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LMGI COMPASS
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Spring 2019
Frank Gehry, noted architect, sums it up best:
"Architecture should speak of its
time and its place, but yearn for
timelessness."
Sense and Sensibility:
Filming at Historic Properties I
by Eric Klein
The stove roars to life as Mary Donegan feeds it hickory logs.
When she arrived in America, she didn't think she would tend
fire in the kitchen of such a fine home as Lindenhurst, that she
would be a kitchen maid in the great house of Master Jay Gould,
with baked-bread deliveries and milk from his own cows, making
her job easier than most. At the back door, the eggs, milk and
bread for the day were waiting. Jeremy, the steward's son, had
collected the eggs and milked the cows, and Mr. Pepperidge,
the baker, delivers the bread just as early. The house had just
been fitted with Mr. Edison's light balls. 'Tis true we are living in
a miraculous age.
"And CUT."
The director crosses into the basement kitchen of Lyndhurst
to give her notes to the actress. Like all "Gilded Age" mansions,
the kitchen was in the basement and wasn't the most glamorous
room in the building, nor the largest as it was usually only visited
by the servants. Yet it gave the director the realness she wanted,
an actual kitchen where thousands of meals had been prepared
from 1838. While very few actual meals are prepared there these
days, many productions have filmed at the hearth. This historic
treasure has been used as a film location ever since Jay Gould's
youngest daughter, Anna, the Duchess of Talleyrand-Périgord,
willed the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation
back in 1961. Along with the Gothic castle-like structure came the
two-lane bowling alley, the pool, the stables, the Rose Cottage
and the massive Conservatory Greenhouse, which was the first
steel-framed conservatory in the United States.
Today's shoot was a historical piece for cable on food from
the Gilded Age of America. It joins the ranks of many other
productions, starting with House of Dark Shadows in the '70s,
all the way up to Winter's Tale, Mysteries of Laura and Project
Runway filming on the premises. The house, the exterior of which
is a heavy Victorian Gothic, especially lends itself to horror but
is equally adept as a nuanced stand-in for opulence from any
decade from the 1880s to the 1960s.
Designed by architect Alexander Jackson Davis, Lyndhurst sits
on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, in Tarrytown, 30 miles
north of Manhattan. The estate was built by former New York