Tag: Frank Lloyd Wright

Photo is sepia of cabin with hipped roof surrounded by trees in late fall. Property: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/MplsPhotos/id/12037/

Frank Lloyd Wright Violated the Mann Act

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No, not the first time he violated it.

I wrote about that before when introducing you to the second Mrs. Wright.

In this post I’ll write about the second (and last) time.

As I wrote once before, information about the Mann Act is something you learn when working at Taliesin.

In particular, the Mann Act is related to what happened to Frank Lloyd Wright on October 21, 1926, at the cottage in the photo at the top of this post.

It started,

as things do with Wright,

in a story that got really complicated.

Let’s go back

to Wright’s second wife, Miriam Noel. She left him by early May 1924, then almost 6 months later, he met his future wife, Olgivanna. Their new relationship was practically tried by fire—Taliesin’s second fire 5 months after they met. Olgivanna had their daughter, Iovanna, in December while she was chased out of the hospital after giving birth. And, in the next year, Wright was having financial problems while struggling to find clients. What’s more, Miriam was still refusing to settle their divorce.

This was quite a problem for everyone.

Especially, where Wright lived.

Spring Green was dealing with the “Chicago boys”: those reporters from that city’s newspapers. They were around, writing about Wright’s problems with Miriam. She had shown up at Taliesin in early June 1926 trying to get in while the Chicago Boys took photos.

Taliesin was legally her home, after all.

So William Purdy, editor of Spring Green’s newspaper, The Weekly Home News, wrote about this sorry business in the June 10th edition.

Also, Purdy allowed Wright to publish an apology to the people of the village. Here it is in part:

Architect Makes Statement to Public

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT THANKS HOME PEOPLE.

To the Countryside:

Taliesin seems to be a storm center for conflicting human interests and emotions. Three times I have built it up from its ashes;1 each time stronger and more beautiful than before tragedy destroyed it. The cooperation of the countryside was mine in all this and I have appreciated it more than I can tell. But I have never thanked my neighbors and townspeople directly for their friendship and forbearance. I want to do so now, particularly in consideration of their “hands off” attitude in this last attack—this attempt, made in hatred and a spirit of revenge, to destroy any usefulness I have and make what I have struggled to establish here useless to me or anyone….

Then, the last paragraph includes my favorite part:

Enough of that. What I want to say to you was that I like you people…. You all seem home-like to me. I’ve been about all over the globe and come back here with that feeling of coming “home” we all seek somewhere, and too often seek in vain…. I want to stay here with you, working until I die. I want to mind my own business and not be subject to public question if I can manage it. At the present times it looks as though I yet had some distance to go—and I might die before I got there. I must be patient and I hope those of you who don’t believe in me very much, perhaps, will be patient too—along with those who are closer to me and know better what I have had to contend with and what I would do if I could. I think the countryside deserves the best of me and if you who make it what it is give me the benefit of the doubt in all this for a year or two, I believe I will come through right side up and you may yet take pride in Taliesin as I have always hoped and believed you would do.

With affection, such as I am

Your—FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.

If you didn’t see it above, check out the photo I put together below:

Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright by Edward Steichen, Bequest of Edward Steichen. Located in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright in the National Portrait Gallery. © Condé Nast. NPG.82.92

Honestly, I wanted to show this because it looks like a motivational poster that’s taken a bad turn.

Despite what he wrote to his neighbors in 1926, things for Wright would not get better in “a year or two.”

In fact,

they were going to get worse that fall.

At the end of August, one of Wright’s attorneys (Levi Bancroft) advised Wright to spend a while away from Taliesin. Bancroft and others were trying to settle things with Miriam and the Bank of Wisconsin.

So, Wright and his coterie —Olgivanna, her daughter, Svetlana, and Iovanna—eventually went to the cottage you see at the top of this post. It was on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, where they all lived for about a month. 

But unfortunately,

as biographer Meryle Secrest wrote,

Wright could not have known that by driving Olgivanna across the Wisconsin-Minnesota state line, instead of having her get out and walk (presumably to demonstrate she was not a “victim”) he had given the bureau new evidence under the White Slave Traffic Act [a.k.a., the Mann Act].

Meryle Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 327-328.

And, on October 21, 1926

there were at the cottage when they were apprehended and brought to the county jail for the night. They released everyone but Wright the next day. Then, he stayed for the weekend until they could all see the judge.

Although Svetlana’s father, Vladimir Hinzenberg, dropped the charges once he saw that she was no longer in trouble, the event caused a permanent rift between Hinzenberg and her. In fact, her son Brandoch Peters2 later told the LaCrosse Tribune that this was why she always signed her name, “Svetlana Wright Peters”.3

A good thing about this is that the tide began to turn against the second Mrs. Wright. Around that time her lawyer, Arthur Cloud, said, “I wanted to be a lawyer… and Mrs. Wright [i.e., Miriam] wanted me to be an avenging angel.”4

One last thing about the cottage in Minnesota:

Its photo shows it with a hipped roof and apparently windows all the way in the back. When I first saw that photo over a year ago, I instantly remembered Graycliff, a home in Derby, New York.  Wright designed it that year, 1926, for Isabelle Martin, wife of longtime client, Darwin Martin.

My photo of Graycliff is below:

Color photograph of the Isabelle Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright in Derby, NY. Photo by Keiran Murphy

I don’t know if there’s any connection, but I was really struck by the resemblance to this home against a lake.

 

Posted October 17, 2024.
The photo at the top of this post is here from the Digital Collections of the Hennepin County Public Library.

Notes

  1. He says “three times I have built it from its ashes”, but Taliesin was only destroyed twice by fire: in 1925, but also 1914. I think Wright might have meant that the first construction was atop his former home/life in Oak Park.
  2. Brandoch is seen talking about his grandfather in this video, Brandoch Peters Remembers, Part 1. Part 2 is here.
  3. Susan Smith for Lee Newspapers. “Grandson of Wright offers his memories”, La Crosse Tribune, December 14, 2003.
  4. Meryle Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, 331.
Two portraits of Ellen C. Lloyd Jones (left) and Jane Lloyd Jones (right). Property of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Unknown photographer.

More on Frank Lloyd Wright’s aunts

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

Or, Jennie and Nell Lloyd Jones for those of us who are Wright-fanboys.

like I’m one to talk. Whatcha been doin’ for the last 30 years, Keiran?

That’s because one of my blog readers

you can subscribe at the bottom of the page

asked if I could talk about what led to the demise of the Hillside Home School.

But before I start:

I wrote last time that the Taliesin tour guides created the story that the aunts vowed never to marry.

I was wrong.

Of COURSE

this story originated with Frank Lloyd Wright.

He wrote in 1932 in his autobiography that the Aunts, “made a compact with each other never to marry.”1

Regardless, the Hillside school opened in September 1887. In 1891, their yearly newsletter (“Whisperings of the Hillside Pine”) said,

… a Home Building of thirty-three rooms furnished with all the modern improvements, steam-heating, bathrooms, etc.  There is also a cottage of four rooms, a school building of seven rooms, a laundry with two sleeping rooms, a workshop, a gymnasium, an octagonal barn and the other prerequisites of a well-furnished farm, with its garden, cattle, chickens, etc.   

And in 1896,

The Aunts commissioned Wright for a windmill tower. This is the Romeo & Juliet Windmill, finished at the start of the school year in 1897. Here’s Spring Green’s Weekly Home News on p. 3 in its September 9, 1897 edition:

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, of Oak Park, Ill., spent several days in the valley the past week visiting their relatives. The object of Mr. Wright’s visit was to complete the arrangements for a tower and observatory which he has designed, to be erected for the new windmill. The well is finally completed. It has a depth of over one hundred and fifty feet, and has over thirty feet of water.

Wisconsin Historical Society has a photo of the windmill:

Sepia photograph by Frank Lloyd Wright of Romeo & Juliet Windmill. Property Wisconsin Historical Society, 25564.

This version of the photo is backwards from what you’ll see at the Historical Society. What you see above is the correct orientation. I can tell the one at the Historical Society is wrong because the door in their photo faces the wrong way in “Juliet” (the octagonal part of the building).

I’m totally amused with the attention Wright gives to this commission in his autobiography.

He spends over 2500 words writing about its design, and the fights his Aunts had with his Uncles about whether or not it would stand. And he ends the story proudly writing that it stands still!

btw: it was reconstructed and dedicated in 1992 so you see the reconstruction today. A link showing the dedication of the reconstructed windmill is here.

Additionally, you can also see me talking about the windmill from Taliesin Preservation, here.

In 1901

The Aunts commissioned Wright again. Once more, here’s the Weekly Home News:

October 17, 1901

Owing to the increased attendance, the principals have decided to build a new school house.  The plans have been drawn and sent from the studio of Frank Ll. Wright, architect, Chicago, and work upon the construction will begin at once.

The building, with the two classrooms on the north side (now the Dana Gallery and Roberts Room), was completed in 1903.2

In 1907

As the school turned 20 years old, the Weekly Home News wrote a piece on it on its front page on June 27. The Home News reported that:

The past year there were sixty home pupils and ninety day pupils, the day pupils all living within a radius of five miles.

BTW:

See?! Hillside was not ONLY a boarding school!

            Who are you yelling at, Keiran?

one person I used to work with who kept calling it a boarding school and wouldn’t listen to me saying “DAY and boarding….” I’d say he knows who he is, but I’m guessing he never listened to me.

Here’s the Story in the Home News, continued:

The school is on the accredited list for all courses in the University of Wisconsin excepting the ancient classical course, and a diploma therein admits to the Chicago University, Wellesley and other colleges.

And that its students came from:

Canada to Mexico, from New York City to Los Angeles, California.

The Home News reports that,

in addition to the classics, geography, math, science, history, English, French, and German,

the school teaches:

            Music.

            Manual Training.

            Arts and Crafts.

            Domestic Science.

This included gardens that each of the pupils maintained

            The Farm.

                        under the management of James Lloyd Jones and his son Charles.

And the kids lived in:

Home Building.

The home building contains the parlors, in one of which there is a beautiful carved fireplace which at once attracts the attention of the visitor. It is the work of Mr. Timothy. Over this fireplace is carved in the stone a quotation from the bible in Welsh, “Yr Enid hob wybodaeth, nid yw dda,” (“The soul without knowledge is not good,’ [sic]) which was chosen by Mr. Thomas Lloyd Jones, deceased brother of the principals….

            Boys’ Dormitory.

Which was that building I wrote about in my post, “Another Find at Hillside“.

            West Cottage.

This building stood for a long time. Those who know folks in the Wrightworld: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer lived there in 1949, his first summer as an apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship. Then it was torn down.

            The Home Cottage and The Gables.

The Gables…, contains rooms for the helpers and the laundry, which was added to the institution last year. This is equipped with modern appliances for work. An engineer and four women are employed in this department. From 2,500 and 3,000 pieces are laundered each week, and though the capacity is sufficient to take in outside work it has as yet been confined to the school.

           And it has:

The Green House.

            The Stone Building.

            A.K.A.: Wright’s building

            and,

            The Thomas Farm.

originally owned by Uncle Thomas Lloyd Jones.

William Michels purchased it after the school closed. His son, William Michels, Jr., sold it to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in the late 1990s.

Remember James

Lloyd Jones—brother to the Aunts—who ran the school’s farm?

James died

in an accident in October 1907.

That revealed problems.

See, James had bought a LOT of land, starting in the 1890s. Which was fine when the economy was ok. Then things went south and James ended up owing more money than he would make off the crops he raised.2

And

earlier, the Aunts signed a lot of background papers to help him with his debt.

It might have turned out ok if he’d been able to swim his way out of the debt, but there was the accident.

Andrew Porter, the husband of their niece, Jane, took over as business manager for the school in the summer of 1907.

            That’s when he and his wife commissioned Tan-y-Deri

After the accident, Andrew discovered that James owed

$65,000

            that’s $2,159,068.52 in 2023.

So, two years later, the Aunts declared bankruptcy.

That was in 1909

Uhhh… a little bit happened with their nephew near the end of the year.

Despite the headlines that Wright was making in Illinois in 1909-10, the school was chugging along.

Below is a photo

Looking at the school grounds in 1910:

Campus of the Hillside Home School in Wisconsin in 1910. From collection of Peggy Traverse.

This photo came from Peggy Travers’ collection. Her family had a booklet from 1909-1910 from the school and she let others scan it.

While the School went along, it got worse when everyone found out that Wright was living with Mamah about a mile from Taliesin.  

and what I wrote about here, here, and here.

Here’s an example

of Wright’s effect on the school:

in a letter one parent wrote to Wright in early January 1912:

“I am writing Aunt Nell today that unless you can be persuaded to move from Hillside or vicinity at once that I will have to take my son out of school….“

A. Cole, to Frank Lloyd Wright, January 6, 1912. Property: Crank Lloyd Wright Archives. ID: C001A06.

However the school limped along, the fire/murders at Taliesin happened on August 15, 1914.

The school closed

I don’t know how the Aunts kept the Hillside Home School open, but they had the last graduation in 1915. In 1917 Wright assumed the defunct-school’s mortgage for $25,000.3

There is the problem of how well Wright took care of the Aunts in their final years. They moved to California perhaps because they thought they would do better. Although Nell, particularly, wrote her nephew. They missed Hillside horribly. But they weren’t able to go back to Wisconsin in part (or so Wright wrote on letter J002D05) he thought they would be inundated by scandalmongers.

people writing up about his life, at that time with Miriam, of course.

When all’s said and done, though, I’ll leave you with a quote about the Hillside Home School from A Goodly Fellowship, by educator Mary Ellen Chase.5

Chase started her teaching career at Hillside. This is how she ended the “Hillside Home School” book chapter:

We travelled much in realms of gold at Hillside, saw many goodly sights of the earth, entered into many goodly kingdoms of the mind. We were watchers of the skies there. Whatever vision of imagination I have been able to give to my teaching in the years since then, I owe to two women in a Wisconsin valley thirty years ago; and I can only wish in all humility that any words of mine may prolong, if but for a season, their rightful immortality.

Mary Ellen Chase, A Goodly Fellowship (The MacMillan Co., 1939), 121.  

 

The photo at the top of this post was published in the book, Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (1992; Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992).
Published February 22, 2024.

Notes:

1. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 130.

2. The Home News said on February 19, 1903 that they were scheduled to finished the Art and Science building in April.

3. Meryle Secrest wrote about this in Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 195-8.

4. That was something I found out with Anne Biebel (of www.cornerstonepreservation.com) while we wrote the history of the Hillside Home Building.

5. You can find the book in libraries, or for purchase through www.abebooks.com.

The Chicago Day Book December 21, 1911. In the public domain.

Was Mamah Borthwick the love of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life?

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Drawing of Mamah Borthwick.

People have asked me this question about Mamah

former wife of Edwin H. Cheney, and the woman for whom Wright first designed Taliesin south of Spring Green, Wisconsin. And who was murdered on August 15, 1914.

Since Mamah’s birthday is June 19, I am addressing this question in this post.1

Or “pondering” I guess. Since this is all my opinion. Did you ever think it wasn’t? Well, I didn’t, I can tell you that.

Plus, I’ve no idea what Wright would have thought or felt about this

even though I so wish that he was interested—beyond the grave—on my thoughts about things.

But, really:

was Mamah Borthwick the love of Wright’s life?

Determining who was “the love of” someone’s life is kind of like determining who someone’s “soulmate” is. Altho, dammit, the press continuously referred to Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah as “soulmates”!

As for those two

I think they loved each other terribly. I’ll bet it was the out-of-your-mind crazy love. Of course, tempered by the fact that they were both married with children. Which came with a lot of excitement because they lived in Oak Park and everyone would know if they were fooling around.

And

if Wright had also been murdered at Taliesin in 1914, I think Mamah would have been counted as the love of his life. Which you can definitely say for her. You can see that especially when you look at research in Mark Borthwick’s book:

A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Distant cousin Mark Borthwick detailed how Edwin H. Cheney pursued Mamah for years. From what Mark Borthwick explored, it’s not certain that Mamah thought of ever marrying before becoming Mrs. Edwin H. Cheney in 1899. Mark Borthwick wrote:

Apparently sober, constant, and determined, to judge by his years-long courtship of Borthwick, [Edwin Cheney] lacked the vivacious spark she herself nurtured…. Probably none of the men in her class measured up to her standard, but she no longer had the luxury of time.

A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, by Mark Borthwick (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2023), 60.

In addition, when the press found Wright and Borthwick at Taliesin, Wright confessed that he and his then-wife Catherine were too young when they married.

Ok,

as for that choice: aside from the fact that everyone told them not to get married that young, they were in love, it was the 1880s, and it’s not like they were the only people to ever do that. After all, “Marry in haste and repent in leisure” was put into writing almost 500 years ago.

So,

they married in 1889 and Kitty gave birth to their first child in 1890 (Lloyd).

  • Then again in 1892 (John).
  • And in 1894 (Catherine).
  • Then in 1895 (David).
  • Then a break and in 1898 (Frances).
  • And another break and their youngest in 1903 (Llewellyn).
    • Here’s part of what Wright in his Autobiography:

Architecture was my profession. Motherhood became hers.

Fair enough, but it was a division.

The young architect’s studio or workshop was within a few years built on Chicago Avenue. The young mother’s home and kindergarten had continued and still kept on—on Forest Avenue….

The handsome children were well born. They, each and all, were fine specimens of healthy childhood. They were curly-headed, blue-eyed, sunny-haired, fair-skinned like their beautiful mother. They all resembled her.

Every one of them was born, so it seemed, directly in his or her own right. You might think they had all willed it and decided it all themselves.

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 109.

Then Wright and Mamah got close during the commission of her and Edwin’s house (commissioned in 1903).

So, MAN, Keiran

– you’re dancing around the answer here, aren’t you? Just say what you think: was Mamah the love of Wright’s life?

Here’s my two cents:

I don’t think so.

I don’t think it’s possible to say that someone was the love of a person’s life when they died just after your halfway mark.

Wright met Mamah when he may have just been “going through the motions” in his marriage. Then they flee to Europe, which is followed by all the front-page news when they came back (which just bound them together I’m sure). And three years later, there was the horrible murder in 1914.

And then Wright lived over 44 years more. Therefore, he lived a lot of life after Mamah. I don’t think you can say that a man who continued to create incredible, deeply felt art, was emotionally stilted.

i mean, well yes, the man said and did some things sometimes where it’s like, hmmmm. but…

And I’m not saying Wright didn’t love Mamah. But I think we’re looking for the wrong thing if we point at her and say, “That was it. She was ‘The One.'”

In 1924, after his relationship with Miriam Noel (his second wife who I wrote about recently) rounded to its close, he met Olga Lazovich Milanoff.

Olgivanna was also with him through some extremely difficult times. There’s Taliesin’s second fire; the pursuit following the birth of their daughter, Iovanna; and the years in the latter 1920s with difficulties followed by the Great Depression. And she was with him and brought him to the last part of his life, and revival of his career.

Back to Mamah

As I grow older, I have come to understand that love and relationships are a lot more complicated. I mean, Romeo and Juliet is a great love story when you read it as a freshman in high school, but…

So I’ll end with what I wrote to myself in April 2005.

After the marriage of now-King Charles III to Camilia Parker Bowles (now Queen Camilla):

[Charles] loves a woman, Camilla. He joins the navy (1971-76) and Camilla marries someone else. He can’t ask her to get divorced: it’s the 1970s and he’s still required to find a virgin.

So he finds Diana Spencer. She’s a little unstable. They don’t fit…. and he’s still in love w/Camilla. Diana starts having lots of torrid affairs and vomiting and cutting herself.

I’m saying:

neither party in that marriage was entirely innocent.

 And then Diana died….

 If I were in his position and my ex-wife, “The People’s Princess” died, seriously, one of the first things I would have thought would have been, “Oh cr*p, now I can’t marry Camilla.”2

 Now, at least, he gets to marry her, which from what I’ve heard, is what he wanted 35 years ago.

 To me, in the end, this is actually a very romantic story, about 2 people who loved each other and now finally get to be together, formally, in the eyes of the world….

 They still hang out and do stuff. Presumably, they still make each other happy.

 That is one cool story, if you ask me.

And that’s what I’ll say. Mamah Borthwick was a love of Wright’s life.

 

First published June 14, 2023.
The image at the top of this post was published in the Chicago Day Book, December 21, 1911. It’s available at this link.3

Notes:

1. She was born in 1869.

2. Or “oh bloody hell,” because I’m Prince (now King) Charles and not a dirty commoner.

3. I changed my original image from the front page of the Ogden Standard, which was a story published after Taliesin’s 1914 fire/murders on September 5 (find it here). That’s because I learned that the woman in the photo on that page is not Mamah Borthwick. The photograph shows Catherine Wright, his wife at that time. Thanks to Allen Hazard for correcting me.

Black and white photograph of John and Marybud Lautner outside at Taliesin, 1933-34. By Hank Schubart.

Taliesin Kitties

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Photograph of future architect (then apprentice) John Lautner (1911-1994) and wife Mary Faustina Roberts Lautner (“Marybud”, 1913-1995) standing at the southwest corner of Taliesin’s hill crown.  Behind them is the chimney that served the dining rooms of the Taliesin Fellowship and the Wrights. I wrote about this space, here. The photo was taken by apprentice and later architect, Hank Schubart (1916-1998).

This is going to be a cat-themed post. But it does have a connection to Frank Lloyd Wright, I swear!

Let me explain….

Here are my cats, Wes and Gene:

Color photo of cats Wes and Gene on the floor.

This is a photo of them lying on the kitchen floor. My husband says they’re competing in the synchronized cat napping nationals.

Now, the names “Wes” and “Gene” are related to Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin. But I was not completely in charge of them being named Wes and Gene.

— well, ok, yes, actually, I was, since I was the one who first decided to name them that.

However —

I was not the person who focused my attention on names related to Taliesin.

You see,

in 2015, 5 kittens showed up on the Taliesin estate. Cats aren’t there all the time, but they do (and can) show up. Sometimes they are owned by residents at Taliesin. Or, sometimes they take up residence. At least one of these cats became internationally famous.

In fact,

anyone who took a tour at Taliesin starting in the late 1990s up to the twenty-teens met this cat. She was a long-haired calico named Sherpa.

Color photograph of the calico cat, Sherpa at Taliesin on a stone wall. Photo by Keiran Murphy

Sherpa laying on a stone wall outside of the old Taliesin Fellowship dining room (it functions currently as an office and sometimes a guest room).

Sherpa appeared in the Taliesin tour program in the late 1990s. She lived at the Hillside structure and had one litter of kittens that delighted visitors.

the summer at Hillside with Sherpa and her kittens meant lots of real-time lessons on working with animals. There was no way you could talk about Wright’s history or ideas when there were 3 or 4 adorable kittens playing and jumping over each other on the deck at the edge of Hillside’s dining room (a photo of the deck is in a photo at Flickr, here).

After the season’s end, Sherpa was caught and spayed. By this time, she already walked in front of several tours at Taliesin, so she was given the name Sherpa. Since the Taliesin estate was basically her home, she settled in closer to the Taliesin building and began to “lead tours” there.1

That was because she knew where the guides went on tours, so she would walk ahead of the guides and group.

She appeared on a magazine cover

after a group of Japanese architects took a tour. They were as delighted by Sherpa as by the architecture. So one photo they took of her ended up on the cover of a magazine, below:

Back to Wes and Gene:

I hadn’t known about the kittens until I mentioned the desire for cats to a coworker at Taliesin Preservation. I was searching for a home, and having cats was on the agenda. Then she asked, “did you hear about the Taliesin kittens?”

The kindle of five domestic shorthaired kittens had arrived in late spring. They were big enough to make themselves known to the students at the School of Architecture, who were then in session and living at Wright’s Hillside building.

Since they appeared on the Taliesin estate, my coworker, the students, and staff at the local vet clinic knew them as the “Taliesin kittens”. As I had already decided I wanted two male kittens, it took me less than 10 minutes to come up with the names Wes and Gene.

PLEASE NOTE: I decided immediately that I was NOT going to name them Frank and Lloyd, or Lloyd and Wright.

No, I’m not a cat lady! I’m just a Frankophile!

While I have not written on my blog about Wright’s son-in-law and engineer, Wes Peters, I did write about Gene Masselink last year.

Are they worthy of their names?

Wes is a little like Wes Peters, because he’s really big. But, while I love the guy, Gene is not worthy of the memory of Eugene Masselink.

And how did Wright feel about cats?

I don’t know.

In fact, I don’t know how Wright felt about domesticated animals overall. Except for horses. He long admired them and rode them as long as he was able.  The photograph below is Wright on a horse outside of the Hillside school building.2 The photo was taken in the 1950s.

Color photograph--Frank Lloyd Wright at the Hillside Home School on a horse with his wife Olgivanna and apprentice, Joe Fabris. Photo by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer.

Photograph of Wright on a horse to the east of the Assembly Hall at the Hillside Home School. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright stands on the right and apprentice, Joe Fabris, is wearing the t-shirt.

However, there is the doghouse:

That’s right: in 1956, 12-year-old Jim Berger wrote Frank Lloyd Wright. He was the son of clients Robert and Gloria Berger, who built their Wright house in San Anselmo, California. Jim asked Wright to design a home for their dog, Eddie. Jim would pay for the plans and materials through money he earned on his paper route. This link from the Smithsonian Magazine shows you the whole story, and Jim’s initial letter to Wright.

In addition,

Olgivanna Lloyd Wright liked dogs and you can find photos online of the Wrights sitting together outside at Taliesin West with her dog, Casanova. Casanova appears with Frank Lloyd Wright in the Garden Room (the living room) at Taliesin West. They’re on the webpage, “Five stylish men with dogs“. 

 

First published February 8, 2023.
The photograph at the top of this post was taken by Hank Schubart and is in The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Hank Schubert collection, 6501.0140.

Notes:

1 We used to do a 1 mile, all exterior Walking Tour. Sherpa would show up when we were with our groups on the road below Taliesin, and walk in front of us to Hillside. She would hang out at Hillside until the Walking tour came by in the afternoon. Then she would lead the later tour back to Taliesin, where the tours began.

2 This link shows you 94-year-old Joe Fabris at Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, OK. It gives you a nice overview of that space. Joe is seen speaking to the Price Tower curator of Collections and Exhibitions (Hi, Scott!).

 

More winter activities

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

I took this photograph looking out of a window of my office at the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center. You can see my lone car in the parking lot. Sometimes when I came into work, the ice was a little “sketchy” to the employee-parking-lot up one level. In that case, I just stayed below rather than try to get up there. 

I live in a small town.

It has one stoplight and a population of around 1,600 to its outer edges.1 Sometimes the winter has the same grind, when you don’t see much of anything or anyone.

But this meant a great commute when I worked at Taliesin

I could drive to work in 5 minutes. And, when temperatures are 10-20F (-12 to -6 C), curious visitors with questions didn’t come to the door. This quiet time meant that I could investigate things without interruption.

For example, during this quiet time, I acquired copies of the 13 images that Raymond Trowbridge took at Taliesin in 1930.

And at that time, I had the chance to take photographs of the ongoing work by the Preservation Crew in Taliesin’s Guest Wing.

Taliesin’s Guest Wing looking pretty rough at this time:

Looking northwest in the Guest Wing of the Blue Room after demolition.

The stone on the left-hand side of the photo was a stone wall that’s been there since 1911. It originally stood outside. The wall hasn’t moved: the building just got longer.
You can see that stone wall in my first post, “What was on the menu the day they were murdered?”

This photo shows the Blue Room. I identified the Blue Room in that photo I investigated that one time before Christmas.2 Here’s  the post-restoration photo of the same room:

Taliesin Preservation staff in restored room at Taliesin.

During the quiet time, I also

wrote a chronology of Taliesin’s exterior courtyards and terraces. One part of that study was an examination of Taliesin’s Tea Circle. So my work gave the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation its basic history while restoring the area.

I wrote a lot about the Tea Circle in “What’s the oldest part of Taliesin? Part I“.

Coincidentally,

One quiet time inspired staff to recreate the radio tradition of

CHAPTER A DAY.

In other words, one person read a chapter from a book each day at lunch time.

btw: Chapter A Day started on Wisconsin Public Radio.3

Anyway, we did Chapter A Day in 2009

and the chosen book was TC Boyle‘s The Women.

I mentioned Boyle’s book when I wrote about Taliesin II and Wright’s relationship with his second wife, Miriam Noel. The book even has its own Youtube video. It’s surprisingly entertaining.

Now, to clarify:

we didn’t take turns reading chapters. Only one person on staff read: Bob (who is a Jeopardy champion!4) read it to us while we sat around a table in the Hexagonal (“Hex”) Room.

See, we weren’t wasting time.

It was important we read this book because of the excitement in 2007 after the release of the book, Loving Frank.

Plus,

the staff’s sojourns up to the Hex room gave them the chance to get warm after being downstairs in the basement. Srsly: the only time the walkout basement isn’t cold is the months of July-August. I’d come downstairs to the office there sometimes in the winter and see the staff typing with fingerless gloves. Sometimes when I came off tours in summer months, I’d walk down the stairs and lie down on the floor to cool down.

Speaking of tours:

Bob worked on the register for tickets during the tour season. In addition, he scheduled tours. He had an amazing ability to schedule the staff and add tours. On the busiest days, up to 11 tours went into the House: 1 Estate Tour, 3 Highlights Tours, and 7 2-Hour House Tours.5

He also had the ability to tell which visitors approached the tickets area thinking they were actually at the House on the Rock.

So, during that winter,

Bob would read a chapter every day. Afterward—in addition to voicing our annoyance with Miriam Noel—folks around the table would ask me what was truth and what was fiction in the novel.

I even wrote a “Hey Keiran” about the novel for guides and staff the next season.

Easy answers on “What’s true or not” in The Women:

      • Boyle wrote things that are in the public records:

        • Miriam (Wright’s unstable second wife) gave those press conferences.
        • Reporters in Oak Park did bug Wright’s first wife and the children from his first marriage.
        • Wright and Mamah Borthwick did speak in Taliesin’s Living Room.
        • Wright and Olgivanna (his future wife) did have all of those problems early in their relationship.
      • However, the narrator, Tadashi Sato, is fictional, and so are some other apprentices.
      • And, while things aren’t correct about Taliesin’s structural history, that’s not important.

Following Bob’s completion of the novel,

I did what I often did that winter: looked for images of Taliesin and the Taliesin estate, continued studying Taliesin’s history, and checked out the work the Preservation Crew was doing.

Originally posted December 31, 2022.
I took the photograph at the top  of this post in December, 2007.

Notes:

1 Here’s how small the town is, and it has to do with local culture. I have a memory of watching the television show, Entertainment Tonight, over 5 months after the release of the 1997 movie, Titanic. The ET hosts start that night’s show talking incredulously about a small town in upstate New York that had only, just then, gotten the movie at the town’s theater. I remember thinking that the Gard Theater in Spring Green had also not gotten that blockbuster.

And I remember one time in which I was at a break at a summer music show with an old boyfriend. Someone else walked outside with us and he asked them how they liked our little town.

“It’s nice,” she said, looking at the sky. “But there’s that cloud that won’t go away.”

He and I both looked up and he answered, “That’s the Milky Way.”

Definitely makes up for having no food service except for Culver’s, Subway, or the convenience store after 8 or 9 p.m.

2 Since my work identified what the room looked like without the load-bearing closet, the Preservation Crew removed it. They switched the support of the load to the micro-laminated beams you see in the ceiling. 

3 Chapter a Day links to the Wisconsin Idea. See, when Marconi (et al.) invented radio, the Wisconsin University System saw it as a way to expand “the boundaries of the university” to the “boundaries of the state” (the Wisconsin Idea motto). I introduced the Wisconsin Idea in “How I became the historian for Taliesin“.

4 A computer programming student put Bob’s stats from Jeopardy, here.

5 Bob’s ability to schedule all those tours meant that, when we were super busy and he’d schedule up to 7 that day, he would add a 2-hour tour of the House at 1:30. However, the reality of the timing (with Shuttle buses, etc.) meant that the guides had to gather folks on the 1:30 House tours at 1:20. And folks on the 1:30 House tour would walk out of the building at 1:25. This resulted in a real-life example of my joke book title I wrote in this post: “What time does the 1:30 tour leave?”

Photograph of Keiran Murphy talking to someone in front of her sales items while at the holiday art fair in 1997.

Selling my wares to the public

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Taken in 1997. Me talking to someone at the art fair that was held in the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center. I’m standing to the left of all of the stained-glass pieces that I had made.

No:  “selling my wares” in this post does not mean I’ll write about giving Taliesin tours.

I’m talking about my time making (and selling) stained-glass items. My work was not completely

although, yes it sort of was,

related to Taliesin and Frank Lloyd Wright. So, first I’ll show you a pretty, geometrical, piece that I made (unrelated to either Frank Lloyd Wright or Taliesin):

Looking at a blue and yellow rectangular stained glass piece.
Photograph, and stained-glass piece, by Keiran Murphy

And why I’m writing this today:

For years, December was the month in which I sold my stained-glass items at an arts and crafts event in the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center.

As I wrote above, my stained glass has a little (ok, maybe a bit) to do with Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin.

But, primarily,

I started making stained glass the first full year I worked in the Taliesin tour program,

my first summer of tours was 1994, then I went back to school the fall semester to finish my degree.

and geometric designs were among the first things I made.

Although, I also made objects such as ornaments and candle holders, like you see at the top of this page (they were easier to make). As you also see in the photo up there, I designed, and sold, pieces with a Wright connection. That photo above shows my rendition of the Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater.

Photo by Keiran Murphy of her piece of stained glass that shows Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

This is in my kitchen. I sold another one of these after I corrected a mistake in this version.

Additionally, I created designs from compositions that I saw at Taliesin and Hillside.

How much I charged for these:

I was told to charge $3 for every piece of glass I used in a piece that I made. That accounts for materials and time. So, an ornament with 4 pieces would be $12. But that Fallingwater piece in the photo? Over $300. It’s cool, but would someone spend that much money on something that small?

I put a list of designs I put on paper for later stained-glass windows that are related just to Taliesin and the Taliesin estate. I sold most of them, and traded one:

  • Taliesin’s Entry Steps

Photo and drawing of Taliesin's Entry Steps by Keiran Murphy.

 

  • The “Hill Tower” in the Middle Court

Photo and drawing by Keiran Murphy of Taliesin's Hill Tower.

You can see in the numbers I wrote on the paper before cutting it (and, then, the glass). This is part of the procedure with the copper-foil method of making stained-glass designs.

Photograph looking at Taliesin waterfall. Taken October 29, 2004 by Keiran Murphy.
Photo by Keiran Murphy

Obviously, that’s a picture of the real waterfall at Taliesin. I executed a stained-glass piece of the waterfall, but I can’t find a photo of it or its drawing. I took this photo in 2004. 

  • And the Hillside Theater Foyer roof.

Get back to the arts show—how did it start?

One afternoon in October, 1995 after all the tours had gone out, several staff members started talking. 

While talking, they had an idea.

They all knew that, once December came along, nothing would be going on in the building except for the gift shop staff getting items out to customers. The  gift store was still open on the weekends, however, for people buying gifts.

The folks that day in the visitor center thought: why not take the café area,

which was not in use because the restaurant was closed

re-arrange the tables there, and set up some homemade items to sell?

After all, by December, while the tour season was completely done, the gift store was still open on the weekends. Therefore the main floor would be heated to catch anyone interested in holiday shopping.1

The thought was: do this the first two weekends of that month.

After all, we had homegrown talent:

I had recently started making stained glass; a shuttle bus driver made her own paper and paper boxes;2 a guide/gift store attendant crocheted scarves; and her husband made decorative wooden carvings. Feeling optimistic, we asked a supervisor if we could try selling on the main floor in December. This wouldn’t cost them any money and we’d clean up after ourselves.

They allowed the idea.

So, we tried it that first December.

Ah, yes! This was like the pluckiness of the Taliesin Fellowship itself. Once more, it was like Andy Hardy saying,

Come on let’s put on a show!

We did this with no expectations. We moved the tables and chairs into place that Saturday morning in December, set up our stuff and hung out with our items. People who came in to buy things at the Taliesin gift shop took a look at our displays and bought some things. Overall, it was a success, even though we didn’t publicize it.

That started a tradition

at the Visitor Center of an arts and crafts weekend (although now just one weekend in December). I think we did it on 10 Decembers.

I found a write-up about one of them on the Taliesin Preservation website at the Wayback Machine.3 That write-up (for the “Annual Holiday Art Festival”) has a lot of detail. A lot. Which makes me wonder if I wrote the piece (even though someone else oversaw the website at that time).

This Holiday Show

fit in very well with Spring Green‘s newly-created “Country Christmas” celebrations in the village across the Wisconsin River.

Spring Green’s “Country Christmas”

The first full weekend of December has a light parade, followed the next night by fireworks.4

Consequently,

the small success in the Visitor Center caught the attention of others in the organization. So a few notes were put out, and the next year a few more people came and sold items. In a few years, there was a fabulous mixture of sales items, locally-made sausage, cheese, and wine, as well as entertainment.5

The last event

was year 10.

I think perhaps that the no-frills, “let’s just move some tables around”, was overwhelmed by its modest success. Eventually, there had to be organizers, and advertising, and a lot more work than it was worth to many people.

And, personally,

by that year, I lived in a house where I could only make stained-glass pieces in the garage. But it wasn’t climate controlled. Now, I didn’t need comfy temperatures, but

by December,

sometimes it got so cold that I warmed up my hands by resting them on the electric, metal, radiator that I’d turned on.

While in the summer,

I had to take a break when I cut glass on the days when the heat made me sweat too much. I didn’t want to lacerate my fingers (or cut a vein).6

Is there a lesson in this?

I think so.

But that lesson goes back to

what I started with:

making stained glass.

After all, a classmate in Grad School once observed that:

“Those who can’t do art, teach Art History”

Despite at least two classmates who were artists; one of whom teaches and continues making art.

And due to my experience crafting stained-glass designs, I think people who learn art history should take an art class. You know, actually make something. I remember when I was in grad school for AH at the University, I met some students getting their BFAs who had to take AH, but not the other way around.

Yet

when I had to work with materials,

and find out what does and doesn’t work in a composition, and USE some of that geometry I learned as a high school sophomore,

I realized it takes quite a bit of work and knowledge to make even a halfway-decent piece of art.

 

 

First published December 9, 2022
I was given the photograph at the top of this page, but cannot remember who took it.

Notes

1 Later on, they kept the visitor center open only when tours were going on. So: nothing past November. But in the early years, they were still trying to “feel out” the ends of the tour seasons.

2 One of her boxes sits, right now, to my lower right.

3 Remember I wrote about the Wayback Machine in September of last year.

4 If you want to be enveloped in “smalltowniness”, take a look at the video for the song, “My Hometown“, by Camela Widad. She wrote the song about Spring Green, and filmed it in, and around, here. It’s a great little song. It’s got a summer vibe, so you might want to wait until you’re sick of winter.

Part of the video for “My Hometown” was shot at the Post House Garden, which is where the Post House (once the oldest restaurant in Wisconsin) used to stand.

The Post House burned down in a fire in 2004. The owners decided not to rebuild.

5 And, it is the reason why I know, and love, Merry Christmas from the Family, by Robert Earl Keen. That’s thanks to the photographer-writer-musician who used to play it at the Visitor Center on Saturdays at the event.

6 “Don’t get mad at the glass” was what I learned, early and painfully, to tell myself. That was after I, yes: got mad at the glass and cut my finger while aggressively moving around. It was one of my first “learning by doing” lessons in the glass craft. Fortunately, there was no scar, but I did bleed.

Postcard of crowd at Taliesin. Caption on card: "WEST WING. WRIGHT'S BUNGALOW". Property: Patrick Mahoney

What is the oldest part of Taliesin? Part II

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A postcard looking (plan) northeast at the western façade of Taliesin’s hayloft, summer (the hayloft is under the roof). Because the collection of people are unexpected at a farmhouse, Randolph C. Henning (who collected this postcard), thinks this was taken the day after Taliesin’s 1914 fire and murders.

I wrote The Oldest Thing at Taliesin (stuff that goes back to 1911-12), and was going to leave it at that. But before I posted, I realized there were too many things to point out. I needed to divide it into two posts. So, that was part I.

Here’s part II.

Like last time, I’m going back to stone because it’s the easiest material to trace at Taliesin. That’s because Taliesin’s shingles, wood, and plaster has to be replaced. And I’m not sure how much of the window glass at Taliesin goes back to 1911-12.1

Therefore, in 2010,

Taliesin Preservation‘s Executive Director taped a printout of the picture at the top of this post onto my computer monitor.

In 2005, she (Carol) also told me about “The Album” on auction at the online site, Ebay.

Architect and writer, Randolph C. Henning, had sent her the scan of the image. Although he knew what you see in this image (the courtyard on the other side of Taliesin’s Hayloft), he wrote asking for help on any research on the rest of the images in his upcoming book, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards (this image is on p. 39).

I’d never seen anything like that image because

you can’t really see this view today.

Why?

Because that nutter changed his house all the time, of course.

A similar angle of view is in the photo below:

Exterior photograph looking at the roofs Taliesin. Photograph taken in 2005 by Keiran Murphy.

I took this photograph from the roof of Taliesin’s former icehouse. The photograph is looking northeast according to Taliesin’s plan direction. Taliesin’s “Work Court” is one floor below.
I was up on this part of the roof with a member of the Preservation Crew. He was showing me details on the re-roofing. And, NO, you cannot stand on this roof while you’re on a tour.2

Almost nothing in this photograph matches what you see in the c. 1914 postcard at the top of this post.

But,

even though everything’s different here’s what got my attention: the stone pier under the hayloft.

THAT is still there! Here’s a comparison of the 1914 photo and the photo from 2004:

Looking (plan) southeast in Taliesin's "Work Court". In view: stone, roofing, plaster and windows in the courtyard.

In the Work Court, looking southeast according to Taliesin’s plan direction. This photograph has the stone pier that I saw in the 1914 postcard. The image below has both the old and new photos, with the stones in the pier compared.

Photographic comparison between 1914 Taliesin photograph, and digital photograph from 2004.

Here’s the stone pier in a close-up of the two photographs:

 

Close-up of stones in 1914 photograph and photograph from 2004.

TA-DA!

More Taliesin 1911-12:

The next photo appeared in 1911. I first saw it two years ago when the Chicago Tribune treated us all to was in a published article:

Looking east at Taliesin's agricultural wing.
In view behind trees: hayloft of Taliesin. Car [?] garage on the right. First published 12/29/11. Unknown photographer. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

This photograph was taken December 25, 1911. The photographer was looking east/southeast (according to Taliesin’s plan direction) at Taliesin’s agricultural wing in 1911. The photo was taken on that day when Wright gave the disastrous press conference at Taliesin.

This, and the article that included it,

made me so happy that I wrote a post about it: “This is FUN for me…“.

Props go to Stan Ecklund on Facebook who, in 2020, first alerted me (and other Frankophiles) to this article. Stan created and curates two Wright-based groups on Facebook, The Wright Attitude, and Wright Nation. The “WA” is a private group, but Wright Nation on Facebook is public, here. If you are in the WA group, Stan posted the link to the article in the Tribune on Dec. 4, 2020.

Again, you can’t see the same view today because of Wright’s changes at Taliesin.

But I found a photo on Wikimedia Commons that’s shot from a similar angle. That’s below:

Photograph of Taliesin roofs taken on July 4, 2018.
By Stilfehler. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Looking (plan) southeast to the chimney that’s in the photograph from 1911 in the Tribune.
Taken by Stilhefler while on a tour. Click the photo to see it on-line.

I am not publishing the second photo from the Chicago Tribune. Most of what you see in the second photo cannot be seen on a tour and if you read “This is FUN for me…”, I explain it some more.

Then there’s the Hill Crown:

And its retaining wall:

Looking (plan) south at the stone retaining wall at Taliesin's Hill Crown. Photo by Keiran Murphy.

I took this photograph in April, 2005.

Most likely, there are other parts of the retaining wall that go back to 1911. However, I do not think you’ll be able to look at those places for any length while on a tour at Taliesin.

Lastly, I’ll show something else you can see on tours:

Wisconsin Historical Society, Fuermann Collection, ID# 83113

This was also published in Architectural Record magazine in 1913. Here’s where I wrote about it.

Look at the pier on the right, with the pool. The open windows on the right are at the kitchen (today it’s called the Little Kitchen). Every tour you take at Taliesin walks near that pool.

I put a present-day photo of it, below. The person who took this photo in 2018 also took the one above.

Photograph of pool next to the "Little Kitchen" at Taliesin. Taken on July 4, 2018.
By Stilfehler. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Taken in the Breezeway at Taliesin. Looking (plan) southeast at the stone veneer on the west wall of the Little Kitchen.
Photo from July 4, 1918, by Stilhelfer. Click the photo above to see it on-line. You’ll see that this photo has been cropped.

I love this area.

Wright changed things so much at Taliesin that I’m intrigued when he didn’t.

That’s all I’ve got the time to show you right now. Oh, and last thing: remember that these parts of the building I talked about were just what you can see.

So, thanks again for coming along!

 

Published November 26, 2022
Randolph C. Henning acquired this and sent this to the Executive Director of Taliesin Preservation while he was working on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated By Vintage Postcards. You can see the photo on page 39. Henning sold his collection to Patrick Mahoney, AIA.

Here’s “What is the oldest part of Taliesin? Part I“

Notes

1 I could go and point out windows that seem like they were at Taliesin in 1911-12, but I dunno.

2 “WHAT – do you think we’d just walk onto the roof?”
No, I do not think you would.
However: one time a person arrived at the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center in January or February and wanted to know if they could go into the buildings on the Taliesin estate. I asked, “Did you see the notice on our website that there are no tours at Taliesin until May 1?” The person replied nicely that, “Yes, we saw that. But you didn’t say the estate was closed.” So I’m double checking.

Image logo courtesy of National Novel Writing Month

Death by Design

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

The logo for NaNoWriMo

Here’s the start:

Over 15 years ago, I read the book, The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes and was furious. I wasn’t mad about the novel’s plot; I was angry because I felt the author completely misunderstood art restoration.

The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes takes place around an exhibition on early Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli (the man who painted The Birth of Venus, a.k.a., “Venus on the half-shell”). Among other things, a violent Italian fascist mutilates two Botticelli paintings… and puts the “Girl” of the book’s title into a dangerous position. I don’t remember the rest of the novel: I just remember how pissed off I was.

Why so mad, Keiran?

That’s because—after the crazed Fascist slashed through the eyes on a painting (or two), and left the piece barely intact—the curator gives the painting to some genius restorer who does magnificent work in, like, 2 days. In time for the exhibition opening.

While there are world experts in art restoration in NYC, there’s no way in hell that someone could restore a painting—executed in Italy in the late 1400s—in two f***ing days. I knew that and I didn’t even know the particulars about restoration experts of Renaissance painting.

So

As you can see by my continued annoyance

I wrote a couple of pages on a novel with a Taliesin house steward as the main character to show people what someone who knows the damned details about an artwork could do. But then got lost and did nothing more.

Until 2005

That’s the year that I wrote my first novel during NaNoWriMo, which is the subject of my post today.

What’s NaNoWriMo?

It takes place every November and stands for:

NAtional

NOvel

WRIting

MOnth

Some friends started it in 1999 after giving each other a challenge: write a 50,000 word novel in November from scratch.

In the lead up to November 1, you can do character development, plotting, planning etc., but you CANNOT write anything on the novel until 12:00 a.m., November 1.* And you must SUBMIT your 50,000-word novel by 11:59 p.m., November 30.

* I wrote earlier that you couldn’t start writing until 12:01 a.m. I’ve got no idea where I got that mistake came from. Well, yes, aside from coming from my own brain.

Do you win anything?

You win a link to a certificate that you can print. The certificate says you WROTE A 50,000 WORD NOVEL IN A MONTH.

What’s all?

Yup: that’s all.

No, really: don’t you get anything? Doesn’t anyone look at your novel?

The majority of people who look at the novel will be those who wrote it, and/or those who know the NaNoWriMo novelist.

Why the hell would you do this?

The folks who came up with Nanowrimo have dealt with these questions longer than me, so read their FAQ page from the Wayback Machine.

But,

Aside from knowing that you WROTE A NOVEL, there are people who participated in NaNoWriMo and took their 50k-words-(or more)-novel, and edited it, expanded it, found an agent and had it published. Novels written initially during Nanowrimo include:

Check out this web page mentioning some novels started at NaNoWriMo:

8 Bestselling Books Written During NaNoWriMo

 

Here’s my experience (experiences):

In October 2005, a friend online mentioned signing up for Nanowrimo. I’d heard about it, and among all of my “no I can’t do that,” this popped into my head:

Hey – why the hell couldn’t I do that? After all, I’d spent a week PO-‘d about The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes because “The writer wasn’t qualified to write what he did!!!”

Even in 2005 I knew I was an expert on Taliesin. And I knew my typing wasn’t bad.

so I could type like the wind!

And, oh yeah: there was my college degree. In writing.1

So: I wrote my first Nanowrimo novel.

Or, as I called it:

“The Book About a Murder at Taliesin… But Not That Murder“

Lisa is the novel’s narrator. She’s a tour guide who works at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, and lives in Spring Green Wisconsin. She isn’t me… exactly. She’s shorter and has blond hair. I think she was a little younger than me when I first started this in 2005. And she went to Graduate School in Art History, but never got her degree.

She does smoke and drink too much. I probably did when I first wrote it, but not as much as Lisa did.

But that wasn’t really my fault:

NaNoWriMo means you have to write 1,667 words per day. Writing about lighting up cigarettes gives you a chance to change the character’s location. And drinking gives you a place to hang out with other characters. And just having a character look at their cigarette pack and realize they’re getting low, adds to your total word count.

I mean, look:

I checked my cigarette supply. I was down to half a pack. I thought, “Oh, man,… I’ll have to stop soon.” But I figured I would deal with it later.

That’s 30 words right there!

Regardless, I did finish the novel. My word count was over 70,000.

I named the novel Death by Design

An online friend suggested it after I asked for input.

Why was Death by Design a murder novel?

It was the easiest thing for me to think up. Murder mysteries (as I learned) are easy… in ways. Particularly when you are attempting to write 1,667 words per day for 30 days straight.

Because 50,000 divided by 30=1,666.6666666667

I found that murder mysteries are easy because you (the author) figure out the clues and you can dab them in throughout the text, only to have them solved in the exciting denouement. Plus, I’d already spent years listening to murder mysteries on Old Time Radio Drama.

Death by Design‘s plot:

Main character, Lisa, is opening up the Hillside buildings one morning2 in May 2000.3 She walks into the Hillside Theater and finds the body of a man who’s been murdered.

Hilarity ensues since she has to call the programs director (at that time, a former guide who ran all the programs), while keeping the Taliesin Estate Tour guide with her group from accessing the Theater.

Over the following days, Lisa tries to deal with everything. Along with drinking too much (just beer, I swear). Additionally, she befriends a member of Taliesin’s Preservation Crew who she’s known for years. They end up dating by the end of the novel.

ALONG THE WAY:

Aside from every theory and every thought about Taliesin that came to mind, the book gave me a chance to write details about every fricking thing in the local area. I wrote in the novel information about the local bar, The Shed (sadly, closed this year) and the Spring Green General Store cafe. I took the opportunity to mention a yearly tradition at the General Store: BobFest.

And I invented a few obnoxious apprentices at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.4 That gave me a chance to write about the Taliesin Fellowship and its history. I then poisoned all of them with arsenic at dinner one night.

I pulled out “arsenic” after reading advice from another “Nanowrimer”: death and violence is a good way to switch up the story. Plus, by this time my book already had one murder. Maybe two.

UNTIL, finally, Lisa (and the love interest/Pres Crew guy, Jake5) get invited to a Taliesin formal dinner, in which the murderer tries to set fire to Taliesin.

Yes, I know: that old chestnut.

The murderer is caught of course. Lisa and Jake are together at the end. Lisa has started on a nicotine patch to quit smoking, and a new tour has been created based on the murderer trying to set fire to Taliesin.

Apparently, like the book Loving Frank, publicity about the murder in the Hillside Theater Foyer increases sales for tours that go to Hillside!

I participated in NaNoWriMo several more times:

2006:

The plot of the novel starts with Jake and Lisa as newlyweds. They’re on their honeymoon, which consists of going to other Frank Lloyd Wright sites.

as one does

I was also inspired in this novel by the destruction of two historic buildings in 2006. One was a destructive fire at a church by architects Dankmar Adler & Louis Sullivan in Chicago. Later that same month (January), a newly rediscovered house by Wright, the Wynant House, in Gary, Indiana was pretty much destroyed. Also by fire. So, the bad fortunes of these two pieces of architecture were put into the novel. 

In addition,

Lisa later defends herself (I think) with a heavy reproduction of a Frank-Lloyd-Wright-designed “Weedholder” vase. This particular moment of brutality comes at the Wright-designed Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, New York. I remember something else with furniture by Steelcase being used as a weapon at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Meyer May house, Grand Rapids, Michigan. And, lastly, Lisa finds the drowned body of a professor in Architectural History in the guest pool at Fallingwater.6 And she finds the Executive Director of Fallingwater after the E.D.’s been suffocated. She’d had Johnson’s paste Wax stuck into her nose and mouth.

Don’t worry if this makes no sense. I don’t expect anyone to know this unless they, like me, are Frankophiles.

2007:

That was a sci-fi novel where my character lived on a satellite of a gas giant. I never made it past 15,000 words. I had fun with it, but didn’t “Win”. The main character got stranded somewhere and I couldn’t figure out how to move the story on.

2009:

That October, I asked others what I should write for the upcoming NaNoWriMo. A friend suggested I write, “Frank Lloyd Wright in space!“

Predictably,

I just relied on the trope of the Time Travel Police. That is, some police-like force exists to keep the “timelines” clear. In my book, the MC gets picked up by the Time Travel Police whose job it is to find clones that cultural geeks have made of their idols so they can remove the clones from timelines that they could mess up. The MC is brought to a clone of Frank Lloyd Wright living on a spaceship filled with other anachronistic clones.

Like Jane Austin. And Leonardo Da Vinci.

So you can see, that there was a reason why I felt I have done what I could with NaNoWriMo.

Now, remember:

If you’re interested in the idea, November starts in a few days. Go to the site. You can read about the rules (or not), and the organization, in “Help Desk” on the NaNoWriMo page. And you can just sign up, and you can check on your word count as you go.

If you get through it, if nothing else at least you can say that for once in your life, you wrote a novel. You’ve got a month to write it, and all the time you need afterwards to edit it.

October 28, 2022
The image at the top of this is the logo for NaNoWriMo.

Notes:

1 I didn’t figure out the Art History interest until I was a junior in college.

2 Regardless of whether of not apprentices/students were at Hillside, tour guides used to open the Hillside structures in the morning, and shut the building down at the end of the day.

3 I chose to set the novel in the year 2000 because this eliminates any discussion of 9/11/2001.

4 One of the apprentices, who is a big, lying jerk, isn’t based on anybody I know or knew.

5 For those who know me IRL, Jake started out based on a real person. But I got grossed out when I realized the main character and Jake would have a romantic relationship. So, I changed most things about him.

6 The murdered Architectural Historian was real. But, that’s ok: he passed away years ago.

 

Photograph of the curtain in Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside Theater.

Curtains at the Hillside Theater

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Standing in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hillside Theater looking east at the curtain. I took this photo in 2007.

I’m excited1 to write about the curtains at the Hillside Theater today for a couple of reasons.

1: I can show a few photos of Hillside’s original theater curtain. And,

2: I get to give you one of my theories on the curtain.

Theory?!

Oh, man, you gorram egghead.

Yea, I know, but this is my website, so….

Original curtain? What original. There was more than one?

Why, gosh, so glad you asked. There have been two made for the Hillside Theater. The first one was destroyed.

The first theater –

I did a nice write up on the first theater in my “1952 Fire at Hillside” post. It’s got cool photos and a drawing!

Like I wrote a while ago, Wright designed Hillside in 1901 for his aunts, Jennie and Nell Lloyd Jones,2 and their Hillside Home School. The building was built 1902-03. What became the theater was originally the school’s gymnasium.  

The Hillside Home School closes in 1915.

Then, two years later, Wright paid the school’s outstanding debts and acquired the school’s land and buildings.

Yes, I know: he paid some debts. The man was full of surprises.

As I used to say on tour:

After that, he was too busy to do anything with the building because he was working. Then, in the late ’20s, he had lots of time (no work). But you know that also means: no money.

Regardless, 17 years after the Aunts closed the school, Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife, Olgivanna started

The Taliesin Fellowship

(just over 90 years ago!)

The Fellowship was due to open on October 1, 1932.2 The month before that, Wright persuaded ladies from a local church to sew a curtain for his planned Hillside Theater. Spring Green’s newspaper, the Weekly Home News, wrote about this on September 22 of that year:

SEWING BEE AT Taliesin

Members of the Congregational Ladies’ Aid are taking an active part in the preparations for the opening of the Taliesin Fellowship.

The ladies assign themselves to groups of twelve and sew on the theatre curtain afternoons at Taliesin. The work consists of appliquéing material on the stage curtain according to an attractive design made by Frank Lloyd Wright….

Here’s the curtain they were working on:

The design for the first curtain at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside theater (then called the Playhouse).

The link goes to the black-and-white image of drawing #3302.001 on-line at JSTOR

Wright hoped for over 70 apprentices that first year. I hate to break it to you, but Wright was a little too optimistic.

So, yeah: no.

Although they did get 23 apprentices that first October.

I always remember that number. It’s because 23… 1932.

And the curtain done by the Congregational Ladies Aid didn’t get put to work a YEAR later. That’s because the theater (named the Playhouse) opened on November 1, 1933.

Getting a view of the curtain is tough, because most photos show the curtain open. It drives Frankophiles (including myself) crazy.

Or at least it used to.

Drive me crazy, I mean.

Then I started going to Wright’s archives. At that time, they were at his winter home, Taliesin West. Every time before I went, I wrote to the Assistant Director of the archives about which specific photo collections I wanted to see on my trip.

I kept a running list of collections that I would request.3 Actually, I still do, if anyone wants to invite me to Wright’s archives at the Avery.

I scanned as much as I could, and got a few scans of photos showing the old curtain in full.

Here’s one:

Photo of the Hillside Playhouse and its curtain. circa 1936.

Looking south/southeast. Taken 1936-40.

And then that fire happened at Hillside in 1952

NO WONDER the guy said, “All my life I have been plagued by fire.”

After the fire, he designed the curtain in the room now.

When we started tours, all of us had to learn the interpretation of the curtain.

Interpreting the curtain

I used to tell people:

as far as I know, it’s the only major design that Wright ever did that shows something that actually exists.

not counting presentation drawings.

In other words, it’s not something abstracted: it’s a picture. It’s Taliesin on the hill.

Come, follow me.

Here’s a shortcut of what the guides had to learn:

Frank Lloyd Wright's drawing of the curtain at the Hillside Theater in Wisconsin

But here’s the thing

None of this works if you abstract the Wisconsin River, the hill, or Taliesin. All those things are there, but it doesn’t go left-to-right like that.

So I wondered about this for awhile. Then, one day decades ago while I was cleaning in Hillside [yes, I used to do that, too] I realized that

The curtain’s image works if you turn it backwards.

When I thought about this while at work, I remembered something I’d read years before in Art History classes… something about tapestries. This matches what I read on them. It’s from the Met Museum:

 

Making a Tapestry—How Did They Do That?

by Sarah Mallory
….
Historically, weavers worked while facing what would be the back of the tapestry. They copied with their colored weft threads the tapestry’s design. The design, referred to as the “cartoon,” took the form of a painting—made on cloth or paper, the same size as the planned tapestry. This cartoon was either temporarily attached to the loom, flush against the backs of the warp threads, and visible in the gaps between the warps; or it was hung on the wall behind the weavers, who followed it by looking at its reflection in a mirror behind the warps. Because weavers copied the cartoon facing on the back of the tapestry, when the piece was finished, removed from the loom, and turned around to reveal the front, the woven image on the front of the tapestry was the mirror image of the cartoon shown. Weavers could avoid this reversal of the design by using the mirror method to copy the cartoon’s design.

And here’s the Hillside curtain design, backwards:

The present Hillside Theater curtain, shown backwards.

The design has the hill crown. You can see it best in a Taliesin II photo:

Taliesin from the south. circa 1920
Published in “Wright Studies: Volume 1, Taliesin 1911-1914”, p. 3.

Looking north at Taliesin, 1920-24. On the far left is a workman’s apartment. On the far right are Wright’s living quarters. You can’t see Wright’s studio and other apartments for the workmen because the building wraps around the hill the other side of the hill.

I don’t know if Wright was thinking of a tapestry when he drew the design for the curtain, but it does make sense. In the curtain, you can see the top of the hill. You can’t see that if you’re looking at Taliesin from the other side from what you see in the photo above.

So was he thinking about the design backwards?

Possibly. Since working on this post I’ve had to remind myself which way the curtain hangs because I keep getting turned around. Makes me very glad that I learned “left” and “right” in kindergarten.

Although I did ask the Administrator of Historic Studies at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation about my “tapestry” theory. She seemed to “get” what I was talking about, of the curtain being the mirror image of reality, but she said that Wright did not design the curtain as a tapestry. According to Indira, Wright asked “his friend Dorothy Liebes if she could weave it,” but it was too big. So it was done the way it stands at the Hillside Theater. 

First published October 17, 2022.
I took the photograph on the top of this page.

 

Notes

1 Wait – aren’t I always excited about this?… why, yes, yes I am.

2 Some “early birds” – William Wesley “Wes” Peters, John “Jack” Howe, Yen Liang and Edgar Tafel arrived earlier that summer. Tafel wrote about the early time in Apprentice to Genius, the book I recommended a year ago.

3 I made trips 6 times in as many years. TPI paid for some, but at least half were on my own dime. I did it for work, but also for myself. I wanted to see these things and learn them. PLUS! I got to hang at T-West often in the winter – who needs a fricking vacation when they’ve got to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings, and his letters and drawings, and photos of Taliesin by others?

Looking outside in the summer the dissected boiler from Taliesin's Living Quarters.

Blue smoke at Taliesin

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A photograph I took in 2007 while the Preservation Crew removed the boiler from Taliesin’s living quarters. Taliesin’s living room is one floor up and to the right.

Didn’t I write in here about the time there was blue smoke inside Taliesin’s Living Quarters one fall day in 1995?

[searches this blog for the words “blue” and “smoke”, but to no avail.]

I don’t mean blue smoke like decorative smoke that’s supposed to go along with cartoon Taliesin smurfs.1 No: this blue smoke filled the living quarters one day after the heat was turned on.

So, while I don’t know the details, this post is going to be about the new heating system that was installed at Taliesin. Because it’s the first weekend of September and I remember the fact that it’s going to get cold again.  

As I recall,

it happened one day in the autumn of 1995. I arrived at Taliesin’s front door with my House Tour guests and was greeted by the House Steward. She told us it might be a little chilly because they’d turned off the heat. That was because blue smoke filled the house after they turned it on that morning.

I checked online to find out what “blue smoke” coming from a heating system means. “Just Answer” told me the smoke was from an “accumulation of dust that can cause fumes.” I read that and went, “Well, sh*t – if that’s all it was, we should have just kept using the heater.”⇐and right there is why it’s best for Taliesin that I stayed in research and writing instead of MAKING MATERIAL DECISIONS ON FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S HOME.

Following the blue smoke

the Preservation Crew investigated the system. While there wasn’t a sign of imminent catastrophe, they concluded that the presence of smoke and fumes was not a matter of just getting a new “panel” and fixing things easily.

I don’t know the age of the former radiators that comprised the heating system at Taliesin’s Living Quarters, but they were old.2 Maybe they didn’t date to Frank Lloyd Wright’s lifetime (he died in 1959), but, since I’m talking about Taliesin in the mid-1990s? Possibly.

Therefore,

Preservation turned off the heat inside Taliesin’s living quarters. They understood that the heat could not be turned on again until many problems were solved,

like, what I wrote about in “A Slice of Taliesin” is only a small part

and an appropriate system was researched, prepared, and acquired.

In fact, they didn’t even remove the old boiler until things veered closer to getting heat in the building.

That happened in 2007.

That’s when I took the photograph of the dismantled boiler at the top of this post.

Just so you know: NO, the boiler that was removed was not “the boiler” where Julian Carlton hid in 1914 – what the hell are you thinking?

Following this,

the only way the Taliesin Living Quarters were heated was through little space heaters placed in the rooms.

Hence, part of the reason that I’m still attuned to the question, “Did Wright ever live in Wisconsin in the winter?”
Wright had radiators from the beginning. Yet, people didn’t usually see them because the little heaters drew their attention.

Obviously, the space heaters were only plugged in/turned on when tours were going on. Which saved money and ensured that Taliesin House Stewards could monitor the devices.

Man,

I felt for the House Stewards and the tour guides when the weather was cold. I didn’t have to go to the house every day, since I hadn’t worked full-time in the tour program since 2002. But it was hard to talk about Wright’s genius in his house with little electric heaters. Although, while they didn’t make the space nice and toasty, they gave the “aura” of heat. The sense that, “Well, we’re doing the best we can.”

And so,

since Taliesin’s living quarters didn’t have heat until 2014, the building was shut down after October 31.3 In order to prepare for the winter, the tour staff moved the artifacts, rugs, and furniture into separate areas. The work by the tour staff took several days in November, and two weeks in the spring.

I mentioned “House opening” in my post, “Physical Taliesin history“.

Here’s a hint on what Taliesin’s Living Room looked like when it was almost set:

Looking (plan) northwest in Taliesin’s Living Room. Taken by me on the first day of House opening in 2006.

I confess that seeing this photograph squeezes my heart. Not in a good way. Man, I hated House opening.

Honestly,

I sometimes doubted that I’d ever see heat in Taliesin again. Not that the folks in Preservation weren’t making lists and slowly going through improvements, but I had worked there so long while things changed incrementally, and tour guides/staff still gave tours when outside temps were 40F (4.45C) the night before.

I felt like, “You don’t care about us!!!”

A panel from Calvin and Hobbes of Calvin laughing and pointing at his friend/rival, Susie

My alteration of a panel in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon detailing how I felt while opening Taliesin in the spring following the removal of the boiler in Taliesin’s living quarters. I called these altered cartoons “Frank and Hobbes”.

so.

I just realized

that the managers in the Preservation Crew were speaking like the pilot on your airplane while you’re waiting to take off. You get into your seat and they tell you you’ll be leaving shortly. Then sometimes you seem to sit there interminably on the “apron” before moving. But the pilot always has a positive attitude, telling you that you will be on your way in just a moment. Even when you aren’t. I guess with the Preservation at Taliesin, the crew did enough work (over 20 years) to remove the airplane chocks, then get onto the taxiway for takeoff.

You can get some more understanding by looking at a Preservation Report first loaded onto Taliesin Preservation‘s website in 2011.

Altho,

I just looked at the Wayback machine,4 and they don’t have the Preservation Report. Here, you can have my copy of the issue I’m thinking of.

p.s.: these were written by Ryan Hewson. He works for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation as the Preservation Director of Taliesin (Wisconsin). He had me proofread these, which I why I had an electronic copy.

The installation of the geo-thermal system at Taliesin was summarized here. And here’s an “after” photograph from the boiler room:

If that geothermal system seems familiar, it’s because I mentioned it in, “Why Did You Have to do That, Mr. Wright?!“

To reiterate:

  • As I remember it, the heat was turned off in 1995,
  • The radiator was removed in 2007,
  • The geo-thermal heating system was fully installed and switched on in 2014.5

First published September 4, 2022.

 

Notes:

1 Yes, I did just spend time imagining Taliesin Blue Smurfs: Smurfs with canes, porkpie hats and capes. Did you?

2 Here’s information for those working in Preservation on the Taliesin estate: the large hole in the Hillside Theatre foyer is NOT a drain for water.

Since almost no guides were around when hot air used to come out of the vent, I’ve heard many “newer” guides (I mean, those who came after 1997) wonder out loud if that was for water.

That hole used to be a hot air vent. It worked when I first gave tours. You would walk in on a chilly day in September or October, and hot air came out of that hole. I think it helped people emotionally to know that Wright tried to make the space warm. I mean, it’s all stone and has no insulation.

3 While the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is working on Wright’s Hillside Theater, there’s still no heat inside most of the rest of the Hillside School building.

4 Here’s my post about the Wayback Machine.

5 It wouldn’t have made sense to move things ahead of time, since Preservation was just going to have to do a bunch of work later.