literary house #1

Poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the many writers who were drawn to Florida during the 20th century and i couldn’t resist looking up her house. A nomad all her life, Bishop arrived in Key West during the 1930s; in 1938, she & her then-lover, Louise Crane, bought a traditional “eyebrow” house at 624 White Street. Bishop held onto the house for nearly a decade, despite the collapse of her relationship with Crane. Her first book of poems was published while she lived here, but while Bishop was clearly smitten with the climate & lifestyle of the Keys, her battles with alcoholism and depression eventually led to her to sell the house and later to her leaving Florida.

Bishop wrote of the house: “It is very well made, with slightly arched beams so that it looks either like a ship’s cabin or a freight car.” I think I’ve read other writers who have compared their homes to trains or ship cabins – maybe the sensation of travel & isolation helps them to focus. Certainly these are themes highly relevant to Bishop’s work, and I’m always looking for ways that homes reflect the people living within them!

Today, the house is still lovely (though it sports a loud orange sign warning Bishop fans to stay out…so i did). I find it fascinating that she lived in one of these “eyebrow” houses so peculiar to Key West – where the second story is essentially hidden by the eyebrow of the roof, which comes low over a two-storey veranda. You can see the odd effect in this photo. This hidden aspect of the house, coupled with its overgrown garden & well-worn shutters, seem a perfect reflection of Bishop’s often lonely poetic practice.

Though many people know her poem “One Art”, i prefer the evocative “Florida”, which begins:

The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrave roots
that bear while living oysters in clusters,
and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,
dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks
like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.
The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,
and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale
every time in a tantrum...

(read the rest of the poem)

Toronto the Good

every time i get back to Toronto, ready to unpack & do some laundry, i discover a new well-organized event that’s got to be checked out immediately, clean clothes or no…so last night, instead of staying home with my luggage, i went off to Spacing Magazine’s 4th annual “Toronto the Good” party, at my favourite Distillery party space, the Fermenting Cellar. so in with the salad bar, spacey backing tracks, glasses of wine, and beautiful postcards from the already-much-missed Ballenford Books, the purported topic of discussion was supposed to be: does Toronto needs an urban centre, or, maybe more straight-forwardly, what’s an urban centre for?

I do think Toronto would benefit from some kind of building that hosts events & exhibitions & collections about itself as a city–kind of like the Pavillion de l’Arsenal in Paris. except that, if the Pavillion is anything to go by, the centre would have to be brilliantly-curated & accessible (in all the meanings of that term) or it will only interest a select few.

as in previous years, one far end wall was devoted to “the big map of Toronto” –unmarred by street names or park labels, just a plain map of the city with blue & yellow stickers available for people to sticker in their favourite secret place in the city, or the place which presents the greatest mystery to them. i didn’t stay long enough for a complete survey, but around 9pm it sure looked like downtown had the most stickers, both blue & yellow. which i guess is no surprise.

from alligator to zoomburg

while I was in Orlando, browsing in a wonderful bookshop called Urban Think! (and i like them even though they’ve inserted unnecessary punctuation into their store title), I found a wonderful book by Dolores Hayden: A Field Guide to Sprawl. Hayden’s a fascinating writer (read more by her here) and this book came out in 2004–i don’t know how i’ve missed it until now! the guide includes definitions & excellently depressing photo examples of such creatures as the “snout-house”, “litter on a stick”, and “TOAD”. this last has nothing to do with the fabled warty leaping critters which manage to survive in surburban Florida; TOAD stands for temporary obsolete, abandoned or derelict sites. the kind that were all over Vancouver until the mid-1990s building boom…the kind of place that is attractive to teenagers, dog walkers & street people, but not such a healthy sign of an urban environment.

Sarasota modern

Like a lot of Canadians, I first visited Florida as a kid–so it was a land of grapefruit, condos, and DisneyWorld. I’m not crazy about grapefruit & I’m not a fan of the Mouse…but I went back to Florida to spend a month travelling around the state, & I saw lots of alligators, ate some great barbeque, and saw some amazing houses. I kicked off the tour in Sarasota, which I thought was the epitome of golf course developments & not much else…boy was I wrong. The super-sized condos & houses on golf courses are just a more recent manifestation of a real estate story that has basically created Florida as we know it today, with whole cities made up of suburban sprawl. All across the state, there are plots of land that were either swamp, orange grove, or sandbar, which now have neat street grids and ranch houses…for better & for worse…

What makes Sarasota special is that, in that development boom, there have been some modernist visionaries. I was fortunate to find Martie Lieberman’s Modern Architecture Driving Tour (you can download it for free from her website); I printed it up & off I went. I was mostly looking forward to seeing some 50s houses designed by Paul Rudolph.

But the house that stole my heart is the Hiss Studio, built in 1952. This street view shows the original house–which was an office for Philip Hiss (the developer who developed this Lido Shores key from a sandbar into a high-end residential neighborhood). His personal house, across the street, has been torn down, but this office, along with a conference room, kitchenette, and bathroom, still contain some of Hiss’ furniture; there’s a large addition on the back by Bert Brosmith & Carl Abbott, built for Hiss’ children & their nanny, but I didn’t troop across private property to photograph it.

Tim Siebert, a young apprentice to Paul Rudolph, built the office–and lived there during construction, since he was also supervising Rudolph’s “Umbrella House” going up next door. Like many modern flat-roofed buildings, the roof of Hiss Studio leaks…Siebert has been quoted as apologizing, saying he was, after all, very young at the time.

What I love is how the now-classic glass box, balanced on its solid plinth, tucks beneath the massive banyan tree on the property.