The New York Times also has a much nicer story about a house located on a rock in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island: "It was another indecently beautiful day at Clingstone — a faded, shingled and, yes, very rough 103-year-old mansion set on a rock in Narragansett Bay — and Mr. Wood, its owner, was musing on what the place is not: specifically, that grander turn-of-the century folly in nearby Newport, a limestone-and-gilt palace built by a Vanderbilt in 1895. But in fact it’s the rough edges and salt-encrusted surfaces that Mr. Wood, a 79-year-old Boston architect, treasures most about Clingstone. For nearly half a century, he has kept them (more or less) intact, and the house standing, through his own hard labor and that of others. He and a crew of family and friends who share his passion for the place’s “deep bohemian funk,” as Nicholas Benson, a stone carver from Newport, put it, have dedicated their time and skills (plumbing and wiring experience are always particularly welcome) to keeping the place from slipping into the water forever... In 1961, when Mr. Wood bought the house with his ex-wife Joan, who is also an architect, for $3,600, it had been empty for two decades. All of its 65 windows were smashed, and its slate roof was wide open to the sky. Vandals had been creative: on the second floor, the interior shingles were embedded with marbles (they still are), which had been blasted there by some sort of firearm... To get to this point, Mr. Wood became an expert scavenger, a deft barterer and an experienced arm-twister. 'The number of things I’ve gotten for free', he said happily, ticking off the sixty black porcelain doorknobs salvaged from houses that were being torn down in Boston’s South End; the overhead factory lights that came from a slaughterhouse in lower Roxbury; the lumber plucked from an old Boston-area supermarket and strung with netting to make the railing that runs around the stairwell on the second floor. There are still no banisters on the wide, twisting main staircase, though the father of a man who was married here carved the banister posts for the back stairs... One year Mr. Wood put an ad in the Harvard Crimson: “Island occupant wanted to live in 23-room house. No charges. No duties. Ready now.” Somehow, the Crimson printed that last line as “Leaky now.” Still, Mr. Wood was able to hire his first caretakers, a doctoral student and his wife, who would stay at Clingstone during the week and head back to Boston when Mr. and Mrs. Wood arrived on the weekends with their three sons... Today, solar panels heat the water, and a wind turbine on the roof generates electricity. Rainwater is collected in a 3,000-gallon cistern, then filtered, treated and pumped through the house for cleaning purposes. (Mr. Wood claims it is safe enough to drink, “but my children don’t trust me so we don’t,” he said.) After years of using an activated seawater system that draws in seawater, then treats and filters the waste before releasing it back into the ocean, Clingstone now has the latest generation of composting toilets. Bartering access to the house has yielded all sorts of boons, like the yearly services of the Jamestown Boatyard (formerly the Wharton Shipyard, built just for Clingstone), which hauls the family’s boats and floating dock and stores them each winter in return for a week’s use of the house in the summer. Would-be renters, Mr. Wood said, “must be able to swim, understand hurricanes, strong tides and outboards". Upkeep is still Sisyphean, and Mr. Wood, who is divorced from both his first and second wives, has benefited from an ingenious solution: the Clingstone work weekend. Held every year around Memorial Day, it brings 70 or so friends and Clingstone lovers together to tackle jobs like washing all 65 windows and scraping and painting their frames and sills. Feeding the volunteers, who camp all over the house, is a job in itself. There are, in fact, 215 such projects in the database maintained by Anne Tait, an artist and professor who married Dan Wood in 1998, organized by theme and skill.
08 August 2008
Much prettier story
The New York Times also has a much nicer story about a house located on a rock in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island: "It was another indecently beautiful day at Clingstone — a faded, shingled and, yes, very rough 103-year-old mansion set on a rock in Narragansett Bay — and Mr. Wood, its owner, was musing on what the place is not: specifically, that grander turn-of-the century folly in nearby Newport, a limestone-and-gilt palace built by a Vanderbilt in 1895. But in fact it’s the rough edges and salt-encrusted surfaces that Mr. Wood, a 79-year-old Boston architect, treasures most about Clingstone. For nearly half a century, he has kept them (more or less) intact, and the house standing, through his own hard labor and that of others. He and a crew of family and friends who share his passion for the place’s “deep bohemian funk,” as Nicholas Benson, a stone carver from Newport, put it, have dedicated their time and skills (plumbing and wiring experience are always particularly welcome) to keeping the place from slipping into the water forever... In 1961, when Mr. Wood bought the house with his ex-wife Joan, who is also an architect, for $3,600, it had been empty for two decades. All of its 65 windows were smashed, and its slate roof was wide open to the sky. Vandals had been creative: on the second floor, the interior shingles were embedded with marbles (they still are), which had been blasted there by some sort of firearm... To get to this point, Mr. Wood became an expert scavenger, a deft barterer and an experienced arm-twister. 'The number of things I’ve gotten for free', he said happily, ticking off the sixty black porcelain doorknobs salvaged from houses that were being torn down in Boston’s South End; the overhead factory lights that came from a slaughterhouse in lower Roxbury; the lumber plucked from an old Boston-area supermarket and strung with netting to make the railing that runs around the stairwell on the second floor. There are still no banisters on the wide, twisting main staircase, though the father of a man who was married here carved the banister posts for the back stairs... One year Mr. Wood put an ad in the Harvard Crimson: “Island occupant wanted to live in 23-room house. No charges. No duties. Ready now.” Somehow, the Crimson printed that last line as “Leaky now.” Still, Mr. Wood was able to hire his first caretakers, a doctoral student and his wife, who would stay at Clingstone during the week and head back to Boston when Mr. and Mrs. Wood arrived on the weekends with their three sons... Today, solar panels heat the water, and a wind turbine on the roof generates electricity. Rainwater is collected in a 3,000-gallon cistern, then filtered, treated and pumped through the house for cleaning purposes. (Mr. Wood claims it is safe enough to drink, “but my children don’t trust me so we don’t,” he said.) After years of using an activated seawater system that draws in seawater, then treats and filters the waste before releasing it back into the ocean, Clingstone now has the latest generation of composting toilets. Bartering access to the house has yielded all sorts of boons, like the yearly services of the Jamestown Boatyard (formerly the Wharton Shipyard, built just for Clingstone), which hauls the family’s boats and floating dock and stores them each winter in return for a week’s use of the house in the summer. Would-be renters, Mr. Wood said, “must be able to swim, understand hurricanes, strong tides and outboards". Upkeep is still Sisyphean, and Mr. Wood, who is divorced from both his first and second wives, has benefited from an ingenious solution: the Clingstone work weekend. Held every year around Memorial Day, it brings 70 or so friends and Clingstone lovers together to tackle jobs like washing all 65 windows and scraping and painting their frames and sills. Feeding the volunteers, who camp all over the house, is a job in itself. There are, in fact, 215 such projects in the database maintained by Anne Tait, an artist and professor who married Dan Wood in 1998, organized by theme and skill.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment