From Beauport to Fenway Court
Five Figures in Five Houses at the Twilight of Gloucester’s ‘Gold Coast’ Era
By Caleb McMurphy
July 5, 2023
Abbadia Mare, today Hammond Castle Museum, the laboratory and home of John Hays Hammond Jr. (Hammond Castle Museum Archives).
If one walks along any of the narrow boulevards which girdle downtown Gloucester, all manner of historical markers and architectural embellishments announce the glory of the distant past and the diverse influences that shaped it. These features point– as a compass points–to the individuals whose aesthetic convictions formed the cultural constellation which we inhabit today. Throughout the early decades of the Twentieth century five such defining characters settled in Gloucester, and while only four would come to be counted as natives, all built remarkable houses, leaving a profound mark on the historical landscape of our city, commonwealth, and nation: A. Piatt Andrew, Henry Davis Sleeper, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Leslie Buswell and John Hays Hammond Jr.
Distilled to elemental archetypes they are The Doctor, The Curator, The Widow, The Actor and The Sorcerer. From Eastern Point down through the Ravenswood and all the way to Back Bay, they created houses which were physical edifices for lives infused with grandeur and imagination. These almost mythical spaces form a complex system of bright and heavenly bodies, whose gravity inexorably anchors our present time and place to history.
Samuel Champlain’s 1606 Le Beau Port map of Gloucester Harbor (Creative Commons).
The First Builders on Le Beau Port
These characters were by no means the first to settle here. Even by the time the City of Gloucester celebrated its bicentennial in 1823, it had already been thoroughly and repeatedly colonized. Masconomet, the last Sagamore of the Pawtucket people who called the Greater Agawam their native home, had been dead and buried on a hill in South Hamilton for over 150 years. Long before that, the European settlement we now call Gloucester had been founded twice-over: once, in 1623 by representatives of the Dorchester Company led by an overseer named Thomas Gardner, and again, more permanently, around 1642, when the name “Gloucester” first appeared in the historical record. By that time, over two hundred years had passed since Samuel De Champlain had first sketched “le Beau Port” in 1606, depicting Eastern Point as a “tongue of plain ground” dotted with a scattering of Indigenous inhabitants and their dwellings.
The Market Revolution
By 1823, 40 years had passed since the American Revolution. President James Monroe announced to the world that the Western Hemisphere of the globe was now closed to the great colonial powers. The country was in the final years of a period often ironically dubbed the “Era of Good Feelings,” and while nobody in Gloucester knew it yet, the United States was on the cusp of a second revolution. This time, it was not to be a revolution of guns, nor of sabres, but of markets and capital. The “Market Revolution” would fundamentally shape the geography and culture of Cape Ann and the North Shore as much, if not more, than all the previous 200 years of European conquest. From 1823 over a century, from Nahant to Ipswich, some dozen small villages nestled in rocky inlets, thick copses, and salt marshes along this rustic coast, were colonized once again, this time not by Old World sailors, hardy planters, or hardscrabble quarrymen, but by the roots and scions of America’s growing class of elites.
Garland’s Gold Coast
Gloucester Historian Joseph P Garland described the period between 1823 and 1929 as the era of Boston’s “Gold Coast,” but these new settlers first arrived as tourists. They came in cool muslin tents, perfect for enjoying a day in the countryside, or lazily yachted up the shoreline. What permanent Summer “cottages” and hotels existed were modest affairs. As in the 1849 gold rush in California, however, the emerging Gold Coast brought with it its own fatal ambition. As industrialization propelled capitalism to a central ideological position in America’s national identity, the emergent beneficiaries of the market began to erect grand hotels and claim vast estates across the North Shore. They established foxhunting and yachting clubs, tennis courts, polo grounds and golf courses, but the favorite hobby afforded to the rich by their new North Shore residences was the oldest and most cherished one practiced by America’s upper class: tax avoidance. As individuals, the members of this privileged class had both much and little in common. They were sensitive poets and ruthless industrialists, celebrated actors and powerful statesmen, humble painters, and punctilious socialites. Factoring in both long-term fixtures and their famous guests, one could assemble an inexhaustible Who’s Who of North Shore notables, ranging alphabetically from Agassizs to Zimbalists.
The Associates’ 1888 development map of Eastern Point (Harvard Map Collection).
Throughout this period, Eastern Point changed hands several times, from those of a wealthy Boston China merchant named Jack Cushing, to those of a wealthy Boston businessman named Thomas Niles, but by the turn of the century, as Garland’s Gold Coast was entering its final act, it had been purchased by a consortium of developers under the banner of the “Eastern Point Associates.” The firm subdivided the sparsely settled farmland, cleared, and expanded roads, and erected— among other improvements—a pier, a gatehouse, some scant dozens of private “cottages,” and had begun work on the Dog Bar Breakwater, to be officially completed in 1905. A thriving art colony then establishing itself across all of Cape Ann seated its epicenter on Rocky Neck. It was this atmosphere in which the first of our principals, the Doctor, came to settle on Eastern Point.
The Doctor: A. Piatt Andrew
Dabsville houses. Beauport (left), Wrong Roof (Center), Red Roof (Right), circa 1910 (Hammond Castle Museum Archives).
Abram Piatt Andrew Jr., known as A. Piatt Andrew— “Doc” to his friends after receiving a doctorate in Economics from Harvard—was born in LaPorte, Indiana in 1873. His grandfather was a successful businessman, and his father a decorated soldier and successful banker. The younger Piatt Andrew’s academic nickname may have seemed strange to those that knew him as a young man—he had been expelled for disciplinary reasons from both the local Indiana high school he attended and from New Jersey’s prestigious Lawrenceville Academy. After an abortive stint at Wabash College, he graduated from Princeton in 1893. By 1901, the year he purchased a narrow strip of land on Eastern Point to serve as the site of his future home, the former delinquent was a Harvard Economics Professor. In June 1902, work began and finished on said home, a three-story chateau with—it is reported—more than its shares of hidden doors and secret rooms, but altogether not a radical departure from many of the structures that were its contemporaries. Originally the house was nameless, and Andrew referred to his new residence as his “wife” before its roof was painted a conspicuous shade of carmine in 1903—and “Red Roof” it would then forever be.
The DABS of Dabsville
While Red Roof was being built, Andrew became close with Miss Joanna Davidge, a descendant of Virginian royalty and the head of a prestigious New York girl’s school who, along with her mother, built a more modest home adjacent both to Red Roof and Eastern Point’s original steamship pier dubbed “Pierlane.” In addition to Mrs. and Miss Davidge, the prominent Philadelphian portraitist Cecelia Beaux was one of the first guests to occupy Andrew’s “shanty,” and soon broke ground on her own home in the growing enclave, “Green Alley,” in 1905. The fledgeling trio were joined by Caroline Sydney Sinkler, the daughter of a prominent Old Southern family, who purchased a house to the North of Red Roof in 1906. By most accounts, these four made up the original DABSville, an acronymous nickname referring both to and their last names (Davidge, Andrew, Beaux, and Sinkler) as well as the small, almost errant “dab” of land which their small constellation of homes along what is now Eastern Point Boulevard occupied. Of course, there is another, now much more locally well-known S, in some reckonings of the Dabsville moniker: the Curator, Henry Sleeper.
The Curator: Henry Sleeper
Sleeper’s Medieval Hall at Beauport, later altered into the Chinese Trade Room (Hammond Castle Museum Archives).
Henry Davis Sleeper—or “Harry” to most that knew him well—was born in Boston in 1878. His father, like Andrew’s, had been a distinguished military officer, while his grandfather was a successful textile merchant and real estate magnate who was one of three founders of Boston University. Yet Sleeper was privately educated, and was interested in miniature, architecture, literature, and interior design. One legend—perhaps too perfectly fitting its subject to be true—reports that, in absence of formal schooling as a child, the sickly Sleeper was provided with a series of meticulously furnished and architecturally intricate dollhouses. Initially a guest of Andrew’s at Red Roof, Sleeper, like Davidge, Beaux, and Sinkler before him, was drawn into the nucleic Doctor’s colony. Beginning in 1907 and continuing for some 20 years as his vision expanded, Sleeper, with his architect Halfdan M. Hanson, erected his own “cottage,” which became a labyrinthine array of rooms and passageways with carefully curated contents arranged according to an unmistakably distinctive design language. He first called the home “Little Beauport” after Champlain’s map, and then later simply “Beauport.” Between Beauport and Red Roof was Sinkler’s home, which the fledgling colony, by all accounts at her own suggestion, took to calling “Wrong Roof.” Sinkler inveigled Sleeper to aid in decorating Wrong Roof and became one of the first of many notable clients who sought Sleeper’s eye (and Hanson’s hands) to devise and furnish their own abodes. To these clients, Beauport was a model home, every square inch a portfolio of the Curator’s dollhouse imagination.
The Widow: Isabella Stewart Gardner
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court from the Back Bay Fens, circa 1906 (Creative Commons).
The Doctor met the Widow in 1903, the same year that Red Roof was christened. He was 30, a princeling of the newly born century, and she was 63, an undisputed queen consort of the century just passed. They were introduced through Beaux, who secured Andrew—and several other members of their fledgling social circle—invitations to the Widow’s long-anticipated and newly completed “Fenway Court” one Spring afternoon in 1903.
The Widow was born Isabella Stewart in New York in 1840, the daughter of a wealthy textile merchant. In 1860, she married John Lowell Gardner Jr., a direct descendant of Thomas Gardner, the Dorchester overseer whose failed attempt to colonize Cape Ann in 1623 is used as the basis for that year as the City of Gloucester’s founding date. Through his mother, John Gardner was a scion of the Peabody family, one of the country’s most prominent mercantile institutions. Childless after the death of their only son in 1865, the Gardners began to travel and to collect and patronize the arts. Their limitless resources, both financial and social, allowed them to privately amass one of the great art collections on the North American continent. In 1898, “The Queen of Back Bay” or “Mrs. Jack,” as she was known even after her husband’s death that year, began to build a palatial museum to house her collection and serve as a second residence. The house was architecturally inspired by a Renaissance-era Venetian Palace, and Gardner was meticulous in imposing a strict curatorial logic and singular aesthetic vision within Fenway Court.
From Right to Left: A Piatt Andrew, Okakura Kakuzō, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Caroline Sinkler and Henry Davis Sleeper at Red Roof, 1910 (Hammond Castle Museum Archive).
When Andrew first visited Fenway Court in 1903, John Singer Sargent, the descendent of another historical Gloucester family and contemporary portraitist to Beaux, was in residence with Mrs. Jack, but The Widow did not visit Dabsville until 1907, when her developing friendship with “A,”—her nickname for Andrew—and the lure of Sleeper’s new acquisitions for his Little Beauport became too great to resist. By 1908, Mrs. Jack had acquired yet another nickname: “Y,” short for Ysabella, and she occupied a position of high honor in the colony. A chair draped in purple and embroidered with a Golden letter “Y” served as her throne on at least one occasion at the Dabsville cottages. Gardner brought Bernard Berenson, Okakura Kakuzō, and Morris Carter, men of high distinction in the world of art, into the settlement’s orbit. When Andrew was asked by the National Monetary Commission to travel to Europe that year, Y became a regular steward of Red Roof throughout his absence. Who else was going to look after the two pet black bears, Gold, and Silver, that the Curator had gifted the Doctor, and which now occupied a cage on the house’s lawn? Red Roof, Green Alley and Beauport thrived, while across Gloucester Bay, the Sorcerer began his work.
The Sorcerer: John Hays Hammond Jr
In 1903, John Hays Hammond Sr., a wealthy mining engineer, former Randlord, and councilor to Presidents, selected Gloucester as the site for his new summer home. By 1908, Gardner was a frequent guest at the newly refurbished Hammond family compound at Lookout Hill. Hammond Sr. was, by then, an established political ally and sometimes rival of Isabella Steward Gardner’s nephew by marriage and “adopted” son, the Republican congressman Augustus P. Gardner. Meanwhile, the young John Hays Hammond Jr., second born of the Hammond clan, then a student at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific school after stints at various prestigious schools, including Andrew’s alma mater the Lawrenceville Academy, could increasingly be found at Eastern Point.
Leslie Buswell (Top Row, Far Right) and John Hays Hammond Jr. (Top Row, Center Right) at Radio Point laboratory demonstration, 1925 (Hammond Castle Museum Archives).
Born in 1888 in San Francisco, the younger Hammond, who, like his father and Gardner’s deceased husband, traded the name “John” for “Jack” in company, had always wanted to live in a castle. His own later account recalls that when the family had been living in Eastbourne, Kent, England in the 1890’s, he had found it “disgraceful—not to say dull” that they did not select an authentic Gothic castle as their residence, opting instead for the relatively convenient plumbing of a Georgian home. After graduating in 1910, Hammond Jr. established himself in a small “Bungalow” on Lookout Hill’s grounds and, from a similarly modest laboratory called Radio Point, began a remarkable career which would result in him becoming one of America’s most prolific inventors. Widely renowned as an “inventor’s inventor,” Hammond’s diverse contributions to radio control, navigation, audio reproduction, telephony, musical instrumentation, television, acoustics, and consumer appliances, among dozens of other disciplines, are the basis for many of the most defining innovations of the 20th century, and earned him nicknames such as “The Wonderful Wizard of Gloucester” and “The Electronic Sorcerer” in the press.
The Actor: Leslie Buswell
Sources disagree as to when and how the Actor made his entrance. By most accounts Leslie Buswell— called “Boo” or “Boozey” by his intimates—and John Hays Hammond Jr. met by chance, when the handsome English-born thespian was touring the United States and became a favorite of Mrs. Jack, who invited him to join the Gloucester Gold Coast’s various theatricals. It is certain that Buswell—born in 1890 into a nominally aristocratic English family—was soon living with Jack Hammond at the Bungalow at Lookout Point and was employed by The Sorcerer as his agent and business manager, despite his lack of relevant experience, while starring in amateur theatrical productions across the city, including at Red Roof, Green Alley and Lookout Hill. Together the two men, with assistance from Sleeper and others, began to remodel the Bungalow into something more evocative of Jack’s vision of a castellated home. Circumstances, chief among which was familial fallout from Hammond Jr.’s scandalous courtship of Irene Fenton, the divorced daughter of a prominent Rocky Neck Yacht designer, conspired to ensure that neither Jack nor his cohabitant would get to occupy the remodeled Bungalow for long.
The Bungalow, early 1920’s. Pencil embellishment by Hammond or Buswell depicting never-realized future expansion (Hammond Castle Museum Archives).
So concerned was Hammond with the possibility that his mother and father would disinherit him that he entered a self-imposed exile in Europe while Buswell remained to oversee his affairs. The principal of these affairs was the construction of his own folly home, to be called “Abbadia Mare,” from the Latin “Abbey from the Sea” on a craggy cliff a mile South of his parents’ property. Abbadia Mare was to be furnished with a variety of antiquities that Hammond had already collected or inherited, and which were then decorating the Bungalow, as well as with new and grand finds that Hammond was acquiring in Europe. The castle was also intended to house one of the largest residential pipe organs in the country. Hammond envisioned a laboratory, a home, and a museum of architecture, artifacts, and atmosphere, rather than of art and tapestry—as in Fenway Court—or of design—as with Beauport. Exteriorly, Abbadia Mare was to combine elements inspired by Gothic and Romanesque Castles and Cathedrals, Renaissance chateaux, and ancient Roman ruins. As Buswell oversaw the realization of Hammond’s vision and the renovations at the Bungalow, he himself purchased a large swath of land in the Ravenswood, dammed a creek to enlarge what is now Buswell’s Pond, and began erecting, and later expanding, his own Jacobean manse to serve as a home and theatrical venue. He would ultimately call his palatial stage “Stillington Hall” after a manor of the same name in England, and he, Hammond, Sleeper, and Andrew shared and swapped interior elements purchased in the US and abroad.
The BASHes of BASH
One local legend that is often repeated as fact is that as Hammond Jr. and Buswell became later fixtures of Andrew, Sleeper, Beaux, Davidge, Sinkler and Gardner’s bohemian social set, the four men in the group received their own acronymous appellation: BASH (after Buswell, Andrew, Sleeper, and Hammond). While no contemporary sources seem to support this claim, it does speak to the degree to which these men were drawn together by their interlocking social circle—geographically beyond the borders of—but still inexorably chained to—Dabsville, the houses of Eastern Point, and one particular looming building towering over the Back Bay Fens. It is common knowledge that there was an erotic component to the relationships of this assemblage of Gold Coast elites, but the precise dimensions of this historical fact are difficult to define and often wildly exaggerated by local gossip and tacitly homophobic innuendo. Whispers transform a simple loft into a secret bordello, windows become peepholes, nude statuary is recast as esoteric erotica, and costume balls rendered libertine bacchanals in the popular memory. Certainly, Queerness was a central force in the relationships between these individuals; The Sleeper-McCann house, the modern Museum which currently occupies Beauport has, for the past decade, openly acknowledged and explored the romantic and sexual relationship between Sleeper and Andrew, for example. The enclave is certainly worthy of serious continued and expanded analysis from this perspective, particularly in the context of our understanding of the greater Gold Coast, North Shore, and nationwide culture from which it emerged. Yet to frame the members of DABS and BASH primarily by their variable—and varied—Queerness outside of a broader discussion of relevant history and theory discounts other powerful political, philosophical, and economic alliances which bound them together and located them in history.
The Final Acts
In late 1914, not long after he had arrived in the United States, Leslie Buswell followed A. Piatt Andrew—who by then had served stints as Director of the US Mint and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Taft administration, and had been recently drubbed by Y’s aforementioned nephew, the incumbent Augustus P. Gardner in a Republican congressional primary—in volunteering to drive ambulances on the French front of World War I. It was to be four years before the United States officially entered the conflict. Sleeper, Beaux, Davidge, Gardner, and Hammond helped fundraise and solicit supplies for Doc’s successful American Field Service organization. In 1918, Y’s beloved nephew, Andrew’s erstwhile rival, died after having resigned his seat to join the war effort. Andrew ascended to the same seat, which he had unsuccessfully sought in 1914, in 1921. Isabella herself died in 1924, and Buswell, Andrew, Sleeper and Hammond were all in attendance at her Fenway Court funeral. By 1925, when Stillington Hall’s first iteration was completed, it had been 22 years since Red Roof first received the coat of paint for which it was christened, and 103 years since Garland’s demarcation of the Gold Coast era. In the wake of the Great War and with the Great Depression on the horizon, that gilded epoch was ending.
Completed in late 1929, Abbadia Mare could be called the last and perhaps the ultimate of the great Gold Coast houses. Like Red Roof it was the private home of a man with a reputation for intelligence and wit, and like Red Roof it was initially imagined with all manner of secret passageways. Like Fenway Court it was a museum designed to evoke the intangible atmosphere of the Old World here in the New. Like Beauport it housed an eclectic array of carefully selected and repurposed antiques, and like Stillington Hall it was intended to stimulate the theatrical, musical, and literary imagination. Gardner’s work at Fenway Court looms large as one moves through the Sorcerer’s home, but Abbadia Mare’s similarly skylighted atrium is more rustic village than Venetian palace, and its galleries showcase stone friezes and furniture rather than the paintings of great Renaissance masters. Although Hammond consulted the framework of Gardner’s will when establishing his own museum corporation in 1930 (of which, notably, Congressman A. Piatt Andrew was the first Vice President), Abbadia Mare feels, and certainly was, rougher, more lived-in; simultaneously a private place, a public museum, and a working laboratory. It is a building plainly of the same substance as a dozen other mansions up and down the North Shore, not just an extension of those built by those in Hammond’s immediate social circle.
The Twilight of the Gold Coast
Stillington Hall, before later expansion of theatre hall and residence, Photographed from Western Ave. Across Buswell’s Pond, Late 1920s. (Gib Carey).
The factor which bound all of these figures, from the close-knit and bohemian Dabsville denizens to the respectable and storied Peabodys and Sargents, Cranes and Lodges, Abbotts and Fricks, was money. The cynical view might be that regardless of the variety of gargoyles and gables, piers and promenades, archways and antiquities which adorn these places; despite the unique collections they house, or the Old World or au courant architecture they seek to embody, these buildings are far more similar at the core than they are different. This view, while not entirely erroneous, discounts the fact that each of the homes discussed is also a singular reflection of the priorities of its own master or mistress, and an expression of the role that every one played within the social constellation of the group, and in our local history. Red Roof was, per Garland, a “bachelor's castle,” where a young Franklin Roosevelt cavorted with his quick-witted Economics professor during rowdy stag parties. While its memory remains, the building itself has now been all but replaced. Fenway Court is, as it was intended to be, one of the premier collections of Art and Culture in the country, and Y’s resplendent and mischievous shadow still glides throughout its galleries. Beauport remains a popular showcase of Sleeper’s meticulous eye for detail and design. Across the bay, perched on a high hill tucked away in a thick forest, Stillington Hall, long used as a theatrical venue, is now a private home. Like the character of Leslie Buswell, it has been largely removed from the public spotlight. Finally, Abbadia Mare, an idiosyncratic creation, dubbed a “pudding of a building” by a mid-century tourism guide to the area, continues to hold court as the museum of a self-proclaimed Medievalist who worked to develop the technologies that drove the Space Race and the Cold War.
The Fault in Our Stars
These houses loom as large in our understanding of our past and character as Champlain’s map, Masconomet’s grave, or any other discrete cultural unit from which we derive the 400 years of experience that constitute our shared sense of local historical identity. They are houses built to last, visions which have endured, and which collect and focus our collective cultural beliefs and feelings—some proud, some critical, and some complicated—about our past.
The Gold Coast did not end because the money which tied its constituents together vanished in the Great Depression, but rather because culture itself shifted. When John Hays Hammond Jr. died in 1965, the last of his Dabsville contemporaries to depart these shores, the world he had helped shape was profoundly different from the one in which the first stones of Red Roof were laid. Although the means and mechanisms to construct another Abbadia Mare, another Stillington, another Beauport, another Fenway Court, or another Red Roof certainly exist, without the conscious constellation of cultural community created and enjoyed by the likes of the Doctor, Widow, Curator, Actor and Sorcerer, what will those who follow us divine from the constellation of our efforts, our lives, our houses, when they look back at us over the perspective that the space and time of the next hundred years provide?
Caleb McMurphy is originally from Corvallis, Oregon. As an undergraduate, he attended Lyndon State College of Lyndonville, Vermont. He then attended Bowling Green State University’s school of Critical and Cultural Studies in Bowling Green, OH, where he obtained an MA in American Cultural Studies. He began working at Hammond Castle Museum in Fall of 2020, and was appointed the Museum’s Director of Visitor Services and Education in Summer 2022. That same year, he moved to Gloucester, where he currently resides. In addition, he has served as a Director of the Massachusetts Watch and Clockmaker’s Association since 2021.
