Seagram’s and Be Sure

Ongoing site preparations at the future home of the Lancaster Museum of Art recently uncovered a ready-made masterpiece: Seagram’s and Be Sure.

 

Building of the Week: The Mayer Farmstead

Name: The Mayer Farmstead

Address: 1580 Fruitville Pike, Manheim Township

Built: 1867

The Mayer Farmstead is a proud but abandoned hamlet of nineteenth-century barns and outbuildings anchored by a forlorn Italianate mansionette along Fruitville Pike.  Surrounded by industrial parks, shopping centers, and freeway on-ramps, this architectural apparition stands like a mothballed diorama of slow demise and obsolete grandeur.

Its hard to imagine anything but impending doom for the site, even if our lame economy has just emptied a few of the big boxes at the Red Rose Commons shopping center next door.  While new retail construction here seems redundant at best, it also seems inevitable.  The site, which includes some of the last actively farmed land in the city’s oldest and closest ring of suburban development, recently sold to a commercial developer with unknown but predictable intentions.

Not that exploiting this land for profit is anything new, of course.  The site’s patriarch, David M. Mayer, was a catch-as-catch-can entrepreneur who had stakes in farming, lumber, and mining, and who established a lime quarry and kiln on the property around the same time his house was built.  Both are featured views in Everts & Stewart’s 1875 New Historical Atlas of Lancaster County, illustrating a fascinating juxtaposition of nineteenth-century tastes and norms.  That an ostentatiously  genteel, lavishly landscaped estate would stand directly across from a smoke-belching pit mine, and indeed, that both would be proud trophies, posed no contradiction to the captains of nineteenth-century industry.  That Mayer’s teenage daughter Lyda (perhaps the young child in the tree swing?) died of consumption in 1888, reportedly in the cupola atop the house, is a cynical parallel drawn purely in hindsight.

 

Building of the Week: Ashley & Bailey Silk Mill

Name: Former Ashley & Bailey Silk Mill

Location: Third and Linden Streets, Columbia

Date: c. 1897; c. 1920

Architect: Unknown

Until recently, the former Ashley & Bailey silk mill in Columbia was a bewildering and improbable ruin– a knotted curtain of brick, vines, and broken glass.  The building lurked on the edge of the town like a Dickensian spectre, not just of an industrial past, but also of a landscape yet to come, a post-apocalyptic premonition of a built environment returned to nature.   Its ruinous state was the legacy of a tragicomic history of abandonment, redevelopment pipe dreams, and a demolition campaign that was itself ultimately abandoned.  Like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the mill complex was half-heartedly hacked away at for decades while redevelopment plans and liability concerns came and went and an encroaching wild ecosystem took root.  Trees replaced the concrete mushroom columns of the factory floor, wildflowers sprouted between amputated floorboards and joists, and hawks perched atop the ivy-covered water tower.

More than a century ago, Frederick Law Olmsted revolutionized landscape architecture by fabricating naturalistic vignettes (New York’s Central Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Chicago’s Jackson Park) within an industrialized urban grid.  He worked in direct response to the threats posed to the American landscape by the new social and architectural orders embodied in buildings exactly like the Ashley and Bailey, constructed only a few years before Olmsted’s death.  In a sense, then, the chickens came home to roost in Columbia, as a sublime natural ecosystem returned Olmsted’s favor and inserted itself into this industrial shell after the fortunes of enterprise waned.  This was architecture gone feral, and it was something to behold.

All this changed when a new set of redevelopment plans were unveiled last year.  The site is now being scraped clean (pasteurized?) for the Turkey Hill Experience, a dairy and iced tea tourist mecca and erstaz factory to be housed in stabilized portions of the old mill structures.  Demolition of the site has intensified over the last few months, with vegetation and windows stripped away, the smokestack lopped in half, and large portions of the surviving original 1897 mill cleared.  These were undertaken ostensibly for structural reasons, though it is worth noting that plans call for a mini-mart–first proposed in the mid 1990s–on the newly-leveled site, and there are whispers of a giant fiberglass cow standing perch on the shortened smokestack platform.  Perhaps in an ode to the recent spirit of the place, however, the mini-mart will reportedly feature a green roof.

Note: The above rendering and half the photos below depict the site before redevelopment began this summer.  As can be seen in the historic images, this constituted only a portion of the original complex, the bulk of which was demolished in 2000. (Click to enlarge)

 

Building of the Week: Fleet Wing

Name: Fleet Wing, aka A&W Jewelry
Address: 49 West King Street
Built: c. 1940
Architect: Unknown

This sleek little relic began life as a filling station for Fleet Wing gasoline in the early 1940s, when few other buildings of any kind were going up downtown.  While it would only serve this purpose for a few short years, the building kept a decidedly bird-themed identity for decades.  In 1944 it was converted to the Bluebird Grill, and in 1950 became the Pelican Bar and Grill.  For almost twenty-five years, a large neon pelican sat atop an electric marquee sign mounted to the building.  Today, however, only a vaguely avian tv antennae keeps company with the graceful red silhouetted bird of the surviving original logo.

The building is clad in a colorful palate of porcelain enamel, a then-state-of-the-art material favored for its ease of maintenance and streamlined appearance.  A decade later, this same material would be used in mass-produced all-steel Lustron houses, an evolutionary dead-end but now a cult classic of mid-century architecture.  For more on Lustron, click here.

 

Building of the Week: 302-306 West Vine Street

Address: 302-306 West Vine Street

Built: c.1890

Architect: Unknown

In certain pockets of the city, the lock-step march of Lancaster’s ubiquitous Victorian rowhouses encountered topographical and street grid abnormalities that forced otherwise by-the-book builders to improvise.  One of the best examples of this vernacular free-form is at the five-corner intersection of Vine, Mulberry and Strawberry Streets, where this teetering cluster of turrets, chimneys, bay windows, porches and balconies turns a hilly corner.  It is enough to make Frank Gehry blush.

 

Update: Lancaster Kodachrome Campaign

East King Street (B. Leech, August 2009)

Given that Kodachrome film has been on a nationwide backorder for the last few months, the Lancaster Kodachrome Campaign has been off to an understandably slow start.  But while rolls are still unavailable locally, New York City’s venerable B&H Photo is now restocked and selling online HERE, though they expect their current stock to run out within the week.

The Lancaster Building Conservancy also has a few extra rolls for the cause, and will donate one (1) to each of the first three (3) people who contribute five (5) new photos to our Flickr group.  Email bentleech@gmail.com for more details.

 

The Polyester of Brick

Formstone.  Its the fake rock veneer we love to hate.  The stuff that makes large parts of our city look like Fred and Barney’s Bedrock.  In a self-professed red-brick town like Lancaster, Formstone is not something to be discussed in polite company.  Like a rash we picked up in Baltimore, or the tub of expired sour cream we just found in the back of the fridge, this infamous cement skin is an embarrassing pox on our houses.  And churches and stores and garages.  While Baltimore might be the epicenter of the outbreak (John Waters famously called the stuff “The polyester of brick”), we have no shortage of the stuff.  We try to ignore it, but there is hardly a block in the city that is Formstone-free, and in some neighborhoods it covers a good quarter of the building stock.  Its ubiquity renders it almost invisible, the architectural equivalent of white noise or the gray static of television’s old dead air.

Formstone coverage in part of Cabbage Hill, Lancaster.

As architectural travesties go, however, Formstone has an certain charm.  If you stop and really look at the stuff, there is a surprising diversity of forms.  Some is monochrome, some has four, five, or even six different colors.  There are pinks and blues and purples and tans mixed in with the standard grays.  Some have recessed mortar lines, some have raised beads.  It is a widely-held misconception that the stuff was rolled on or hung in sheets like other veneers– in fact, most Formstone was shaped by hand, on site, with a series of special tools in an extremely labor-intensive process, making it a true (if inexplicable) form of folk art.  The original 1937 patent describes how each “stone” was formed with its own batch of colored concrete, textured with special rollers, and powdered with mica or other surface additions.  Mortar lines were drawn and shaped freehand.  Every mason had his own style, his own abstract interpretation of a stone wall.  Few were convincing, of course, but that wasn’t really the point.  For most of the twentieth century, a red brick house was boring and ugly and needed to be painted all the damn time.  A Formstone house, on the other hand, had a touch of class to it.  In the words of one Baltimorean interviewed in a great documentary of the same name, they were “Little Castles.”

 

Building of The Week: Keppel’s Confectionery Building

Name: Keppel’s Wholesale Confectionery Company Building

Address: 323-329 North Queen Street

Built: 1913 (323-325); unknown (327-329)

Architect: C. Emlen Urban; unknown

The former R.F. Keppel & Bro. factory on North Queen Street is an elegant heap of a building, half Beaux-Arts dandy, half square-jawed pugilist, and crowned by a rusting industrial spire that looks like it was conjured out of a Charles Demuth painting.  In a town that gave birth to Hershey’s, Peeps, and chocolate Easter bunnies (none of which were a Keppel innovation) the building had a long but undistinguished clock-punching career as a candy factory.  But in its afterlife, the Keppel Building has transformed into an ad-hoc cultural institution that’s the envy of forgotten industrial buildings everywhere.  Lured by adaptable space and cheap rents, dozens of artists and musicians have taken up residence within its walls, beatifying the structure through the simple act of  doing exactly whatever they want to do within it.

The building was recently sold, and rents are reportedly going up.  The new developer has inevitable condominium aspirations, but radical change does not appear imminent.  Which in this case is a very good thing.  This is a building that’s comfortable in its own skin, be it terra cotta, brick, or rusting corrogated metal.

 

Lancaster Kodachrome Campaign

Eastbound, Lancaster Station (B. Leech, May 2009)

As you may have heard, Kodak recently announced that its signature Kodachrome slide film will be discontinued at the end of the summer, a few months shy of its 75th anniversary.  While most people will forever associate Kodachrome with that Paul Simon song, any fan of architecture, photography, or urban history should be equally familiar with the work of another man– Charles W. Cushman (1896-1972).  Cushman was a zealous amateur photographer and globetrotter in the early days of Kodachrome, and his life’s work (available online here through the benevolence of the Indiana University Archives) is testament to Kodachrome film’s visceral, almost alchemical ability to capture the colors, textures, and details of the built environment.

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (1940)

New Orleans, Louisiana (1941)

New York City (1942)

Chicago, Illinois (1946)

It is our loss that Cushman never passed through Lancaster– the closest he came, it seems, was Harrisburg in 1941.  But the world he photographed– the dynamism of everyday life amid the forthright patina of weathered cities– still surrounds us here.  At the twilight of the Kodachrome age, there is still time to document the city in a way that Cushman might have done.

To eulogize the passing of Kodachrome, Lancaster Building Conservancy is calling all interested photographers to participate in the First (and Last) Annual Lancaster Kodachrome Campaign.  Dust off your film camera, pick up a few rolls of Kodachrome, and take to the streets.  The Campaign will culminate in the fall with an exhibit of your best images, along with any historic Kodachrome slides we can dig up (if you have any you’d like to share, please contact bentleech@gmail.com).  Stay tuned for submission details and event info.  Kodachrome processing is notoriously slow, so there will be plenty of time to hammer out the details.

 

Building of the Week: Groff Funeral Home

One in a series of portraits of Lancaster’s landmark architecture, acknowledged or not.

Name: Fred F. Groff Funeral Home

Address: 234 West Orange Street

Built: 1954

Architect: Henry Y. Shaub

The Fred F. Groff Funeral Home is an enigma: a monumental slab of a building tucked discreetly into the rowhouse-dominated streetscape of West Orange Street.  Resembling nothing so much as an enourmous barge to ferry the dead across the river Styx, the building exudes a mysterious sobriety in spite of the gleaming stainless steel curlicues of its Eisenhower-era signage.  Befitting a house of coffins, cadavers, and hearses, the building travels along starkly horizontal lines, from its long Roman bricks to its sweeping ribbons of marble.  Its entry portals glow like the Art Deco pearly gates etched into a flat limestone tablet looming mutely above the Orange Street sidewalk.

The building is the work of Henry Y. Shaub, a Lancaster native whose other notable contributions include the Posey Ironworks (1910, 1916), Shaub’s Shoes (1929), and McCaskey High School (1938).