from Philadelphia judging by the photographer's studio name on the formal portrait. Upper class couple in New York City getting married at the Waldorf Astoria in 1945, old movie camera film transformed to silent video cassette, the richness of the guest's hats and dresses breathtaking, the food that they are eating and the utensils they use of the highest cost and quality. You can even read their lips to see what they are saying if you are good at that kind of thing. One of my favorites was a stick in snap shot album from the 80's , definitely Baltimore or a suburb of, the girls wearing the permed hair and pouffy prom dresses of the time, the boys with their mullets and beer cans clowning for the camera. One girl went to three proms and had three different dresses, each a more magnified pastel powder puff than the last, one with a matching parasol. Who is she now? Is she my age, a young grandmother at a crab feast in Ocean City? Is she a single woman living with cats in New York City writing a book on middle age angst? Is she even alive still, and if so , what would she think about me and my friends looking at this album academically, seeing it as a prime example of horrible 80's fashion?
What I see again and again is a paradox, a metaphysical one. Nothing stays the same. People are born, age, die. Their lives , no matter how grand or how humble , leave a paper trail that leads us to the fact that they are gone, and they once were here. Yet the business of antiques and ephemera is a curious way of entering the lives of these people on an almost alarmingly personal level and seeing who they were, what they wore, where they lived, and if you are lucky, what they felt and thought. All very similar yet all completely unique. Why are we alive if all we do is leave paper behind that means nothing to anyone but our family, who obviously didn't care enough to save it if it passes in to the hands of strangers like me? And what should I do with the crates of photos, letters, journals, programs, that I have accumulated over fourteen years in this business- too much to archive, too heartbreaking to consign to the dustbin of history.
Faulker wrote something to the effect that the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. It is oddly ephemeral, yet never disposed of entirely. That's why I will continue my collecting, in the hopes that someday someone who comes across my paper trail will at least give it a look and know that I was alive.
Vintage clothing I suppose could be seen as a kind of fabric ephemera, telling a visual and sometimes olfactory history of the owner. We see the sweat under the arms of a wedding dress and the tear on the hem of a party gown as evidence of stress or hurrying down a staircase after having too much to drink. We smell the cigarette odor of a smoker, we find the ticket stub in the old purse.
But it's the actual physical archive of a family's history written down in black and white or printed in kodachrome that fascinates me and I save it, because if I didn't snatch it up the bulldozer that comes at the end of the auction will plow it down and take it to the dump where it will be lost forever.
"That's sad, to have your family photos end up like this" the dealers say as they sift through the birthdays, the weddings, the proms, the proud new home owners in front of their brick house, the beach photos of women in the twenties in their wool bathing suits, showing more skin than was probably ever seen before in history and looking sheepishly pleased about it.
The men in their boater hats with their school pennants. The children in white dresses and ringlets posing with the family cat. The color group school photos with the name of the teacher and the year, the platform shoes and bellbottoms, the tee shirts with their timely logos. That is the thing about ephemera. You can criss cross through the twentieth century with one family from great grandmother to the present day, you can trace the resemblence in the faces, you can see their embarassing bare bottomed baby pictures and the same person in a formal graduation shot with their serious picture in the yearbook and their accomplishments beside them.
You can read their letters to their mother from college asking for money. You can read their journals describing all of the movies that came out in the year 1947 and rated from good to excellent. You can go to Paris with a teenager in 1926 and shop for hats with her and talk with her father who comes to pay her bills and have what she calls "a talk fest." You can read between the lines when a lawyer in 1882 says that he enjoyed a lady's company "very much" and was annoyed when his coworker made him go back to the office. You can read the story of a single mother in New Jersey in the 30's written by her depressed mother she takes care of, citing the weather every single day and the laundry that she did, meals that she cooked, worries that she had regarding her granddaughter who was having trouble at school and was home sick often.
The journals are often dull and badly written, rarely do they show any literary merit or anything earth shatteringly novel. Rather they are the real record of lives lived, dutifully recorded on paper with a pen, and the fact that they are able to reach out to the present and connect with me, a total stranger in a different century, fascinates me.
With the internet you can do a cursory search and find out who the people were, if there are names with the ephemera. Often it is just boxes of photographs or albums with first names only so you can only surmise- upper class family from Philadelphia judging by the photographer's studio name on the formal portrait. Upper class couple in New York City getting married at the Waldorf Astoria in 1945, old movie camera film transformed to silent video cassette, the richness of the guest's hats and dresses breathtaking, the food that they are eating and the utensils they use of the highest cost and quality. You can even read their lips to see what they are saying if you are good at that kind of thing. One of my favorites was a stick in snap shot album from the 80's , definitely Baltimore or a suburb of, the girls wearing the permed hair and pouffy prom dresses of the time, the boys with their mullets and beer cans clowning for the camera. One girl went to three proms and had three different dresses, each a more magnified pastel powder puff than the last, one with a matching parasol. Who is she now? Is she my age, a young grandmother at a crab feast in Ocean City? Is she a single woman living with cats in New York City writing a book on middle age angst? Is she even alive still, and if so , what would she think about me and my friends looking at this album academically, seeing it as a prime example of horrible 80's fashion?
What I see again and again is a paradox, a metaphysical one. Nothing stays the same. People are born, age, die. Their lives , no matter how grand or how humble , leave a paper trail that leads us to the fact that they are gone, and they once were here. Yet the business of antiques and ephemera is a curious way of entering the lives of these people on an almost alarmingly personal level and seeing who they were, what they wore, where they lived, and if you are lucky, what they felt and thought. All very similar yet all completely unique. Why are we alive if all we do is leave paper behind that means nothing to anyone but our family, who obviously didn't care enough to save it if it passes in to the hands of strangers like me? And what should I do with the crates of photos, letters, journals, programs, that I have accumulated over fourteen years in this business- too much to archive, too heartbreaking to consign to the dustbin of history.
Faulker wrote something to the effect that the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. It is oddly ephemeral, yet never disposed of entirely. That's why I will continue my collecting, in the hopes that someday someone who comes across my paper trail will at least give it a look and know that I was alive.
Friday, May 10, 2013
"The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, and little we see in nature that is ours."
The one benefit of having a liberal arts education, that I can see, is having quotes like this rattling around in your head like marbles. This poetry fragment from William Wordsworth often comes to me when I am at auctions, which are the ultimate example of getting and spending.
I recently drove to a Pennsylvania fire house to attend a premium vintage clothing auction. This auction, Whittakers, was attended by The Dukes of Melrose (Decades in LA) the other lady who has a vintage clothing reality show whose assistants are beautifully dressed willowy young men, and various other cranky, respectful, competitive and hell bent for leather vintage clothing dealers who would throw their grandmother under a bus if she had enough Hermes scarves to justify murder.
Of course I am exagerating for entertainment value, but not much. First off, it was one of the first warm Saturdays of Spring, delicate breezes wafting through new sprung flowers, the sun showing itself finally after weeks of cold rain. I am in this fire house auditorium with about thirty people sitting in folding chairs riveted to the action on the stage. Because this was no ordinary auction. The flowers will come back next spring, but we may never see again the astounding collection of 1920's hats from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the delicate mint green folds of a Fortuny evening dress from the Fashion Institute of Technology, the eighteenth century cotton gown that Marie Antoinette herself would have lounged in, the liquid silver flapper dress from a Euclid Avenue gilded age estate- all in one place! All for sale to the highest bidder!
I attended the preview a few days before and wore the obligatory cloth gloves to handle the garments which probably hadn't seen the light of day for 100 or more years. The experience of seeing hundreds of silk evening gowns from the late 1800's all in one place took my breath away, and handling them gently, seeing the beading , the silk, the intricacy of the designs, the colors no longer seen made by dyes that no longer exist, all I can say is WOW! I wasn't able to keep the poker face that I saw on some of the higher end dealers. It felt like I was in Bergdorf Goodman in 1900 , shopping for an outfit for a life I didn't have.
I have always been fascinated by antique clothing, and perhaps it is because of the sense of "otherness" that it exudes, the sense of a different time when people didn't throw on sweat pants and a tee shirt but rather took hours to be carefully secured in layers of cotton, silk, hooks and eyes, ribbons and lace. And perhaps there is a vouyeristic element of getting a glimpse of the lifestyles of the extremely rich, since these are their artifacts, clothes made of less expensive materials would have decayed by now, or not been valued and have all perished.
I am estimating from memory here, but standout items were the 1920's baywater green wool cape with red silk lining that had sea lions exquisitely embroidered along the front in a winding art nouveau design. $8,000.00 My bidding card stayed down. The silver lame sheperdess inspired evening gown also from the 20's, apx. $9,000.00 sold over the phone to an overseas bidder. The box of ethereal silk afternoon dresses from 1904, airbrushed with the barest suggestion of roses and swathed in spiderwebs of the finest lace, $300.00. I should have gotten that one!
And the high prices went on and on as the decades rose, the 1950's beaded cream silk ballgown that must have weighed at least ten pounds- over $4,000.00, the bizzare conquistador jump suit (was it Yves St. Laurent?) thousands, the Chanel lace dress, quite recent , thousands. By the fifth hour my bidding card was creased and folded and had not been raised once. I'm thinking, either I am charging way too little, or these people have customers that I have never seen, for whom cost is no object.
After the formal auction, was over and the Dukes of Melrose bagged up his forty thousand dollars of purchases, they did something called a "discovery" auction, which was basically boxed lots of antique clothes that had some flaws or were not designer enough to qualify for the catalog auction. This had a more carnival like atmosphere, more like the auctions I attend regularly, with bad manners, fighting, snide remarks and a blessedly comedic auctioneer tossing the Victorian widow's weeds and white cotton bloomers here and there with gay abandon. The competition here was no less fierce, however, and the prices high enough to make me airsick. I bought one lot of evening clothes for much more than I would normally have paid just to make driving all the way to this thing worth the gas and the hellish drivers on the Pennsyvania Turnpike. The auctioneer said as I held up my card "Is this the first thing you have bought today?" I nodded. "I hope it won't be the last!" he says , digging in to the next lot, a box of elfin leather shoes from the Philadelphia Museum.
I walked out of the fire station after eight hours of concentrated attention, holding my trash bag of garments, the most notable being a cream taffeta rhinestone studded evening dress from 1935 that had a Glida the Good Witch feeling about it. I had spent the last few days devoted to garments worn by people who were long dead, from a world that no longer exists.
However, the warm Spring evening as I drove home would have been the same now as then when some hopeful Philadelphia society girl put on this sparkling dress to go out dancing. Nature connects us to the past probably more than clothes or things do. So, would Wordsworth be miffed at me for spending my day in pursuit of things rather than rambling about the daffodils? Probably. But he was a poet, and I sell vintage clothes.
The one benefit of having a liberal arts education, that I can see, is having quotes like this rattling around in your head like marbles. This poetry fragment from William Wordsworth often comes to me when I am at auctions, which are the ultimate example of getting and spending.
I recently drove to a Pennsylvania fire house to attend a premium vintage clothing auction. This auction, Whittakers, was attended by The Dukes of Melrose (Decades in LA) the other lady who has a vintage clothing reality show whose assistants are beautifully dressed willowy young men, and various other cranky, respectful, competitive and hell bent for leather vintage clothing dealers who would throw their grandmother under a bus if she had enough Hermes scarves to justify murder.
Of course I am exagerating for entertainment value, but not much. First off, it was one of the first warm Saturdays of Spring, delicate breezes wafting through new sprung flowers, the sun showing itself finally after weeks of cold rain. I am in this fire house auditorium with about thirty people sitting in folding chairs riveted to the action on the stage. Because this was no ordinary auction. The flowers will come back next spring, but we may never see again the astounding collection of 1920's hats from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the delicate mint green folds of a Fortuny evening dress from the Fashion Institute of Technology, the eighteenth century cotton gown that Marie Antoinette herself would have lounged in, the liquid silver flapper dress from a Euclid Avenue gilded age estate- all in one place! All for sale to the highest bidder!
I attended the preview a few days before and wore the obligatory cloth gloves to handle the garments which probably hadn't seen the light of day for 100 or more years. The experience of seeing hundreds of silk evening gowns from the late 1800's all in one place took my breath away, and handling them gently, seeing the beading , the silk, the intricacy of the designs, the colors no longer seen made by dyes that no longer exist, all I can say is WOW! I wasn't able to keep the poker face that I saw on some of the higher end dealers. It felt like I was in Bergdorf Goodman in 1900 , shopping for an outfit for a life I didn't have.
I have always been fascinated by antique clothing, and perhaps it is because of the sense of "otherness" that it exudes, the sense of a different time when people didn't throw on sweat pants and a tee shirt but rather took hours to be carefully secured in layers of cotton, silk, hooks and eyes, ribbons and lace. And perhaps there is a vouyeristic element of getting a glimpse of the lifestyles of the extremely rich, since these are their artifacts, clothes made of less expensive materials would have decayed by now, or not been valued and have all perished.
I am estimating from memory here, but standout items were the 1920's baywater green wool cape with red silk lining that had sea lions exquisitely embroidered along the front in a winding art nouveau design. $8,000.00 My bidding card stayed down. The silver lame sheperdess inspired evening gown also from the 20's, apx. $9,000.00 sold over the phone to an overseas bidder. The box of ethereal silk afternoon dresses from 1904, airbrushed with the barest suggestion of roses and swathed in spiderwebs of the finest lace, $300.00. I should have gotten that one!
And the high prices went on and on as the decades rose, the 1950's beaded cream silk ballgown that must have weighed at least ten pounds- over $4,000.00, the bizzare conquistador jump suit (was it Yves St. Laurent?) thousands, the Chanel lace dress, quite recent , thousands. By the fifth hour my bidding card was creased and folded and had not been raised once. I'm thinking, either I am charging way too little, or these people have customers that I have never seen, for whom cost is no object.
After the formal auction, was over and the Dukes of Melrose bagged up his forty thousand dollars of purchases, they did something called a "discovery" auction, which was basically boxed lots of antique clothes that had some flaws or were not designer enough to qualify for the catalog auction. This had a more carnival like atmosphere, more like the auctions I attend regularly, with bad manners, fighting, snide remarks and a blessedly comedic auctioneer tossing the Victorian widow's weeds and white cotton bloomers here and there with gay abandon. The competition here was no less fierce, however, and the prices high enough to make me airsick. I bought one lot of evening clothes for much more than I would normally have paid just to make driving all the way to this thing worth the gas and the hellish drivers on the Pennsyvania Turnpike. The auctioneer said as I held up my card "Is this the first thing you have bought today?" I nodded. "I hope it won't be the last!" he says , digging in to the next lot, a box of elfin leather shoes from the Philadelphia Museum.
I walked out of the fire station after eight hours of concentrated attention, holding my trash bag of garments, the most notable being a cream taffeta rhinestone studded evening dress from 1935 that had a Glida the Good Witch feeling about it. I had spent the last few days devoted to garments worn by people who were long dead, from a world that no longer exists.
However, the warm Spring evening as I drove home would have been the same now as then when some hopeful Philadelphia society girl put on this sparkling dress to go out dancing. Nature connects us to the past probably more than clothes or things do. So, would Wordsworth be miffed at me for spending my day in pursuit of things rather than rambling about the daffodils? Probably. But he was a poet, and I sell vintage clothes.
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