Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Read online

  Other Books by Witold Rybczynski

  Paper Heroes

  Taming the Tiger

  Home

  The Most Beautiful House in the World

  Waiting for the Weekend

  Looking Around

  A Place for Art

  City Life

  A Clearing in the Distance

  One Good Turn

  The Look of Architecture

  The Perfect House

  Vizcaya (with Laurie Olin)

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  Copyright © 2007 by Witold Rybczynski

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

  Text set in Stempel Garamond

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rybczynski, Witold.

  Last harvest: how a cornfield became New Daleville: real estate development in America from George Washington to the builders of the twenty-first century, and why we live in houses anyway / Witold Rybczynski.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. New Daleville (Pa.) — History. 2. Planned communities — Pennsylvania — Londonderry (Chester County) — Case studies. 3. Real estate development — United States — History. 4. Housing — United States — History. I. Title.

  HT169.57.U62N497 2007

  307.76’80974813 — dc22 2006052136

  ISBN: 1-4165-3957-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To Shirley

  God made the country, and man made the town.

  — WILLIAM COWPER

  Contents

  Part One

  Prologue

  1. The Developer

  2. Seaside

  3. Epiphanies

  4. Last Harvest

  5. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Estate

  6. Joe’s Deal

  7. On the Bus

  8. Meetings

  9. Scatteration

  10. More Meetings

  Part Two

  11. Drop by Drop

  12. On the Way to Exurbia

  13. Design Matters

  14. Locked In

  15. House and Home

  16. Generic Traditional

  17. The Dream

  18. Builders

  19. A Compromise

  Part Three

  20. Trade-offs

  21. Mike and Mike

  22. Ranchers, Picture Windows, and Morning Rooms

  23. Pushing Dirt

  24. The Market Rules

  25. Bumps in the Road

  26. Hard Sell

  27. Competition

  28. The Spreadsheet Buyers

  29. Moving Day

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Part One

  New Daleville, September 2003

  Prologue

  Twenty years ago, my wife and I started to walk for exercise, every morning before breakfast. We lived in the country, and our route was a winding road between meadows and apple orchards. Since moving to Philadelphia, we walk on city streets. The experience is different, yet not so different.

  Chestnut Hill, where we live, is as bucolic as its name. There is a hill, and there are horse chestnut trees, though the American chestnuts that gave the place its name are long gone. Our walks take us down arboreal tunnels of massive oaks and sycamores, which grow in wide planting strips between sturdy granite curbs and slate sidewalks. The strips, which are the responsibility of individual homeowners, exhibit a pleasant disharmony. Most people, following an unwritten rule, plant grass, but there are also nonconformist patches of ground cover, defiantly individualistic flower beds, no-nonsense brick pavers, mean-spirited bands of crushed stone, and in at least one case, an earnest row of zucchini.

  The boundaries of the house lots are likewise variously defined. Many are generously open; some have hedges or planting beds. There are ivy-covered wooden fences of every sort, as well as black wrought-iron railings, white pickets, and the occasional stone wall. A few houses have solid wooden fences, unsociable barriers that resemble stockades out of The Last of the Mohicans.

  Houses change with the seasons. Pots of flowers appear on stoops, and wreaths adorn front doors. The decorations on our neighbor’s lawn are always a treat: ghosts for Halloween, angels at Christmastime, pink flamingos for the children’s birthdays. Last Valentine’s Day, every window contained an illuminated heart. Some houses fly flags. Not as many Stars and Stripes as immediately after 9/11, but several of those odd flower-power banners that people seem to like. Dave, an ex-Marine, hoists the red standard of the Corps. We sometimes meet him in the morning, watering the rosebushes in front of his house. Most Chestnut Hill houses are close to the sidewalk. So close you can look inside.

  Garbage day is a sort of public confessional. You can see who’s bought a new computer, and who’s given up on the exercise machine. The other morning I came across a discarded tabletop hockey game. For a second, I thought of lugging it home. When the contents of basements and attics appear on the sidewalk, it means a move is imminent. Families come and go with regularity; finally, we’re all of us just passing through. A young household moves in, and swing sets sprout in the backyard. If the children are older, it’s a basketball hoop. A new owner usually means energetic gardening, at least for a season or two. Gardens are the main things that change. Occasionally, someone adds a terrace to a house, or encloses a porch. New owners undertake long-delayed maintenance: putting on a new roof, or repointing walls. The only significant construction on my street in several years has been the repair to a neighbor’s house that was hit by a falling tree. When the work was finished, the house looked exactly as it did before the accident. After all, why improve on a good thing?

  There is no typical Chestnut Hill house. There are mansions as big as small hotels, and little Hansel-and-Gretel cottages. Our walks take us by a representative sample of the architectural styles that came and went during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: charming Queen Annes with picturesque bay windows and ornamental curlicues; rather serious, half-timbered Tudors; elegant Georgian Revivals that make me think of Jazz Age financiers in wing collars and spats; and straightforward center-hall Colonials, as friendly and uncomplicated as the big golden Labs that play in their front yards. One street has a row of flinty stone cottages that appear to have been transported directly from the Cotswolds. Schist, quarried from a nearby ravine, is the common building material, but we also see brick, stucco, and clapboard. If we walked farther than our usual three miles, we would pass Italianate, Jacobean, and Romanesque Revival residences. Not all the houses are old. Beginning in the nineteen fifties, some of the large estates were subdivided. The grandest of these properties was Whitemarsh Hall, a celebrated Gilded Age mansion, designed by Horace Trumbauer in 1917 for Edward T. Stotesbury. All that’s left of the 145-room Georgian pile is a pair of huge entrance gates, whose massive columns loom over the plain-Jane bungalows that dot the grounds of what was once a formal French garden.

  What drew Stotesbury, a stockbroker and banker who was reputedly the richest man in Philadelphia and owned second homes in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Palm Beach, Florida, here? During most of the nineteenth century, Chestnut Hill had been a sleepy rural hamlet. Summer visitors included Edgar Allan Poe an
d John Greenleaf Whittier, who came to experience the rugged landscape of nearby Wissahickon Creek, and wealthy Philadelphians, who, attracted by the salubrious climate, built country estates. In 1854, thanks to a consolidation of city and county, Chestnut Hill became part of Philadelphia, but remained largely rural. In the eighteen eighties, Henry Howard Houston, a wealthy local businessman, bought up 3,000 acres of this countryside, and after convincing the Pennsylvania Railroad, of which he was — not by chance — a director, to build a commuter line from downtown to Chestnut Hill, he set about subdividing the land and developing a new community. He called it Wissahickon Heights. To give his development social cachet and attract Philadelphia’s elite, he founded the Philadelphia Horse Show, which became the premier social event of the city. To draw summer visitors, he built a large hotel — complete with an artificial lake. He added a country club, where residents could drink and play cricket (a popular game in Anglophile Philadelphia, which had several cricket clubs) and built a picturesque Gothic church, where they could worship their Episcopal God.1

  Garden suburbs such as Wissahickon Heights were part of an important episode in American urban history, when upper-middle-class families moved from the centers of cities to their suburban fringes. The Harvard historian John Stilgoe has called these outlying communities “borderlands.” He reminds us that this displacement was the mark of cultural as well as physical transformation. “The enduring power of borderland landscape between the early nineteenth century and the beginning of World War II,” he writes, “suggests that many women and men understood more by commuting and country than train schedules and pastures, and hints also that the cities of the Republic failed to provide an urban fabric as joyous, as restorative as that found by borderers a few miles beyond.”2

  Borderers were not back-to-the-landers. They expected attractive, urbane residences, cultivated landscapes — and cultivated neighbors — which required organization. A few of the nineteenth-century borderland communities grew spontaneously, but most, like Wissahickon Heights, were planned. The first, by most accounts, was Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, developed in 1853 by Llewellyn Haskell, a Manhattan businessman, and designed by the celebrated architect Alexander Jackson Davis. The largest was Riverside, Illinois, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1868 for the Chicago developer E. E. Childs. Similar communities appeared on the outskirts of every major American city.

  So many Philadelphians found Houston’s development “joyous and restorative” that, by the time Stotesbury moved here, Chestnut Hill was the city’s most prestigious address. Houston’s son-inlaw, George Woodward, greatly expanded the business during the early nineteen hundreds. * A physician with an entrepreneurial streak, he was also a progressive philanthropist, interested in architecture and social housing. He subdivided land and sold lots to wealthy Philadelphians, but he also built a variety of rental houses — middle-class family homes as well as large residences, a range that continues to give the neighborhood a diverse charm. Woodward hired young architects whom he’d send to England to broaden their repertoire — and to discover Cotswold cottages. In 1921 he commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., son of the famous landscape architect, to lay out a public park. Woodward’s descendants continue to manage rental properties in Chestnut Hill to this day.

  My own house — built on the foundation of an old icehouse — was designed for Woodward’s development in a Colonial Revival style by H. Louis Duhring in 1908. Stepped gables give it a Dutch appearance, and the interiors are rustic, with pegged, roughhewn beams and fieldstone fireplaces. The public rooms, following the British Free Style, are exceptionally open. It’s a testimony to Duhring’s talent that the house has served as a family home for almost a hundred years with only minor modifications. The bedrooms were remodeled in the nineteen thirties, extra bathrooms added in the fifties, a porch turned into a sunroom in the sixties, and the kitchen renovated in the nineties. I converted two bedrooms into a study when we moved here six years ago. No doubt, during the twenty-first century it will undergo more alterations. If energy costs continue to rise, there will come a time — I hope it’s not on my shift — when someone will have to figure out how to add proper insulation to the walls. But the original roof slates have lasted, and the roofer assures me that, with a little care, they’re good for some time yet. The stone walls need periodic repointing, and the woodwork must be properly maintained. All of us owners over the years have performed these essential tasks, driven by the house’s simple but sturdy details, its practical plan, and its intrinsic good character.

  Not far from my home is an unusual group of houses that Duhring built for Woodward in 1931. By that time, many people owned cars, and Roanoke Court, as it’s called, is entered through a walled motor court flanked by individual garages that resemble two rows of stables. Beyond that, eight attached houses surround a common garden. It’s a magical, secluded space. The large houses are designed in a simplified version of the English vernacular style that Duhring favored, with steep slate roofs and rough stone walls. He built a number of such novel housing groups in Chestnut Hill, including several courts, a crescent of semidetached residences, and a cluster of unusual quadruple houses. Woodward encouraged such experimentation. In addition to the Cotswold row, he commissioned a lane of British country-style cottages and a cluster of charming Norman houses, complete with a town gate, known locally as French Village. The last was built after the First World War to honor Woodward’s deceased son, a pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille.

  Visitors to Chestnut Hill use terms such as old-fashioned and traditional to describe the treed streets and interesting-looking houses. They can be forgiven for assuming that the neighborhood is the result of years of fortuitous evolution — a suburban version of Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution there has been, but pastoral Chestnut Hill is no happy accident. It was a residential real estate development, and it was designed to look the way it does.

  *Woodward changed the name of the development to St. Martin’s, which survives as the name of a train stop.

  1

  The Developer

  “The construction side is almost risk-free, since building begins only after the house has been sold to a buyer. All the risk is in the development side, but so is all the money. A small home builder makes 5 to 7 percent profit, while a developer can make a lot more than that — or he can go bankrupt.”

  Every spring I invite Joe Duckworth, a residential developer, to talk to my class, a mixture of architects, planners, and Wharton School MBAs. He generally begins by reminding the students that home building is an unusual business. “The customers are not only buying a product,” he says. “They’re looking for the right location for commuting to work, good schools, recreational amenities, and nice surroundings. They’re shopping for a neighborhood.”

  He shows images of suburban communities, asking the students to describe what they see. “Lawns,” they answer. “Colonial shutters.” “Brick chimneys.” Emboldened, someone in the back calls out, “Boring, cookie-cutter houses.” “Interesting answer,” says Duckworth. “You’re right, the houses are similar. When people buy a house, they want to be able to sell it. Since they can’t afford to lose money, they’re highly risk-averse. They want what everyone else has.”

  Paul, an architecture student, raises his hand. “The houses that you’re showing all look pretty traditional. What’s the market for modern design?” Duckworth answers that in the seventies a home builder he worked for created a so-called California contemporary model, with clerestories, cedar siding, high spaces, and an open plan. “It wasn’t great architecture, but it was different. Today, those houses are selling at a ten to twenty percent discount compared to other nineteen-seventies-era houses. People just don’t like them, and no Philadelphia builder has tried it since.”

  Duckworth talks about his business. “In the past, residential development was straightforward,” he says. “You had an engineer prepare a s
ubdivision plan, you got it approved, and built the houses. Development and building were done by the same company. In the last five years, thirty-eight states have enacted some kind of land development regulations. Today, especially in an anti-growth area such as Pennsylvania, getting land permitted is an art that requires a different skill set than building houses, so land development and house building are increasingly done by different people. Development involves acquiring land, getting permits, and putting in roads and infrastructure; house building is mainly about construction. The construction side is almost risk-free, since building begins only after the house has been sold to a buyer. All the risk is in the development side, but so is all the money. A small home builder makes five to seven percent profit, while a developer can make a lot more than that — or he can go bankrupt.”

  Kelly, one of the Wharton students, asks how developers weather economic downturns. “It’s mostly a question of resources,” Duckworth says. “In a downturn, about a quarter of developers go bankrupt. They’ve bought land which they can’t sell. So the rest of us have the opportunity to buy this land at a low price. When the economy turns up, we have permitted land ready to go, while other developers are just starting the long permitting process.”

  Duckworth discusses the role of regulation in development. “You have to understand that the way that our suburbs are planned is not because of developers, it’s mainly because of zoning,” he tells the class. “Who do you think controls zoning?” he asks. “Zoning boards,” calls out a smart aleck. “Yes, but zoning boards are run by who? The local residents. What these people want is to maintain, or even increase, property values. At the same time, they want — and their neighbors want — to limit development as much as possible. In Chester County, where I live, the size of an average lot increased from half an acre in the sixties to one acre in the eighties, and by the end of the nineties it was an acre and a half. The bias of local zoning is always towards bigger lots.” Duckworth ends by talking about his own projects. “I’m working on village-type developments with smaller lots and more open space. It’s taking a long time to get approvals, though, because we’re swimming against the current.”