Like all video lectures, this one goes on too long, with endless unnecessary polite introductions. The interesting part begins when Horry County Museum Director, Walter Hill, takes over, at 5:00 minutes in. I think I recognize most of the sites here, just from the kayaking around. You will too, from the blog. Now learn what important industries all those weather-beaten shacks used to house!
Above link brings the incredible Carol Burnett singing that hilarious satire on an old Dixie song, “The Swamps of Home” (from OUAMattress). It will get you laughing. The photos are just a wrap-up of B-roll shots from my fabulous, too brief (%&! Southwest) visit with the folks back east. What an amazing post-vax treat for us all. Thanks Mom, Leslie and B.J… especially a kiss to Les, to whom I still owe a very stiff drink, for coordinating and for the dealings with the airline.
It’s not the heat, it’s the humility — the lowness, that is. Sea level plus inches.
View the lows of Horry County, South Carolina (stifle your sniggers and pronounce it like Orry-Kelly). View too, a bit higher, her fine seat Conway. This was formerly pronounced Kingston, until the King became de trop round these parts, in 1776. The town’s mostly Tory elite fled after him, nipping its bloom in the bud.
So Conway never “took off” economically. Even during the Era of Good Feelings, it was still a backwater. Local history plaques blame absentee landlords. (Read the inscription, I don’t make this stuff up.) But today, there’s a good farmers’ market; we tried the boiled peanuts. You should too. Hot damn!
View our lucky folks kayaking on the Waccamaw, pronounced the usual way. Twenty bucks at Waccamaw Outfitters gets you a paddle and two cool, fresh hours in paradise.
After the sequential horrors of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, several bank crashes, the Depression, the Second World War, and a devastating hurricane flood just three years ago, then finally Covid-19, Conway hasn’t had the (ahem) breathing room to bustle and acquire the wealth that might have killed its spirit. A perpetual “comer,” it is yet unspoiled by over-development. But the traffic on any random corner is as bad as LA’s (seriously) and the wait for a pedestrian signal where two county roads cross, is just as irritating. Still, my walk downtown brought me to the only thrift store; it had two fantastic, authoritative local histories! (A buck each, bottom of the box! Badda-bing.) Better still, I spotted the Main Street Theatre marquee was touting an optimistic revue, “Brand New Day.” Mom was so excited she got us tix! The show was wise and gutsy — Sondheim-centered. Books, nature preserves, musical theatre, history… well, the VVV can confirm sleepy Conway is nicely civilized.
Georgetown is the next county south. Confusingly, its magnificent seat is also “Georgetown.” But both were first “Winyah,” exclaimed as if you were cheering the place on.
Terribly important spot for American history, especially African-American history and food history; for this was of course a capital of the American Rice Coast — the brutalized daughter of the African Rice Coast. Slave labor on countless back-country plantations gave tidewater Georgetown traders wealth. Many of these were Jewish, even in the seventeenth century. Georgetown remains largely Jewish to this day!
Of course the Christian cemeteries feature many memorials for members of the densely interbred armigerous planter caste: Fraser, Middleton, Butler, Allston, Allston, Allston…
Here in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved West African rice farmers were put through hell to clear the cypress swamps, levee the river banks, grade the paddies, and balance the outflow of fresh black river water against the in-flood of salt tides from the sea. The slaves, whose people in Guinea and the Senegambia had domesticated rice centuries before, essentially taught the whites how to grow it economically. Their astonishing contribution to American and world agriculture and wealth deserves remark; of course their unwilling efforts perfected white exploitation and the destruction of the tidewater ecosystem. The amazing story is well told at the Rice Museum, which is in the old Market Clock Tower.
After the Civil War and Emancipation (celebrated here officially for the first time as a Federal Holiday, this Juneteenth!), devastating hurricanes filled the paddies with salt water. Without their slaves, the planters couldn’t fix the fields; and when the local ‘free laborers’ (meaning the freed slaves themselves) failed to jump at the chance to do their old life-destroying jobs for the pennies-per-week the planters were willing to cough up to pay them, all that rice got pretty sticky. So the factory farms were sold off to Yankee robber barons, who eagerly put in duck-hunting clubs, yacht clubs, and pleasure gardens. The most important of these carpetbagging barons, from an aesthetic point of View, was Archer Huntington, son of the Southern Pacific’s Collis P., half-brother of the Pacific Electric’s Henry, and himself…a translator of early Spanish poetry. (One simply has to do something, even with inherited railroad millions.) Archer and his Bohemian sculptress wife Anna Hyatt bought out four of the old rice farms, including most of the Allstons’, and built Atalaya, a fantasy of an Hispano-Moorish coastal fortress.
Atalaya has two inflections of meaning: “watchtower,” or keep; and “high place, clear Views, good light,” thus cognate with atelier, meaning studio for Anna. As with so much in the Lowcountry, hurricanes wrecked their idyll and eventually ruined Atalaya. But this allowed the public to visit; the Huntingtons gave the ruin and the beach, and the whole vast acreage of their work-from-home hacienda, to create the state park.
Nothing could be finah than the beach here. I may have covered Atalaya in the VVV before, but there’s nothing so romantic as a ruin and it was even more fun to crawl around it with Chris than it was the first time. So how could you not enjoy seeing it again too, Patient Reader?
[After reading the essay about the Early American origins of Hollywood Regency, return here, Patient Reader, and click. You’ll see a short movie about the how the pretty, sedate, but often hilarious faux-horsey style came to dominate the streets-scape — the “program” — of many neighborhoods of LA. This is especially true where the Industry settled — Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Silverlake, WeHo, the Valley. Critics dismiss these as knock-offs, or “knock-offs of the knock-offs” — though even the marvelous show-place homes in Bel-Air were dismissed as such when they were built in the mid-century. And, obviously some knock-offs are better than others. But Neoclassical style is knock-offs right the way down, with Palladio knocking off Greece and Rome and John Nash knocking off Palladio and William Strickland knocking off Nash, and Jefferson spinning the whole thing toward the Federal, which had two or three revivals just in the 19th century. And simultaneously, the vernacular cottages and self-built farm houses of the American homestead became so clever at aping the Neoclassical that the Hollywood Regency architects were often quoting the “feel” of vernacular small-town America, with all the Hollywood gloss and gloop they could pour on. So hail the knock-offs! They ARE the style, only built on a smaller scale, or even just tacked on to the outside of a stucco box. Many commercial buildings and apartment buildings in the style are worthy of notice, and of critique, and of preservation, just as much as George Cukor’s famous house is. LA should guard these houses like Philadelphia guards her row-houses, Brooklyn her brownstones, and San Francisco her Painted Ladies. ]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11xR2YRFdIf3xECG0Ywj_ZvNVCH_qydSC/view?usp=sharing
The home-grown LA style known as “Hollywood Regency” is not to be taken literally, either as a style, or a name for a style. It is a dismissive epithet that stuck — like Gothic or Stick Style or Methodist; a campy in-joke put-down, nailing the casually misleading social pretensions of some of the owners of the houses. Whether a huge Bel Air mansion, a secluded Valley Village cottage, a chic designer retail shopping center, or a swank West Hollywood apartment complex — and all these must be included in the style; restaurants too.
These are not academically-researched copies of London’s Neoclassical masterpieces. Instead, they are a highly mannered, but extremely exuberant vocabulary for treating a European villa with American design tricks, outre gay decorator ideas, and the elegant Art-Deco Hellenic polish that Hollywood evolved out of 300 years of Palladian-Anglo-Franco-American houses in the Colonial East Coast. In fact, one of the greatest sources for Hollywood’s style, due to the shared latitude, and similar sunny climate, and a similar gracious, but exploitative economy, was the graceful stuccoed Federal style of the Carolina Lowcountry.
THE ULTIMATE SOURCES OF FEDERAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA:
Patient Reader, recall the history of the builders of the following houses, and about their tensions and rivalries and personal economies, and how important their struggles were. Now put all THAT passion and patriotism into “Hollywood Regency,” the optimistic, nostalgic architecture of the Depression and WWII years. But then, with a sag, understand this inspiring grab-bag of American History as merely so much classy B-roll background for the staircase unveiling of one’s bias-cut gown by Adrian, with matching mob cap; or for the cabana unveiling of one’s toned body, diving into the pool at the Toluca Lake place.
In the 30s. when the often gay, often English designers and decorators were asked to order up columns and urns and white porches and wrought-iron gates and carriage lamps by the ton for the studios and/or rich clients, they sniffed, “Oh, I see, you want all that mannered, dandy-ish nude stucco Greek Regency stuff? Well, darling, then let’s just throw a taupe drape over a white column and call it a day.” That’s exactly what clients wanted, for the movies themselves had taught Hollywood that Life Was Drag. One didn’t have to BE Medea, or Dolley Madison, to live in a chic Greek or Federal house. So architects turned out faux (i.e., “Hollywood”) gestures of Federal Period (i.e., “Regency”) houses. These buildings got stripped through the ultra-efficient Modernism of the Hollywood design process, into that image in your mind of “Tara…. or even Twelve Oaks! If I could only live there with Ashley….” That’s Hollywood Regency.
Few Industry types are actually from the FFV — except, tellingly and fascinatingly, Randolph Scott, who provides an important clue to how the style evolved. The revered Hollywood actor was born in Orange, Virginia, and through locally-bred horsemanship and, ahem, being Randolph Scott, came to the attention of Marion du Pont, the owner of James Madison’s Montpelier. She was A du Pont (!) and a horse breeder of first rate during the Golden Age of American equine culture. He was one of Hollywood’s gods-on-horseback. Both were bi-sexual. So they re-did Montpelier in Hollywood Regency because it seemed, by the ’30s, MORE gracious and Southern and romantic and beautiful than the famous Dolley Madison version of the house. THAT’s the essence of Hollywood Regency. [The Park Service has since restored it to Federal appearance; good! Hollywood Regency belongs in LA.]
One has always lived in Hollywood Regency “as if…” as if one were a product of Philadelphia dancing assemblies, New York publishing houses, Boston universities, or Charleston Society’s summer barbecues. And as if one gets that these fantasies are impossible luxuries for a bum like one. But on the other hand, note the clipped lawn in the honor court, the 14-foot ceilings, the hardwood floors, the graceful turned iron railings, the modern interiors…one could get used to an old fashioned house, especially when it’s rent-controlled.
The Valley Village View 