An Art Moderne house is usually the oddball in the neighborhood, and that's true of this one in Alexandria, Virginia. But one couple knew just how cool it could be. Old-House Interiors November/December 2009
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Editor’s Note
What does it mean to be modern? That’s the thematic question in the curriculum this year at my son’s school. They’re not referring to cell phone use, but rather life and expectations since the Renaissance. I asked Peter if the concept of Comfort had come up—comfort being a modern construct. I rattled on about Witold Rybczynski’s books, the paintings of Vermeer . . . Peter feigned snoring.
“Sense of place” is another theme. (The class is going to France in the spring.) Peter knows Gloucester, its ocean coves and its Federal and Azorean church buildings and its ungentrified streets of small Italianate houses behind downtown. Last week we drove into the almost-completed new strip mall off the rotary, until last year terminal moraine, now all macadam and generic post-Modern facades. Peter said, “This is kinda scary. You have no idea you’re in Gloucester.” Ah, this is what it means to be modern.
Although our French exchange student, soon to arrive, has indicated an interest in shopping at The Mall (18 miles up the line), we won’t be taking her to this new one, as it is of less memorable interest than the working waterfront and the historical museum, the granite quarries and famous ocean boulevard with its man at the wheel and the rocky poppled coast . . . and City Hall with its WPA murals and the wooden footbridge toward the dunes and Dogtown with its motto-inscripted boulders and just about everything else on the North Shore.
I am at a bar at Dulles Airport, relieved that this time the delay to Logan is only two hours. The well-lit space behind the burglar bars is called Max and Erma’s. Model airplanes hang from the pseudo-tin ceiling, and on the back wall hang blown-up snapshots of “the real Max and Erma”: nostalgia in this place of constant movement and anonymity. I wish I were in Columbus, Ohio, in that neighborhood bar of many years past, with Max and Erma. I hope they got lots of dough.
Patricia Poore, Editor of Old-House Interiors
