Photo of the Day: Lenox Community Center, Lenox, MA

The Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts represent one of my favorite summer vacation areas, and within that, the town of Lenox—with Edith Wharton’s restored Gilded Age home, The Mountain, and the theatrical troupe Shakespeare and Company—is a particular focal point for my visits.

The last time I visited, in late summer 2017, I spent a bit more time walking around the town itself. On Walker Street, across Trinity Church, is Lenox Community Center.

I knew nothing about this building when I photographed it other than that it was a handsome structure. Subsequently, I learned that it is an example of an adaptive reuse. In 1923, a member of Trinity Church, Maj. George E. Turnure, built the Lenox Brotherhood Club as a memorial to his son and namesake, a Lafayette Escadrille pilot who survived WW I only to succumb to pneumonia, at age 24, in 1920.

Though conceived as a clubhouse, this clapboard building looks more like a large country house—which was probably why it caught my eye from across the street. Several decades later, it was taken over by the town, which now provides services here to residents of all ages.

In July 2019, the center became the recipient of a $200,000 donation from the estate of an admirer: the journalist Claire Cox Lowenthal.

Photo of the Day: ‘Boy Asleep With Hoe,’ Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA

Three years ago, during the last time I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum, this particular photo took my fancy. The poor boy in this 1919 work for the Saturday Evening Post, when you think about it, doesn’t do anything that adults wouldn’t if they had their way. He’s exhausted, and he’d just feel so much better if he could take off his hat, shoes and socks. Anyway, Rover here will wake him up. Right?

This work  had gone missing in a private home in Cherry Hill, NJ back in 1976. At the time of my visit, it had only been about half a year when the FBI had recovered it. The museum got this as a result of a loan from its current owner. Since 2017, thousands of visitors had the opportunity to see this again!

Photo of the Day: Pond Garden, Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, MA

I took this photo three years ago, as part of a visit to Berkshire Botanical Garden, a 24-acre site even more picturesque than the town in which it’s located: Stockbridge, MA.

This man-made pond with a waterproof liner sustains all kinds of life: frogs, toads, dragonflies, salamanders, and water beetles. But, for anyone not particularly interested in observing these creatures at close range, the pond garden is simply a good spot to catch one’s breath amid the noise and haste of the world.

Photo of the Day: Wetlands Garden, Shakespeare and Company, Lenox, MA

It may be hard to realize, with all those characters—and, yes, in the tragedies, corpses—all over the place, but Shakespeare’s plays are filled with imagery related to gardens. The Berkshire (Mass.) theatrical troupe Shakespeare and Company has invoked that beautifully with the Dorothy and Stephen Wetlands Garden, which I photographed when I attended several plays there in late August 2017.

I wish more people had the opportunity to encounter the plays staged there—and this lovely natural setting—as I did. But, of course, COVID-19 has changed everything, forcing the cancellation of this Lenox mainstay’s 2020 season.

Photo of the Day: Italian Garden, The Mount, Lenox MA

Over the last three decades, I have visited the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts on several occasions. On each vacation, I stop at The Mount, the turn-of-the-century country home of novelist Edith Wharton. Each time, I find something new to appreciate. 

Sometimes it’s because of the different perspectives of the various guides to the home. Sometimes, as part of the ongoing restoration of the place, it’s because some new facet of this pioneering female fiction writer has been discovered.
 

But it’s hard to get away from the beauty of the whole place, created under the watchful, demanding eye of Ms. Wharton. The architecture of the building itself if a marvel of symmetry and sleight-of-hand.

But outside, in the back, the gardens convey their own magic. Indeed, Wharton herself saw them as a series of outdoor rooms, designed to harmonize with the house itself.

The novelist’s niece, Beatrix Jones Farrand, a self-styled "landscape gardener," signed up to make the property harmonize with her aunt’s vision of what a natural backdrop should be. In this, she admirably succeeded.

Photo of the Day: Monkswood, Hancock Shaker Village, MA

Monkswood, an herbaceous wildflowers, grows in mountain meadows in the Northern Hemisphere. Growing 2 to 4 feet tall and 1 to 2 feet wide, it sends up purple-blue flowers like this in late summer or early fall.

Come to think of it, that’s when I saw and photographed this particular plant—in late August 2017, to be exact, at Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. 

This former experiment in communal living, established in 1790 and active until 1960, now functions as a living history museum of this fascinating sect. Though buildings cover much of the grounds, this remains a working farm, with vegetables, herbs and a barn full of livestock. A visitor can spend much of the day here, and it would be time well-spent.

Photo of the Day: Herman Melville’s ‘Arrowhead,” Pittsfield MA—In Honor of the Novelist’s Bicentennial

This week, America celebrates the 200th birthday of Herman Melville. Like Walt Whitman, another foundational American writer with a bicentennial this year, the creator of Moby Dick, Billy Budd and other tales was born in New York State and wrote numerous poems during the Civil War. Unlike the “Sage of Camden,” Melville wrote from a dark vision of humanity in general and America’s mission in particular, and died with his reputation in such eclipse that it would take another three decades for it to emerge from the shadows.

Nearly two years ago, for the third time over the past 30 years, I visited “Arrowhead,” the rambling homestead in Pittsfield, Mass., where Melville lived with his family for 13 years. I took the attached photo during that late-summer 2017 visit. 

I’ve always been fascinated by the notion that Melville could write about the sea so much in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, but maybe I shouldn’t be: his imagination was so fertile that he likened Mount Greylock, visible from his second-floor study window, to the white whale that obsessed him. 

Because Pittsfield was so inextricably tied to his family’s fortunes, Melville invested an enormous amount psychologically in these grounds. He first came to the area in 1837, at a time when his father’s death had plunged the surviving family members into debt. Working for his uncle Thomas that year, teenage Herman found the experience far different from what he knew in New York: eating well and working in the fields. 

More than a decade later, still with these fond memories, he thought it was an opportune time to relocate here from Gotham. This time, though, he had nothing like his earlier carefree experiences.

Herman thought sales of his books would enable him and his family to live comfortably. Inspired by a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne (described in this prior blog post of mine), a fellow Berkshires resident, he created a book on the short list of Great American Novels, Moby Dick. But this turn from adventure fiction to more symbolic, experimental fare sent his sales plunging.

Arrowhead (named after an Indian artifact that Melville found on the property) was, and is, a site of pastoral beauty. But increasingly, it produced problems for the Melvilles. 

With wife Lizzie and son Malcolm soon joined by three more children, plus his mother and several sisters, it could not have been an easy environment for Herman to create. His indefatigable attempts to carve out time—notably, writing till 9 pm, when he couldn’t see anymore—strained his health and, his family feared, his sanity. (Afflicted by hay fever, Lizzie had her own health issues in the home.)

In 1863, a financially strapped Melville sold his home to his brother Allan, who expressed his admiration through an inscription on the chimney from Herman’s Piazza Tales story, “I and My Chimney.”

When Melville died in 1891, only a single obit noted his passing. He is read constantly in high schools and colleges now, of course. 

But  a visit to Arrowhead is a must for any Berkshires travelers, as well as just anyone who wants to better understand this essential writer who still has so much to say to us today about unfulfilling work (“Bartleby the Scrivener”), American race relations (“Benito Cereno”), a leader who drives his followers to catastrophe (Moby Dick), and the national tendency to fall for empty promises and fraud (The Confidence Man).

Photo of the Day: Wishing Tree, Children’s Discovery Garden, Berkshire Botanical Garden, MA

This “wishing tree”—which I photographed a year and a half ago in late summer, while visiting Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, MA—is part of a children’s discovery garden. This tree, containing four different kinds of cherries grafted onto it, features a mailbox and supplies that children used to leave dozens of messages.