Finishing it
The part that took the longest and shows the most: plaster, carving, glass, and the marks left by the hands that did it.
The wet trades
The winter nobody could hurry
Brick, lath and plaster went in wet, and then the house had to stand and dry. The one part of building these places that money could not hurry.
Read →
The ornamental hand
Wood carvers
The 1926 Lenox directory has a heading for wood carvers with one firm under it — and that firm’s own advertisement does not mention carving.
Read →
Tapestry
Faded on purpose
Brussels once had fifteen thousand weavers in it. By the 1890s there were a few hundred left in the world, and a new works on the Bronx River trying to make it more.
Read →
Glass
No part of it done mechanically
Corona was built in 1893, the year Wheatleigh was. What it took to get a sheet of glass out of a Long Island furnace and into a wall in the Berkshires.
Read →
Reading the room
Where the names are
wy-01346-1
Read →
Keep up with it
New properties go up here as the research turns them up.