Urban refuge
Terry Teachout put in four days’ critical duty in Cleveland, and this is where he stayed:
[I]nstead of staying in the theater district of Cleveland, Mrs. T and I spent the better part of a week at the Penfield House, a half-century-old home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and turned a business trip into a retreat.
The Penfield House is one of six Wright-designed houses that can be rented on a short-term basis. It’s located in Willoughby, a quiet suburb east of downtown Cleveland. The house isn’t visible from the road — it’s in the middle of thirty acres of heavily wooded land — and you have to look closely to spot the Cherokee-red gate which tells you that you’ve gotten where you’re going. You push open the gate and drive down the gravel road, and all at once the house comes quietly into view, a simple two-story home built out of glass, wooden beams, concrete blocks, and light tan asbestos-and-concrete panels.
Like all of Wright’s Usonian houses, the Penfield House seems to melt into the landscape rather than dominating it. As you pass through the unostentatious entrance, you feel as though you’re still out of doors, for one of the walls of the twelve-foot-high living room is made almost entirely of glass, and the ceiling and floor extend beyond the glass wall in such a way as to create the illusion that the house is wide open to the surrounding woodland. The Chagrin River is nearby, and Paul Penfield, the owner, has cut a trail through the woods, making it possible for guests to wander at their leisure. Even though the house is only twenty minutes from downtown Cleveland, the city feels as though it’s on the far side of the world. One afternoon I sat in the living room watching the leaves fall, and a half-dozen deer sauntered through the yard as though I didn’t exist.
That seeming otherworldliness extends further:
To spend four days in a Web-free woodland retreat could scarcely fail to please an Upper West Side writer who lives in the middle of the hum and buzz of urban culture. But it wouldn’t have been the same had we stayed in a log cabin or a McMansion, for the all-pervading orderliness of the grid that Wright used to generate the floor plan and architectural detail of the Penfield House is both relaxing and reassuring to the eye. Modern the house most definitely is, but not in the hectoring manner of the International Style. It is, above all, tranquil, a point of repose in a world of pandemonium, a place where you can hear yourself think — or, if you like, where you can think of nothing at all. Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” Such self-sufficient things were the stuff of which our four days at Penfield House were made: falling leaves, train whistles in the distance, deer on the lawn, rain on the roof.
It probably says more about me than I’d care to admit that Mr Teachout’s description under one tab and these photos under another made me think immediately: “honeymoon destination.” Not that I’m going to have such a thing, of course. But it makes sense to me: not so far from Things To Do, yet remote enough to help inculcate that feeling of “You and me against the world, babe.” And yes, it would take something that important, that life-changing, to keep me from doing the usual tour logs. (Mr Teachout reports that he repaired to the parking lot of a Wendy’s a mile away to snag Wi-Fi.) For me, it would be “a new knowledge of reality,” as Wallace Stevens says in that very poem. God knows I’m due for one about now.
Still, you can count on the fingers of no hands the women who will jump for joy when “Where are we going?” is answered by “Cleveland.” I don’t know when exactly the town became a national punchline — maybe 1969, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire — but I’ve routed four World Tours through northeastern Ohio, and the place continues to fascinate me, even as it seems to elicit yawns from everyone else.
fillyjonk »
19 October 2008 · 5:16 pm
I’m not sure I’d actually enjoy staying in a Wright house; I vaguely remember reading that he excoriated one homeowner for choosing the “wrong” china pattern. (Megalomaniacs make me twitch).
I grew up in Northeast Ohio (though the trips into Cleveland were very rare; I think I was to the museums in University Park (I think that was what it was called) a few times and took a few trips to see the orchestra through school; Akron was a lot closer to where I grew up). There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff in (non-Cleveland) Northeast Ohio; periodically I get homesick (though I’ve not been back for nearly 20 years now) and look up websites about the history and landscape. (Sometime I should do a post with links to all the “Abandoned Ohio” sites and all the historical sites).
And this time of year, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park (it was National Recreation Area when I lived there) is beautiful. Or at least it used to be.
A lot of my interest in history came from actually SEEING the remnants of it in the “Western Reserve.” The old traces of the Ohio and Erie canal, the GAR hall in Peninsula, and especially Deep Lock Quarry, which always gave me kind of an odd feeling as a child, standing next to millstones that were cut from the bedrock 100 years before my birth by people I would never know the names of.
CGHill »
19 October 2008 · 6:10 pm
A decade or so ago, a fellow from the Repository, the daily paper in Canton, having read some of my screedier rants (rantier screeds?), let me know that if I were interested in an editorial slot, he’d be happy to recommend me to the powers that be. I turned him down; occasionally I wonder what life would have been like had I taken him up on it.
fillyjonk »
19 October 2008 · 7:43 pm
Yeah, it was a nice enough place to live as a kid. Not sure I’d want to live there now, considering that when my parents moved west, they made roughly twice the cost of their new Illinois house (newer and nicer) off of selling the old Ohio house.
And the town where I grew up was largely full o’ snobs. And the cost of living’s a lot higher. And winter can be a real Female Dog.