The other day I received an email that made me homesick — for a house in which I never lived.
Its writer was an elementary school classmate I have not seen in many decades. Following the death of her mother, she is about to sell the house her parents built in 1955 on the Connecticut coastline in Leetes Island, part of Guilford.
The first few pictures she attached to the email didn’t show the house at all, just the stony coastline and seaweed that took the place of lawns and hedges. Subsequent pictures showed an unabashedly modern structure, not a pure form, but rather a straightforward response to a jagged site.
Today it seems modest, but I remember what a bold act it was. Guilford was a bastion of the colonial. Anything built after 1840 was viewed as slightly vulgar, and even the tumbledown rental where I grew up dated from 1770. I used to ride my bicycle to Leetes Island to look at the strange modern houses that were appearing there.
The house was part of a development built into the jagged remains of a celebrated granite quarry that produced stone that looks grey in the ground, but pink when polished. Rock from this quarry was used to make the base of the Statue of Liberty, the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, and other New York landmarks.
It also may be the model for the intensely symbolic Connecticut granite quarry that figures in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel about architecture, The Fountainhead: “It was a world without curves, grass or soil, a simplified world of stone planes, sharp edges and angles. The stone had not been made by patient centuries welding the sediment of winds and tides; it had come from a molten mass cooling slowly at unknown depth; it had been flung, forced out of the earth, and it still held the shape of violence against the violence of the men on its ledges.””
I drove through the neighborhood a few years ago, and it looks softer and greener than I remember, but patches of flat smooth rock, cut at sharp angles still remind us that pieces of the earth were wrested from this place to build a great city 90 miles away.
The house itself shaped lives. In a telephone conversation, my classmate told me her mother had worked closely with the architect, and after her three daughters were raised, went back to school and became an architectural historian. And my classmate attributes her own career choice — as an environmental educator — to the house’s setting.
As I looked at the pictures on the computer screen, I could almost smell the salt and feel the wind whipping off the sound. I covet this house, but can’t afford it, and my classmate doesn’t think it’s practical for her to keep it either. But she fears that if she sells it, it will share the fate of its modernist neighbors and be torn down to build something bigger, more showy, and less responsive to its land and its history. Even at 2,500 square feet, it is considered small for such a fine waterfront site.
Do I know anyone, she asked, who will buy it and keep its optimistic vision and environmental sensitivity intact?
Well, do I?
