7. MANSARD ROOFS
I was going around today thinking of
what was my favorite house. Dumb
self-question, nearly stupid, and with
nothing to go on. What caught my
attention was, in strolling along College
Avenue, Rutgers, by the Alexander
Library, I saw a few Mansard Roof'd
houses still in good use and grand
repair. The Mansard Roof has, these
last 5 decades, been considered dour, and
sour too. An architectural monstrosity
to be avoided at all costs. To me, it
never came across so badly - Lewis
Mumford's book, 'The Brown Decades'
has always been one of my favorites.
It - the Mansard Roof, I mean -
always looked separated enough
from the regular duty of ordinary
life as to make it, if not attractive,
then desirable. I'd love to live in
a nice one - garret-high, southern
light, all that. I researched them once
and was surprised to find a large part
of their history had to do with stealth
and illegality. Bad tactics by landlords
to get around things, taxes mostly.
Real estate taxes. Seems like, a long
time back, it being illegal to house
people in upstairs attics and the
aforementioned garrets and
studios, there began a mad rush
to the 'falsified' look of the Mansard
Roof window casements so that those
attics and things would begin to appear
as rooms and extra levels, which they
were not. But, I still think, people
must have somehow been pretty
stupid to think that sleeping twenty
people on an unfinished attic floor
would be concealed (and also, how this
would save the 'tax' money of showing
extra floor) by the addition of pleasant-
enough looking outcrops and dormers.
It's still all pretty confusing to me, but
the intentional (or not) look of the
Mansard Roof continues to please
my Brown Decades eye. So, walking
along College Avenue (the Alexander
Library is right along there, plenty of
old-time New York and New Jersey
collection books about the early days)
today, I just carefully gazed at the
housetops that I saw : a few already
taken away and being replaced by the
'modern', and another few in a now
progressive state of disrepair. Still,
a few shone on, and stood out.
-
It's funny to me how, over the years,
housing design has deteriorated, even
as people have grown more wealthy and
wealth-orientated, making sums unheard
of to me before. Flying off to Europe on
whims, for vacation, homes at the shore,
living like kings and queens in most
every other aspect. The world has
certainly taken off from its more
humble beginnings, at least around
here. But the diminishment of taste
- in the other direction - has proceeded
with precipitous speed. In fact, we live
amidst, now, a real overflow of bad
taste. There are entire towns (Elizabeth,
New Jersey comes most immediately
to mind) where the rows of older
homes, having been done over now
probably two or three times, in two
or three different ethnic tastes and
variations now too, are simply
outrageously poorly done and as a
not at all enticing visual nightmare:
Porch after porch either redone and
mismatched, with no regard for quality
or fit, varied forms of sidings put on,
sometimes glaringly offensive and one
right over the other, iron and scrollwork
with pink masonry or stucco, or brick,
work. The clash of a Portuguese taste
ringing up now against a South Asian
taste, where once before it had been
a Puerto Rican, Spanish, or Black taste,
and before that Italian or Hungarian.
Lingering arches and scalloped moldings
and beams, all haphazard and without
reason. Ostentatious entryways and
really, really bad front door treatments.
It's all really rough, and wherever you
do perhaps find some older, original
structure, it's sadly neglected and falling
in. Inhabited by people barely hanging
on. Many of the once grand and broad
American places have now been taken
from us. A lot of these houses were
waterway houses - think of that. The
days when one's comfort and wealth,
from trade and commerce, say, could
be given evidence by your stately home
facing the river, the river traffic, and the
wide expanse of waterfront - your cupola
and 'widow's watch' - are all gone now.
The rivers have no use at all. Roadways
and interstates ring them, and separate the
people from their proper settings. No one
knows the rights or the values of water and
water traffic any more. All is clogged by
highway and traffic. Even today, on College
Avenue, the steady stream (no pun) of
campus buses and autos just ran by. The
campus of Rutgers is now so far flung -
with the urban New Brunswick part of
it being only a small fraction - that there
is need for streams of buses to keep taking
students to and back from the outlying
'suburban' area expanses of 'drive-to'
campus on what was, until 1990, give
or take, farmland. It's a car-campus
college now, this 'Rutgers'. Why it
has any, in fact, reputation now, is
beyond me - it seems a drone school
for teaching nothing but drone habits;
a real no-consequence mess just barely
pretending to act at educating people.
It's a grind-mill, New Jersey's very
own. The old, downtown part is
nothing now, more an adjunct to the
car-campuses of varied sites out in the
once-woods. The old observatory
telescope, in its little, rounded, building
is probably the best thing there now, and
I'd bet it too is not long for this world.
-
There is a great silence, most of the time,
around me, and it's one I'm happy with. It
allows though and it allows a certain other
level of 'communication' with the broader,
interior world, the world which better
understands some of all this : the mysterious
villains of the unseen and invisible, the secret
spaces, between words, even as they
are being spun.
-
So, where does any of this leave me?
I don't know. In flux, always, I guess.
Somebody like myself, I suppose, is
always, needs always to be, in flux. Seeing.
Observing. Sort of 'renegotiating' the world.
I sometimes swear that everything is in
constant motion and only stops dead, the
entire picture stops, when the eye hits it. It's a
world in motion and all that motion undergoes
constant change until the next 'stop' moment, when
the viewers' (alone or en masse) presumptions
and predelictions and ideas have all changed
again, still more, and the resultant 'new' frozen
picture of the world reflects all that. At only that
instant, and then it's all off to crazy-land again
until the next stop. That's how public opinion
shifts, and paradigm changes and new gestalts
take effect. That's what Thoreau and those
Transcendentalist guys meant by saying
'consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'
They meant that you simply cannot just
always be of one mind about things - everything
is always underway, on to course somewhere,
undergoing changing. When we go to sleep
and all those strange rudiments of 'Dream' begin
hitting us, that's exactly what's going on -
the world, in flux, re-arranging, trying on different
guises, trying to make sense of a no-sense deal.
Hiding twenty people in that attic upstairs,
behind those false-front
Mansard Roofs.
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