Thread by @cinemashoebox

i will never learn how to spell massachusetts

massacheusetts? massachewsetts? massachusitts? massachusets? massachussets? massuchussets? massucheezits? there's literally no way to know

ANYWAY, mushycheezits has like a buuuuuunch of NRHPs. 4,318! that's the second most of any state, behind New York. so this might be a long one.

it's not surprising that it has that many, obviously: muskyarmpits is the epicentre of New England and has Boston, one of the few pre-revolutionary cities of any real size, as well as lots of smaller colonial-era communities, plus there was a lot of 19th century action there too.

(indeed as you can see on the map, Boston - the 327 entries in the bay - has a lot but not *that* many proportionally to the rest of missyelliotts)

for that reason i won't do what i sometimes do with big cities by doing them first or last or whatever: the listings in muckybiscuits are just by county, and then by city within county, and we'll just do 'em alphabetically, the way god intended. off we go!

this means we start in Barnstaple County, aka Cape Cod, a peninsula made entirely of money

the Cape is enough of a distinct area to have a named house style - the "Cape Cod House" is a one-storey with a steep pitched roof and five bays: the door in the middle and two either side. this one belonged to a man named Nymphus Hinkley.

this also gives rise to the adorably lopsided "half cape", where there are only three bays, with the door uncentred:

that fun-size fun is balanced out, though, by the Cape's huge macro-capitalist shingle style...stuff. shingle can be nice but this stuff - lots of these are yacht clubs, that kind of thing - is pretty gross

this stuff peaks - thematically, if not aesthetically - with the Kennedy Compound, 3 huge houses in Hyannis Port belonging to the Kennedy family:

that is, basically, the story of Cape Cod in a nutshell - the progress from tiny 18th century fishermen's cottages to vast 20th century tycoon's compounds, all of them sort of pretending that they're speaking the same architectural language of shingles and roof-pitches

and not just 18th century, indeed: this is one of a handful of mid-17th century houses on the cape, and one of many in Massachusetts more broadly: the state has, relative to most others, masses of 17th century stuff. (also all hail the sea-bleached silver shingle)

at the other end of the timeline, happily, there is a listing covering multiple instances of modernist beach houses on the Cape, some of which are lovely:

honestly though i think my fav thing on the Cape is this place, which saw all the muted, tasteful colours and went "lmao fuck that"

the alphabet now takes us alllll the way to the other end of the state, away from the ocean, bordering New York

often, with these threads, i am surprised at how hard it is to find good pictures of the listed structures. but this is not a problem for the awe-inspiring, historically crucial Coleman Ball-patent pipe pony truss bridge in Windsor, Massachusetts. thank god.

CUTE

my core values have just been shattered. i have found a round barn i do not hate

i know this will come as a betrayal to many, but i have to live my truth. the round barn of the Hancock Shaker village community is...not bad

Herman Melville lived here and this is where he wrote Moby Dick. he also wrote this charming description of his writing life:

the other thing western Mass has a lot of is the very ominous mills that are characteristic of the slightly more neglected bits of New England:

jaw-droppingly ominous Quaker meeting house. pacifists my ass

not to be outdone in spookiness, non-Quaker missionaries built this house: actually way back in the 1730s, when it was the centre of a mission to Native Americans

suddenly, BAUHAUS

this is the house and studio of Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L. K. Morris, abstract artists of the 30s and 40s, who had this built on the site of a burned-down 19th century mansion in 1930. it is truly wonderful and now houses their large collection of art

the house that had been on the site was one of a cluster of 19th century mega-mansions in the area, of which two are especially notable...

this is The Mount, designed and built at the very end of the 19th century by none other than Edith Wharton, who was not only a novelist but also an architect and designer: this was the only full house she ever built, and she built it for herself.

it drew on the principles of her own book, the Decoration of Houses, to come up with a sober, neo-Georgian design

then she really had fun with the gardens, giving them over to her niece Beatrix Farrand, who went on to be one of the most influential landscape architects in US history

oh also, after Wharton lived there (she wrote House of Mirth there), it became a girls' boarding school from the 40s to the 70s, and then home to a theatre company, and is apparently super-duper haunted. it badly needs a novel of its own

the other mega-house (and mega-garden) round these parts is Naumkeag, which is, shall we say, a wee bit twee.

history tells us that wealthy lawyer Joseph Hodges Choate
said to noted society architect (and noted asshole, and noted murder victim) Stanford White, "what if Bilbo Baggins spent all his dragon money on a new house?" and Naumkeag was the result

here too the gardens have all kinds of shit going on and are somewhat more notable than the house itself

here's the whole Stanford White saga, if you're interested...

apparently i wrote the Stanford White thread on a bad typo day (even by my already high standards) so, sorry about that

👍🍦🥤🍔👍

can't articulate why but the phrase "boguslavsky triple-deckers" is sending me over the edge

"this is my husband, Boguslavsky Triple-Deckers"

"the ice-skating world has today been stunned after a skater successfully executed six consecutive Boguslavsky Triple-Deckers"

"are YOUR Slavsky Triple-Deckers bogus? get them checked today!"

"you know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Belarus? they call it a Boguslavsky Triple-Decker"

"He's coming off the ropes...there's the twist...here it is, folks, the signature move...BOOM! Right in Cena's face! The Iron Tsar pulls off another brutal Boguslavsky Triple-Decker!"

the New England mill typology really is grindingly bleak. these are four different buildings, all in the same town (Fall River)

these too. all different, all Fall River

these too. half the listed buildings in this town are mills. nobody needs 'em anymore, nobody needs this many luxury condo conversions. horrendous preservation problem.

the other great industry that shaped the state was whaling: above all in the whaling boomtown of New Bedford, which grew fat on the proceeds of whaling in the 1840s. this is where Ishmael meets Queequeg in Moby Dick: this church is where he hears Father Mapple's sermon.

New Bedford also features this house, built for a wealthy whaling family by the young Richard Upjohn, his very first work and utterly unlike the Gothic stuff he came to be known for. odd.

god, i hate this

"this" being the 1894 Bristol County Superior Court. it's described as being "Spanish Romanesque" but in fact it's just very specifically aping the otherwise unique mid-12th century ribbed dome of Zamora Cathedral, which only barely works in Zamora and doesn't work here at all

batshit New England names: a constant delight

the two genders

(those were two of the notable residents of the Taunton State Hospital, a terrifying 19th century asylum that was closed in the 70s and demolished about 10 years ago

T H E M O N O L I T H

whooooops

i arguably bang on about age too much but we're back in a bit of the state where 18th century houses are quite common - these are all comfortably pre-revolutionary - and having this stuff really is just such a wildly different architectural context and vibe from 99% of the US

Dighton Rock is listed! yay! Dighton Rock is a very obviously spuriously carved rock that numerous people have used to "prove" that [insert ethnicity of choice] "discovered" the Americas. i love it

it's ya boi, HH Richardson (one of the H's is for Hagrid)

specifically, it's ya boi HH Richardson as commemorated in the H. H. Richardson Historic District of North Easton, a cluster of 5 buildings by him in the same small town

we've talked about HH and about "Richardsonian Romanesque" a lot before: the unusual chunky, highly textured, red-and-brown style developed by Richardson in New England in the late 19th century (and subsequently widely imitated): one of the most distinct American styles.

North Easton was a town more or less owned by a wealthy family called Ames: they were fans of Richardson's work and got him to build several amenities there, including this completely uncharacteristic cottage which we will now ignore...

...and four others, the Ames Free Library, the Oakes Ames Memorial Hall, the North Easton railway station and the Ames Gate Lodge.

the secret with Richardson - and maybe part of the reason his work is so much more enjoyable in person - is his combination of bulk and force with beautiful detail. the chunkiness of the overall structure is always accompanied by the charm of things like the carved window arches.

this - the Memorial Hall - is 1879, and you can see here the emergence of intricacy without fiddliness, form without force, that Louis Sullivan raised to perfection in the subsequent decades

(Richardson himself died in 1886 aged 47, forever leaving us to wonder what he might have done if he'd lived into the early 20th century)

sometimes, even in North Easton, the chunk got the better of him. the forms here are beautiful and the roof is sublime but WHY did he make it look like an aquarium ornament with this rubble

the railway station is the smallest and simplest of the things he did in North Easton, but it might be the finest: the spring of the arches is so powerful, and once you get close wonderful detail is revealed.

martha's vineyard: proof that money doesn't buy taste

actually, practically nothing in Martha's Vineyard - surely full of interesting mansions? - is listed. a certain small bridge over a creek, for example, is not listed

guess we'll have to move on to Essex County in the north of the state, which is a network of aggressively fancy towns

you can literally trace the powerful local families through the listings

and the oldest of the numerous local Abbot houses is also linked to the ultimate Old New England story - this is the Benjmain Abbot House, named for Benjamin Abbot, who was one of the accusers in the Salem Witch Trials

we're not actually in Salem at this point - we're in Andover, a few towns over - but the Salem panic metastatized across the local area in 1692. Abott accused an Andover woman called Martha Carrier, who was hung for witchcraft as a result.

it's sort of a spooky part of the world. this is the Osgood Farm, the oldest parts of which date to 1699. in the doorway here, in 1783 James Otis Jr - an American Revolutionary, who coined the phrase "taxation without representation is tyranny" - was killed by a lightning strike.

before and after (over-)restoring a 1710 house. yikes

that house, and this one - which is even earlier, probably late 17th century - are of a distinctive local shape with the roof coming down further on one side than the other: they're called saltbox houses. many of the oldest houses in New England are saltboxes

i don't think we've had a batshit castle in Massachusetts yet! but as we know, there is *always* a batshit castle, and here it is: Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Mass

it was built by John Hays Hammond Jr to house his collection of medieval whatnots, and also his laboratories: Hammond was an inventor. if you've ever used a remote control to switch something on, you've used Hammond's technology

in doing these threads i have become increasingly numb to the sheer batshitness of batshit castles, but this one is absolutely one of the most batshit

indeed, next to it (almost literally - they look at each other across a bay) the Sleeper-McCann House, aka Little Beauport, looks positively modest

the interior...less so, perhaps. the house was both home and ongoing showpiece for Henry Davis Sleeper, who was arguably the first interior decorator in the current sense of the term

Sleeper lived next door to Abram Piatt Andrew, congressman and war hero, and - to paraphrase the very, umm, delicate way that historians seem to have approached their relationship - they were GAY AS HELL for each other and it was awesome

we're back in massaspookits

someone write this horror novel

good witches have houses too: like Lydia Pinkham, who lived in this one in the late 19th century and, from it, ran a mail-order business selling tonics and whatnot that relieved menstural cramps and other things nobody could bring themselves to openly talk about in the 19th C.

her advertising copy was was something to behold

good witches go to church here, probably

...entomb me, daddy?

(apparently the *hill* is known as Daddy Frye's Hill, after a tavern that used to be there, run by someone known as "Daddy" Frye, and then they built a cemetery there. every part of this just makes it worse)

this church also used to be on Daddy Frye's Hill. most gothic, most fucked-up part of any state around. i love it

which leads me neatly on to my next point

so, Salem was, like, a crucially important colonial town for a long time, with a long, complex history. also, yes, the witch trials were an outbreak of rabid misogyny and cruelty and a stain on history. that said,

🎃🦇🧙‍♀️𝖑𝖊𝖙'𝖘 𝖌𝖊𝖙 𝖘𝖕𝖔𝖔𝖐𝖞 🎃🦇🧙‍♀️

yes

yES

Y E S

those were, in order, the John Ward House (1680s), the Pickman House (1660s) and the House of the Seven Gables, also 1660s, that last one the subject of a novel of the same name by Hawthorne. it's gorgeous, but its most recent restoration is a bit...clean?

none of those houses have direct connections with the trials, though they were all standing (if pretty new) when the trials went down in the 1690s. right next to the Pickman House is the graveyard in which one of the trial judges rests, though:

the oldest house in town, in fact, is this, the Pickering House, which at its core is early 1660s,but got a funny little carpenter gothic facade 200 years later. it was lived in by members of the Pickering family until 1998.

out around the old town, in what were the tiny little colonial villages of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, are many more such houses: this one, with the classic ULTRASPOOKY paint job, was built by the son of John Proctor, who was executed during the trials...

(an excellent excuse for us all to pause and contemplate this picture of Daniel Day Lewis playing Proctor in the 90s film of The Crucible)

you basically can't spit here without hitting a gorgeous, rambling, late 17th century house

┏┓
┃┃╱╲ in
┃╱╱╲╲ this
╱╱╭╮╲╲house
▔▏┗┛▕▔ we
╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲
╲
aaaaaa ╲
help! ╲
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god help me but i just *love* this stuff

this was the home of John Hale, one of the more notorious trials figures: he was a minister who helped out eagerly in the early stages and then turned against them when his own wife was accused of witchcraft. arguably his change of heart helped to end the panic, but also, wow.

to me though one of the other interesting things about this part of the state and country are the *brick* houses: these are all late 17th/early 18th century and showcase a pleasingly similar style to the wooden houses, but with that very different texture.

anyway in the centuries after the trials i bet everyone chilled out a bit with the gothicness and also the dubious treatment of the maybe mentally ill, right? lol no they built this asylum in 1874

this was probably the model for the Arkham sanatorium that shows up in Lovecraft's fiction, and which was itself the progenitor of the Arkham Asylum in Gotham...

alas it was demolished in 2007. booooooooooooooo

anyway we're back wandering other, remoter corners of the state now. here's where one of those characteristic New England disused mills has been turned into a giant bookshop, which, oh my god?

...?

interesting instance of a "single" NRHP that is 100 miles long: there's a listing for a series of milestones placed in the 1760s on the road between Boston and Springfield. i love these

before there was the bus, there was the

next door to the

lol, this hideous, chunky son of a bitch was mostly destroyed by a tornado in 2011. owned.

the good kind of chunk on show in this Upjohn church in the same town (this is app Springfield, the big industrial town in the interior of the state, very different from the colonial coast) - now, incongruously, a Greek Orthodox cathedral

chunkier still is this one down the road, by notable chunkmonger William Appleton Potter. this building was largely funded by Daniel Wesson, as in Smith & Wesson revolvers, which, lol

Massachusetts has listed loads and loads of midcentury diners and it's so great