(You Need A) Benefit Plan

Well, I’ve still got some pixels I need to flush out of my camera, so here they are. It’s Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island again, of course. That lovely creme yellow number above is on the high side of the street, heading up College Hill, and makes the most of its site. There’s a beautiful little garden gate right next to this plot, too, for the neighbor’s compound.

Living right on the street is tricky. You get goobers and gawkers like me all day long, so privacy is always a concern. There’s a common answer to this malady on display here and there in Providence; the house is raised on a foundation about 3 or 4 feet, and has a stairs set sideways outside the front entry leading down to the sidewalk in both directions. This allows you to look down on your neighbors both literally and figuratively when they pass by, which is the ambition of most people of substance. So I hear; how would I know? Interior shutters on the lower half of the downstairs windows are de rigeur as well.

Here’s another Georgian/Adam lovely. It’s not plain, exactly; or if it is it’s because we’ve lost our perspective — we see Grace Kelly in an evening gown in a place where we’re used to seeing Pamela Andersen in a amateur porn video, and wonder where all the action is.

Here’s a very rare thing indeed in our world. That spindlework, coupled with the pierced screen balustrade and the paneled base, infill sticks set on an angle inside a stop-chamfered frame, is pure Victorian, and the first thing pulled off old houses and replaced with much simpler stuff because the upkeep is a bear.

I live in a town where the locals pride themselves on not letting anything go without shingles all over it. They built a gargantuan dirigible hangar-sized sportspalast at the hoity-toity private high school, and the town made them skin the whole thing over shingles. It looks ridiculous.

Shingles good! goes the chant. I guess. But for the most part, I walk around in the village in downtown Marion and see one house after another that used to look as exotic and exuberant as that little porch right there, and all the gingerbread is long gone and the siding is replaced with shingles. The spindlework Gilded Age ghosts call out to me.

Everybody seems to think they’re still looking at a shingled Grace Kelly. All I see is Pamela Andersen, after too many botox treatments and three more husbands down the line.

(Let’s Try:) Dewars Fvum Pvovidunce (Again)

Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Gimme some of that American architecture.

Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island has a wide selection. Now, by wide selection I don’t mean there are split level ranches and Bauhaus stucco boxes mixed in. I’m referring to a range of architecture from Georgian, to Adam, to Colonial Revival, with a smattering of Second Empire and other assorted Frenchified sort of things. Oh yeah, some Greek Revival. Somebody’s always doing CPR on Greek architecture. There’s some Italianate whatsis here and there. They dabble a bit in the Victorian, but just. For the most part, it’s that chaste and elegant American extrapolation on the English tradition.

There’s really only subtle changes between Georgian, Adam, and Colonial Revival period things. The first picture is an excellent example of the Georgian. A simple two story box, two rooms deep, with doors and windows strictly symetrically arranged. The style books can’t make up their minds if the style goes from 1700-1780, or all the way to 1830. If it doesn’t go to 1830, this house isn’t one. But that’s a classic Georgian door. Or Adam. You decide.

I thought the owner might come out and shoo me away from this bronzey-rusty-peachy wonder if I kept staring at it. I’m going to call this Adam. That’s a bracketed console entry, which was very popular in later Victorian styles, but this is like their daddy. The leaded glass is really delicately done, and there were little bees or pineapples or flowers or something decorating the interstices and all the proportions are elegant and the black door looks marvelous with that not quite definable siding color and –Oh Lord I’ve been leering at this guy’s front door like a lunatic for five minutes by the clock, and if he doesn’t call the cops soon I’ll be lucky. Take a picture it’ll last longer, as they say; so I did.

Adams houses aren’t much different from Georgian Houses; just a little more delicate in execution, and more likely to improvise a little with the massing of projecting wings and porches and ells and so forth. They have Palladian windows a lot. In New England, during the 1980s, there was a short fad for a kind of Jetsons Adam Revival house, with a projecting center gable, a garage attached but set back a foot from the front facade, a palladian window over the front door in the second story — usually part of a two story foyer — and a symmetrical facade. The house might have rambling ells behind. That house passed the true test of architecture — the trick or treater knew exactly which door to go to.

That plan was superior to every damn thing that has come after it.

Here’s our last one for today. Early Classical Revival, I think. It’s got the big entry porch they loved, a much more imposing building and facade. That style overlaps with Greek Revival, and this has all the Greek goodies on it. It’s a great big place, and it’s a throwback to thirty years ago on Benefit Street. It’s a rooming house. Most of Benefit Street used to be inexpensive apartments for students going to the nearby Rhode Island School of Design, or Brown. There seems to be a fetish for vicious dogs again, at least judging by the three pit bulls we saw being walked, so perhaps the neighborhood is that most common of urban situations: You probably don’t need a pistol, but sharp teeth might come in handy in a pinch.

There’s a lot of teeth on the mouldings too. I guess it’s always been that kind of neighborhood.

(Let’s Go To) Pwvaavvadints Vho Dieland (Again)

[Editor’s Note: Originally offered in 2006]

It’s the most stubborn local patois to emulate. About no one ever gets the twang right, when they try it in the movies or on TV. It’s slightly more Joisey than Bawstin, but it ‘taint neither, really. I watch Outside Providence occasionally, just to see the dimbulb Alec Baldwin try it, over and over, and crash and burn.

Providence is the capital of the smallest state, with the biggest name, in the Union: The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. We walked one of the nicer streets in the capital plantation, Benefit Street, and took some pictures for your…er… benefit.

Actually not all that many bricks on display on Benefit Street; the street is too old and the houses from the 18th and first half of the 19th century are generally all clapboard. That last one’s a bed and breakfast of some sort. I can highly recommend it, because I’ve never been there. I never can highly recommend any bed and breakfast I’ve ever actually stayed in, because it’s like staying over other people’s houses except you’re not a guest and you have to give them money. But bed and breakfasts are better than hotels, which all look the same no matter how much they charge, so I don’t like them either. In the one, they’re pushing their way into the room at some ungodly hour to give you orange juice you don’t like while you’re standing in your man-pajamas, ie: underwear. In the other, the fire alarms actually work, but everyone in the place has the same attitude you have in a bad neighborhood in a city –don’t make eye contact.

I stay home a lot.

But not today; we’re wandering around. Benefit Street runs along the side of College Hill, and is nice and flat, but take a turn and it’s San Francisco east, for a block or two, anyway.

These houses were being demolished back in the fifties, until someone started one of those groups that has the werewithal and the tongues to lick lots of stamps and envelopes and save things and cadge money from strangers and pass laws and do all that other mysterious stuff. It was still pretty seedy looking here and there back in the early seventies, and it’s beginning to fray a little around the edges lately too, but Benefit Street still is one of the most pleasant places anywhere to walk with your honey and your male heirs.

More tomorrow.