Month: June 2018

“If you enjoy the finer things of life, good cheer and good times in a beautiful atmosphere—if you take pride in your home—the FormStone club room is for you,” read an advertisement in December 1949. “That ‘lost’ space in your cellar can become the loveliest room you ever saw, with a FormStone beauty treatment. A major home improvement that enlarges your home, increases its value and helps make home life beautiful. A club room or recreation room for adults, a playroom for the children, a television setting par excellence. Hand-sculptured by skilled craftsmen, in any design, with an special effects to suit your taste, arches, pilasters, bars, etc. Architectural ideas and estimate without charge or obligation.”

“FormStone is Foremost,” read another pitch a few months later. “It’s in a class by itself. Your FormStone Home is a work of art, every inch hand sculptured painstakingly by master-craftsmen. Guaranteed 20 years, it will actually last a lifetime. FormStone  is America’s favorite home beauty treatment…nationally proven… highly endorsed by more than 3,000 homeowners during the past 15 years. It’s the natural stone, carefully selected for color and durability, compounded with finest grade cement. FormStone improves with age! It mellows with weathering, remains forever beautiful, rugged, weatherproof…and insulating. Economical, too—initial cost is modest, and it’s the last; no upkeep, no repair, no painting. Applied over any surface, anywhere, exterior or interior—over shingles, weatherboard, brick, stucco, concrete or cinder block. … Your home deserves FormStone.”

Fake stone, or “simulated masonry” as preservation expert Ann Milkovich McKee calls it, “played a large role in the changing aesthetics of the American public begin­ning in the 1930s.” Perma-Stone, the earliest and best known “of the simulated masonries that could be applied directly to a building” originated in Columbus, Ohio in 1929. Other brands, we learn from The Old House Journal, “included Rostone, Tru-Stone, Fieldstone, Bermuda Stone, Modern Stone, Romanstone, Magnolia Stone, Dixie Stone, Silverstone.” And there was FormStone. Each “was applied in a manner similar to stucco, usually in multiple layers, to wire net or lath attached to existing exterior walls, then scored with simulated mortar joints to suggest individual stones. Adding to the illusion were often artful coloration and sometimes mica chips that would sparkle on a sunny day.”

“Form-Stone, is a man-made stone, a hand-sculpted, modern surface for building new homes or renewing old homes,” read the earliest Philadelphia advertisement from March 1947, a decade after Baltimorean Albert Knight patented the process. By then, it had been “tried and proven” by more than a thousand customers in the Baltimore-Washington area. Testimonials aimed to convince Philadelphians: “We are even more proud of our FormStone than we were the day it was finished,” said Joseph Biles. “It has lived up to expectations in every way. In fact, we are sure that it is becoming more beautiful with each passing year.”

“We were tired of worrying about regular repainting, of moisture penetration and dampness,” said a Mrs. Lake. “We wanted something permanent, something that would make your home beautiful and keep it that way. Formstone did just that for us.”

I can safely say that you have added at least twice the value of the improvements to the full value of my house” claimed Major Robb.

A self-described “choosy” restaurant owner declared he “selected FormStone to beautify [his] place. Only FormStone could give me exactly what I wanted: in design, color and effect.”

“We wanted a façade with dignity and beauty and we got it in FormStone,” said a pharmacist, adding the benefit of “everlasting weather protection and freedom from repairs.” A tavern owner considered “it one of the best deals I ever made.” And a car dealer claimed “it has actually attracted customers to our establishment. In the thirty three years we’ve been in business, we consider this the finest improvement made to our property…”

The “last word in lasting beauty.”

Americans carried on their love affair with fake façades until the waning decades of the 20th century. About then, John Waters of Pink Flamingo and Hairspray fame (never one to miss a trend in popular culture) produced a 30-minute video Little Castles: A Formstone Phenomenon.

In a 1998 documentary, Waters provided a nickname for the popular, pastel, sometimes sparkly façade cement long loved by Baltimoreans and Philadelphians alike:

He dubbed FormStone “the polyester of brick.”

[Sources: Advertisements from the Inquirer: March 23, 1947; December 4 1949; March 19, 1950 and March 26, 1950; Ann Milkovich McKee, “Stonewalling America Simulated Stone Products,” in Cultural Resource Management: Preserving the Recent Past (The National Park Service, 1995) vol. 18. no. 8;  and Paul K. Williams, “The Faux Stone Follies,” Old House Online, June 2003.]

“’Everybody’” belongs to the Philadelphia Racquet Club, proclaimed Nathaniel Burt more than half a century ago.  And by “’everybody’” Burt meant the subjects of his classic Perennial Philadelphians, the subtitle of which is our obvious tip off: “Anatomy of an American Aristocracy.

One might have expectations that their clubhouse, designed by Horace Trumbauer, the go-to architect for over-the-top client expectations (a recent monograph is titled American Splendor) would be something of an opulent, urban sports palace. After all, Trumbauer created crenelated “Grey Towers” for the sugar magnate William Welsh Harrison, the 110-room “Lynnewood Hall” for streetcar baron P. A. B.  Widener and the lavish”Whitemarsh Hall” for investment banker Edward T. Stotesbury. But when it came to making a statement at this 16^th Street sporting and eating refuge for old-money Philadelphia, Trumbauer chose the muted Georgian revival, which blended right in with old, original red-brick, white stoop Philadelphia.

Nothing on the façade telegraphed the fact that the clubhouse foreshadowed modernity (it was one of the city’s first reinforced concrete structures) or that its above grade swimming pool was among the world’s first. Nor did the building reveal that inside, members competed in “the sport of medieval French kings” on a “literal indoor reproduction of the original palace courtyard.” There was nothing else like it in the city, and only a few like it in the country, this court tennis court, “with all sorts of antique penthouses, windows at odd intervals.”

Court tennis only vaguely resembled the much more popular (and derivative) lawn tennis. By comparison, this court is “immense: 93 feet long by 31 feet wide… 15 feet longer and 4 feet wider than the standard lawn-tennis singles court.” The “crimson-trimmed net was two feet lower in the middle than at the ends.” Dimensions vary. England’s Hampton Court “is some 24 inches longer and 19 inches wider than the two courts at the New York Racquet Club.” (That’s right—New York has two.) In Britain, the “walls are rougher, which means that the ball will bounce off them at a steeper angle.”  The slope of the penthouses running along three of the walls can be different, although the window-like openings at odd intervals appear the same.

One way players score in this complicated game, is to hit the heavy, hand-sewn, lopsided ball into these holes at speeds approaching 150 miles per hour. Yes, the esoteric rules and hard-acquired skills take years to master.

The history and lore of the game is actually far more interesting  Word has it that the young Henry VIII brought the game to Hampton Court in 1530. “His second wife Anne Boleyn was said to be watching a game when she was arrested and the king was playing tennis when news was brought to him of her execution.”

“Shakespeare mentioned the game in six of his plays. … Chaucer, Erasmus, Edmund Spenser, Rabelais, Pepys, Gower, Chapman, Rousseau, Ben Jonson, John Locke, Montaigne, and Galsworthy are among the men of letters who made mention of tennis.”

“Proper tennis” had been played by royals and wannabes for about three-quarters of a millennium before it arrived on American shores. Whether it first landed in Boston in 1876 or New York in 1890 or Chicago in 1893 is a matter of prideful debate. But one thing, pointed out by Burt, seemed clear: the game was imported “during the Gilded Age as a piece of extremely conspicuous consumption.”

And for the longest time, and perhaps still today, the Philadelphia version of the game is a “preserve of the aristocracy”—albeit inconspicuously as possible.

[Sources: Nathaniel Burt The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; originally published in 1963); Sandra L. Tatman, Horace Trumbauer (Philadelphia Architects and Buildings; The Athenaeum of Philadelphia); Allison Danzig, The Royal & Ancient Game of Tennis: A Short History; Robert W. Stock, “The Courtliest Tennis Game of Them All, The New York Times, March 6, 1983; James Zug, Introduction to Court Tennis, A Guide to Tennis.]