Spite Houses

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this episode is
one hundred percent inspired by Instagram. Yeah, I don't know.

(00:21):
Do you follow real toor Lisa Dubois. No, she is hilarious.
She came to a lot of people's attention because she
started doing this very funny thing where she would show
a house that she has listed, and she does this
thing where she whispers and she plays hide and seek

(00:41):
in the house, and she'd be like, this house has
amazing has amazing high ceilings and mid century modern architecture.
Where do you think I might be hiding in this room?
But she's very funny, and I love her because, in
addition to being very funny and making those videos which
are very endearing, as she has gotten more and more popular,
she's kind of using that platform to also showcase like

(01:06):
local businesses that she thinks are great or like bring
light to other things, and they're always really fun and
she's a delight. But anyway, she recently mentioned a spite
house in one of her posts, and I got to
thinking about spite houses, and I was like, why have
we never done an episode on that? That's super fun?
So here we are, just in case you don't know
what a spite house is. It's a structure that's built

(01:28):
by one party to irritate another or to cause some
sort of difficulty or obstacle or perhaps even damage. And
there have been a lot of them built over the years,
although there aren't a huge number remaining for various reasons.
One is that many just have fallen down or been
torn down or been redeveloped over. And another is that

(01:49):
in some places, the reason you don't see them now
is that we have a lot more building codes and
so there are a lot more municipal laws that would
prevent somebody from building a structure that functions in the
way some of these do. So today we're only going
to talk about four of them. All of these are
in the US, But this could easily be one of

(02:12):
those topics where there are subsequent episodes, because there are
a lot more spite houses than this, some of which
have great stories that I would love to cover at
some point. So if your favorite isn't here, hold tight,
it could be in the future. But we're going to
talk about four today. The first spite house we're talking
about is the Macob Spite House, originally built in Phippsburg, Maine,

(02:35):
but now located in Rockport, Maine, and we will get
to that relocation, but to give context, we have to
start with a man named James McCobb born in Londonderry,
Ireland in seventeen ten. In seventeen thirty one, Macob moved
to Phipsburgh and started what would be a very prosperous life.

(02:55):
It's not totally clear whether his first wife, Beatrice Rogers,
came from Ireland with him or if they got married
in the colonies, but she was also from Ireland. And
James built a log cabin on land that he had acquired,
and he and Beatrice lived there for more than three
decades as he continued to also buy up surrounding land,

(03:18):
and eventually he owned a large parcel of one thousand acres.
He made his fortune in the lumber industry as well
as other business interests, and he was able to support
a rapidly growing family. He and Beatrice had a reported
twelve children together. Beatrice died in seventeen seventy two. Two

(03:38):
years later in seventeen seventy four, James remarried to a
woman named Hannah Nichols Miller. James built a new home
for Hannah, a way fancier home than that log cabin.
This one was a four square, meaning it was two
stories with four rooms on each level. This upgraded home
also reflected James's inn increased status in the Phippsburg area.

(04:02):
He had taken on a role of leadership in the town,
and as the Revolutionary War broke out, James, at this
point in his sixties, became head of the Phippsburg Safety Committee.
Hannah and James had three children, a son named Thomas
and twin daughters, but Hannah and James were only married
for five years before Hannah died in seventeen seventy nine,

(04:25):
James married for a third time. His third wife was
Mary Langdon Storer Hill, and they got married in seventeen
eighty two. Mary, like James, had lost two spouses, and
she was forty eight when she married James, and she
had three children of her own from previous marriages. Two
of those children from Mary's first marriage were adults when

(04:47):
Mary and James got married, but the youngest, Mark Langdon Hill,
was just ten years old, and so he grew up
from that point in the Macobb family. James McCobb died
at the age of seventy eight in seventeen eighty eight.
Shortly after his death, his son Thomas went to see
When Thomas returned, he was anticipating that he would take

(05:10):
possession of his father's house, but he found that things
had played out much differently. His stepmother Mary and his
stepbrother Mark were still living in the house. Additionally, Mark
had married Thomas's sister Mary. It appears that James's third wife, Mary,
had orchestrated this situation so that her son would legally

(05:33):
get the house instead of Thomas. The exact legalities of
this move are a little bit unclear. A nineteen twenty
five write up of the story in the Portland Press,
Harold states quote, when James McCobb died, his widow brought
about a marriage between her son by her first husband
and a daughter of James macob by his first wife,

(05:56):
which gave her control of the large and beautiful estate. Obviously,
this paper a little misinformed about the fact that James
and Mary were each on their third marriages. Yeah, so
it remains unclear to me why that would legally cut
Thomas out of the equation in terms of inheritance. But

(06:17):
it did, and Thomas was enraged and he hatched a
revenge plot, probably maybe right next to his family home.
He wanted to build the biggest, most beautiful house that
he could, to make that four square house that his
stepmother had cheated him out of look tiny by comparison.
And that's perhaps maybe the most interesting part of this

(06:40):
whole story, because by all accounts, Thomas was not angry
with his stepbrother Mark. He was irate with his father's widow, Mary.
Thomas and Mark actually went into business together in seventeen
ninety six, forming a shipbuilding company called Hill and Macob.
So there's another twist to this story that Holly didn't

(07:01):
see mentioned anywhere. It took quite a number of years
for this spite house to be built. Some accounts say
Thomas completed his house in eighteen oh six, and the
others say that he built it in eighteen oh six.
There's an important distinction there. The house was not done
until ten years after he and Mark had been in

(07:22):
business together. And Mary Langdon Hill Macob, that stepmother he
alleged to have vowed to get revenge on actually died
in eighteen oh six. Her gravestone lists her death as
March twenty fourth of that year. Given how difficult it
would have been to start a major construction project in
Maine in the winter, it seems likely that Thomas didn't

(07:45):
even start building this house until after Mary had died.
If all of that construction took place in eighteen oh six,
even if it was under construction before that point, it's
not clear whether she ever would have even seen it
or appreciated its gale and grandeur. So even if he
did outdo the home he had lost in terms of
its size and its style, it might not have been

(08:08):
Actually despite the deceased Mary, it seems like it might
not have been a spite house at all. And there's
also a darker take that knowing about it may have
been what sent Mary to her end, But we just
don't really have any confirmation or information on that. It
is still called a spite house officially, though we'll talk
about it's sort of official spite house standing in just

(08:29):
a moment, because obviously Thomas did build his house even
if he waited for Mary to die, in which case
it was the most polite spite house, ever, and it
was as he promised, massive and grand. In a filing
with the National Park Service from nineteen seventy four, it
is described as quote a fine example of architecture in

(08:50):
the Federal style. The house's footprint is an almost square
rectangle of just under forty five by forty feet or
fourteen by twelve meters. The front and sides of the
house each had six windows originally, and one side of
the house had a duplicate entrance to the front door.
Thomas macob did not get to enjoy his fine mansion

(09:12):
for even a decade. In eighteen fifteen, while he was
serving a term in the Massachusetts legislature as a District
of Maine representative, Thomas died unexpectedly. He had not gotten married,
he had no children, so the spite house went to
the family of his step brother, Mark Langdon Hill, yet

(09:32):
another way in which his spiite move didn't really play
out as perhaps intended if this truly was a spiite move. Incidentally,
Mark Langdon Hill went on to have an illustrious political career,
serving in Congress on behalf of Massachusetts, then as a
representative of Maine. Once Maine was separated from Massachusetts and

(09:52):
became its own state, among other appointments. The Thomas macob
Spite House has a story that goes beyond its origin
with the Macob and Hill families, one that Thomas McCobb
surely did not foresee. The house was sold out of
the family in the eighteen hundreds, and it changed hands
a few times. In nineteen fifteen, it was purchased by

(10:13):
a man named Adelbert Williams, but it was difficult to
keep up, and in nineteen twenty five it was sold again,
this time to Donald Dodge, a man from Philadelphia, and
at that point the house was in pretty rough shape.
Dodge paid six thousand dollars for the spite House, and
he spent a lot more to get it just the
way he liked it and just where he wanted it.

(10:36):
Dodge didn't want to move to Pipsburg, so he had
the whole home moved to his summer estate at Rockport.
Dodge and his moving contractor, Arthur R. Tingley, hired a
barge from New Jersey to come up to Maine so
that it could be loaded up with the house and
carried eighty five miles north along the coast to Rockport.
In addition to the move, the house got an expansion

(10:58):
once it got to its final day, yet it had
two a wing added on on either side. In addition
to those two new wings, the Macob House also had
an extensive landscape planned around it, led by landscape architect
Robert Wheelwright, who created flower gardens in a formal colonial style,
as well as a gazebo and other outdoor living spaces.

(11:21):
In twenty eighteen, the Main Historical Society shared information about
the plants that were kept in those gardens, and that
information came from correspondence and order forms that Dodge and
his gardener Henry B. Williams exchanged with various nurseries. One
set of exchanges in these letters from October nineteen fifty

(11:41):
four is very cute. Apparently, in a catalog from a
nursery called Strawberry Hill, the bulbs being sold for the
lily known as Washington anam was described as being the
size of a lubberjack's fist. Mister Dodge thought that was inaccurate,
writing quote, I was particularly interested in the bulb of

(12:01):
Washington and to see how big is a lumberjacks fist.
It is a fine bulb, but not up to my
idea of a Lumberjacks fist. I have bloomed this lily
here several years and think it is perfectly exquisite. I
secured some real top forest soil from the base of
a large oak tree which blew down in a recent hurricane,
and I am using it around your lilies. So this

(12:24):
seems like a playful comment and not a real criticism.
The rest of the letter notes the other plants that
were received at Rockport and how much Dodge loved them.
The reply from grower Ad Rothman notes, quote your comment
on the Washington Anam and the lumberjacks fist was amusing. Remember, sir,
that nurserymen live drab lives, and their catalogs, with their

(12:48):
opportunity for nurserymen's pros, are virtually their soul surcease. Not
necessarily a story that's particularly important to the spite house
nature of this whole thing, but it was so cute
that I had to include it. In addition to a
wide range of lilies which Dodge clearly loved, there were
also azaleas, Kalmia, rhododendron, Mahonia, and bayberry grown at the house.

(13:10):
Among others. Some of those gardens and outdoor spaces that
were so carefully tended remained, but many of the gardens
were reduced in size or streamlined or eliminated to facilitate
easier upkeep. That was all done after Dodge died in
the nineteen seventies. In nineteen sixty, the Thomas mccob's spite

(13:30):
House was listed on the National Park Service's Historic American
Building Survey, and then in nineteen seventy four it was
included on the National Register of Historic Places. The original
macob House, the one that Thomas thought he was going
to inherit but did not, still stand today. It's a
bed and breakfast known as the seventeen seventy four Inn,

(13:52):
marking the year that it was built. Coming up, we're
going to talk about a house in California that really
might not be a spite house, but it sure has
got a bad reputation as one over the years, thanks
in part to a newspaper write up that we'll get into.
We'll do all of that after the sponsor break. This

(14:18):
next spite house is in Alameda, California, that sits on
an archipelago west of Oakland, and this is one of
those instances where there are competing stories about the origin
of the spite house. So the way this is structured
is we're gonna walk you through the most common one,
which is likely not correct, so keep that in mind
as we talk about it, and then a somewhat tragic

(14:39):
event related to the house, and then we're gonna rewind
to a different version of this spite house's origin before
we land at the account that is possibly the most
boring and makes the most sense. This one starts with
a man named Charles Anton Froling. Charles was born in
eighteen eighty. We don't know a whole lot of about him,

(15:00):
other than that he was Swedish. Sometimes he said to
have been a railroad worker, although one obituary states that
he was a contractor. We know he was married to
a woman named Gertrude and that couple had two sons,
Gilbert C. A. Froling and Fred Frolling. I should also
mention that some accounts say he was a railroad contractor,

(15:22):
so he was building things for the railroad. Perhaps may
account for the variations that we see. So the story
normally goes that in the early nineteen hundreds, Charles inherited
property on Broadway in Alameda, and he planned to build
his dream home there, but the city actually took a
significant slice of his land in order to build a

(15:43):
cross street that's now christ Street. All that was left
of Frolling's lot was a ten x fifty four foot
rectangle that's roughly three by sixteen point five meters, so
not exactly a huge tract of land and a weird shape,
and he supposedly asked his neighbor, missus Annette Westerdhal, to
band with him in fighting the city's plan for a

(16:04):
cross street, but that she didn't want any part of
it and perhaps was kind of into the idea of
her house being at an intersection with a view since
Frolling's lot would not support construction of a house. So,
according to this story, Frolling built one anyway just to
spite her, and built it to take up his entire
lot twenty feet high, so her view was completely obstructed.

(16:28):
There is truthfully not just a made up part one
inch between these two houses. The exterior wall for Froling's
house that is on that one inch gap had to
be assembled and painted first, then put into place, and
then the rest of the house built from there, so
on the Christ Street side, the second floor overhangs the

(16:50):
first to be about twelve feet wide, so it has
a little extra upstairs space. There's a sad development in
the story and legacy of the Alamitus Bite House, and
it involves suicide. So if you don't want to hear
about that, skip forward a couple of minutes. On November twelfth,
nineteen oh eight, the Oakland Tribune ran a story about

(17:10):
a death that places the blame for a suicide on
the Alameda spite House. Right from the headline, which reads
freak house may have been one of the causes of
woman taking her life. This article notes that missus Annette
Westerdaal died quote from inhaling gas with suicidal intent at
her home thirteen forty five Broadway. The story shared information

(17:32):
about two notes that were left by missus Westerdahal, one
to her son in which she thanked him for taking
care of her and asking to be buried simply, and
one to her doctor stating that she had wished to
die and that she was intentionally ending her life. And
this tragic story mentioned several details of her life that
may very well have contributed to her mental state, a

(17:54):
separation from her husband and the recent death of one
of her adult sons, and that she had recently been
released from Harrison Sanitarium just a week before her death,
But those are all mentioned just in passing. This article
instead makes the spite house the clear villain. The bigger problem,
according to the paper, was that she had lost income

(18:15):
from renting her home out to tenants and rumors because
of what the paper referred to as quote the freak house.
But Frolling's house would have only just been finished when
Missus Westerdall died, so it kind of seems like the
paper is just trying to defame the house. It drives
this agenda home even in the caption to the photo

(18:35):
of the Westerdall home, which reads, quote the large house
is that of the late Missus Westerdall on Broadway, Alameda.
In the freak house is that of Charles Frolling, which
may have worried Missus Westerdall to death. And that story
has some other issues. In a twenty twenty four article
in The East Bay Times, the home's current owner stated

(18:57):
that that story was untrue and that the story is
that there was not a street planned at the time
but that Frolling did have an agreement with Westerdhal that
he would buy part of her backyard to enlarge his
small lot for a house. But then Westerdahal backed out
of the idea, and that catalyzed the building of the house.
Perhaps the clearest, most sensible, and least thrilling version of

(19:21):
the story came from Frolling's son Gilbert, in an interview
he did with the Oakland Tribune in nineteen fifty seven
for an article about narrow houses. Gilbert was nine when
the so called spite House was constructed, and he told
the Tribune that the odd, narrow lot at the corner
of Kristin Broadway had been all that his father could afford.

(19:43):
The lot was cut down because of the Chris Street construction,
but that had been before the Frollings owned it. Charles had,
according to his son, the idea that if he and
missus Westerdaal compromised, she could have the front of his
lot as a little side yard, he could have the
back of her lot. That wouldn't change how much square

(20:04):
footage he had, but it would give him a less
severe rectangle. But Westerdahl did not go for that idea.
Still According to Gilbert Building, the house was not an
active spite at all, but just a matter of his
father working with what he had. He told the paper
quote father was a big, easygoing Swede. That was what

(20:25):
he could afford to build. We were a poor family.
Everybody had a place to sleep and a bathroom. It's
just like an ordinary house. The Frolings lived in their
narrow house for a decade before moving. Charles Froling died
in nineteen twenty four, and neither of the obituaries that
I found in research even mentioned the spite house. In

(20:47):
nineteen fifty seven, the then owner of the house, missus
Elsie Darcy, who the Tribune described as quote a short, active,
seventy four year old grandmother who was a cat fancier,
tried to help out her next door neighbors and have
the whole house moved. Her intention was that if it
could be shifted back on the lot a little, it

(21:08):
would enable the neighbors to get some sunshine views. But
the city said that was not possible. It was a
teardown or nothing. That was in part because in nineteen
thirty eight, the city's building code had been updated in
ways that would make building such narrow houses illegal. Frowling's
house was exempt because it was already built before that,
but it couldn't really be changed under the new codes.

(21:31):
That house still stands and as of that twenty twenty
four article, it's had the same owners for more than
two decades. They love it and told the East Bay
Times quote, there are people out there laughing, saying, how
can someone live in there? How do you get a
bed in there? It must be like living in a car.
It's not. We have a queen size bed. The ceilings
are extremely tall. The middle of the house is open

(21:53):
to the roof. It's a little jewel box. We're going
to take a break and hear from the sponsors that
keep the podcast going, and then we will be back
with two more spite houses. Our next spite house is

(22:14):
in Frederick, Maryland, and it is the work of doctor
John Tyler, and this one is a legit spite house.
Well before the construction of his house, Tyler had made
a name for himself as an ophthalmologist. He's sometimes said
to have been the first doctor in the US to
perform a cataract surgery, but it's really more accurate to

(22:34):
say he was one of the first doctors doing it.
That was in the late seventeen hundreds. An important distinction
made in a write up about the house in the
La Times in nineteen ninety notes that he was the
first American born doctor to perform such procedures. Just FYI couching.
The technique Tyler is said to have used involves piercing
the eye and then physically moving the lens so that

(22:56):
the clouded area no longer obscures vision. I tell you now,
there's a source for it that I don't even have
in the source list because I couldn't look at that
page anymore and I ran away. So Holly maybe saying
that because I visibly winced, I visibly winced. I can
handle most stuff, but eyeball surgery. I can handle touching

(23:17):
of the eye, putting in context, but eyeball surgery a
little squinkiar. But in any case, I just wanted to
clarify what exactly he was known for. Tyler was, in
addition to performing this surgery, also a civic and community leader,
and he had served as a senator. But all of
that was well before eighteen fourteen, when the Spite House

(23:37):
was built. Over the years, Tyler had amassed a good
bit of wealth, and he had invested in property. He'd
gotten a significant parcel via a public auction after the
land had been seized from a tory. That parcel sat
in a position physically where a street, which was Record Street,
ended in front of it. Behind the property, there was

(23:59):
another s. West Patrick Street, and city planners thought it
would be a really good idea to extend Record Street
and connect these two roadways. That would mean cutting right
through Tyler's land. Doctor Tyler did not want to lose
any of his property to this public works project. He
protested the plan through official channels, but he didn't really

(24:22):
make any headway. He started to look through the various
laws and ordinances that applied to private property and roadwork,
and then he found it. There was a local law
to Frederick that stated that if a substantial building was
in the path of a proposed roadway, the road could
not be built there. Now. At the time, the lot

(24:43):
where the road was supposed to go was empty. Tyler
actually lived in a house that was on the lot
next to it. But he hatched a plan. Tyler started
reaching out to builders, and he found one who was
willing to help him out and in a hurry, and
by in a hurry, we mean that night because the
roadwork was supposed to start the next day. The road

(25:05):
crew did arrive the following morning, but what they found
was a foundation being laid and doctor Tyler sitting in
a chair and overseeing things. I'm like, this is Arthur Dent,
but backwards. The road was rerouted to cut around the
new construction, and Tyler got to keep his lot intact.

(25:28):
He did complete construction on a three story house and
he rented that out. After Tyler's death, the house went
through a chain of owners, and because of his size,
it has bedrooms on each floor. It's been a bed
and breakfast for long stretches of time over the years.
There doesn't appear to be a bed and breakfast operating
there right now. No. I went down a rabbit hole

(25:49):
looking for it, and I found listed on one of
those sites that aggregates inns and bed and breakfasts. It listed,
but when you click through, there's nothing there. And then
I looked for it on another map site and it
said that is closed. So it's not there now, but
the building still is. This brings us to our last house,

(26:13):
and it is the one that originally started this idea
because it's what was mentioned in the Instagram post, and
that is the Hollinsbury Spite House in the Old Town
district of Alexandria, Virginia. And this house has become really
famous through the years. It's become a curiosity and a
point of pride for the neighborhood, and the current owners,
who have had it for quite some time, have been

(26:34):
very game about talking to the press about this house's
history and how it fits into their life. This one
starts in the eighteen twenties and a man named John Hollinsbury.
Hollinsbury was a brickmaker and he lived at five twenty
five Queen Street, but he was plagued by a problem
or many problems, in the form of carriages. Between his

(26:56):
home and the next there was an alley and it
was narrow, but that did not stop carriage drivers from
trying to squeak through the alley as a shortcut, and
often they did not really fit. They kept gouging the
exterior wall of Hollinsbury's house. Additionally, there was a lot
of foot traffic and loitering, and John, who was a

(27:16):
city council member, did not like this. So finally he
had an idea, and that idea was to purchase the alley,
paying forty five dollars and sixty five cents for it,
no paltry sum in the late eighteen twenties. And then
the brickmaker cut off the alley to through traffic by
bricking in each end of it and putting a roof

(27:36):
over the top, creating a very narrow house. The resulting
structure is just seven feet wide. It's two stories tall,
with a reported four hundred and eighty total square feet
of space, although some write ups about the home say
it only has three hundred and fifty. You'll also see
a couple other numbers floating around out there. One of

(27:57):
the pieces of supporting evidence for the vera city of
this story, because it has them variations, is the fact
that the interior walls, which are just the exterior walls
of Hollinsbury's house and his neighbors do, indeed still show
those dings and gouges from carriages. The variations have no
real substantiation, it's all just gossip, and they involve variations

(28:19):
of the idea that John had some kind of quarrel
with his neighbor, or that he may have even been
making the space for another family member to live in. Yeah,
those don't have a lot of information to back them up.
The only real piece of evidence evidence is those gouges
in the Wawnice. John Hollinsbury died on June sixteenth, eighteen

(28:40):
fifty six, at the age of eighty four. At that
point he had been a resident of Alexandria for seventy
five years, and the unique narrow house he created has
gone through several owners in identity since then, including being
a school house for a while, But today the Hollinsbury
Spite House is a private home. It's passed through a

(29:01):
number of hands, but in nineteen ninety it was purchased
by John Sammus. He owns it with his wife, Colleen,
and the two of them gave an interview for The
New York Times in two thousand and eight in which
Colleen told the story of the two of them meeting
at a dinner party and how woud she was when
she found out John owned the spite House. As for

(29:21):
John's history with the house, he knew about it well
before he bought it, and has said that when he
was walking around the city for lunch or for meetings,
he would often purposely take in a route that would
take him past this curious little house. He told the
Washington Post in two thousand and six, quote one Sunday,
I saw a small ad in the paper that described
this little house, and I knew which one it was. Immediately.

(29:44):
I got in my car and went down there to
the open house and bought it that day. I didn't
know what I wanted to do with it. I knew
I wouldn't live in it full time. It just seemed
like too good of an opportunity to pass up, Although
he may not have had a plan when he signed
the deal for the deed, which cost him one hundred
and thirty five thousand dollars. Sam has hired a contractor

(30:05):
and a decorator to update the home for modern living
while still retaining its historic personality. So they did things
like install ac for example, and to make more space,
the backyard was turned into a garden and sort of
an outdoor living space. The Bright Blue House is a
regular stop on historical tours of Old Town Alexandria. So

(30:26):
though it was built by Hollinsbury to keep people he
didn't like a way, now it draws lots of visitors.
I love the kind of flip of how that played out.
But those are some spite houses. I love spite houses.
Meantime knows more behind the scenes. I have a listener mail.

(30:51):
This is from our listener, Yuan, whose name I probably
mispronounced lightly. I'm doing my best fingers crossed, who is
writing about tomorrow del and writes ladies on my way
to the Young Museum today, I re listened to your
Tomorrow Olympica episode to make sure her life story was fresh.
The ticket agent surprised me when he asked me if
I was to visit the Tomorrow d Lempichka exhibition. I

(31:14):
made a mental note not to skip the C in
her name, given her Polish root ch sounded about right then.
The bio page and several places on interpretive panels. In
side panels says that critics used to rave about Monsieur d'
Leempezki because she signed her early work T d' Lempitzki
Monsieur Lempiki's masculine form. Given that C was followed by

(31:36):
a consonant TZ makes more sense. Maybe the ticket agent
was just attempting at Polish, or maybe I simply misheard.
Wikipedia further indicates that the first letter is softened and
sounds like W, although I doubt if there is public
awareness outside Slavic populations. Meanwhile, US and TV radio hosts
had passing pronunciations of Lekwalzza before I go on with

(32:00):
this email. What I will say is I had looked
at all of these variations, and I eventually defaulted to
the way her great granddaughter says it, because the de
Young produced like a short documentary about the exhibit, and
she pronounces it more or less the way we pronounced it,
and so that's just what I defaulted to, just in

(32:21):
case anybody's curious. Also, given Tamara Olimpica and her personality
and the fact that she changed her name to sound
more artsy, I guess I think we have some leeway.
I also my friend who inspired the episode in the
first place mentioned she's gone back to the exhibit a
couple of times, and she said, I don't think anyone

(32:43):
I have talked to you there at the museum has
ever used her last name. They just say tomorrow every time,
So this might be a confusion situation for everyone. In
any case, to complete the email, the exhibit is really
rich Not only are the arts stunning, but also the
stories placed throughout the exhibit and your podcast enrich each
other perfectly. But the exhibition shows no abstract There's not

(33:05):
even a mention of this post war direction. Meanwhile, the
show blames the nineteen forty one New York and San
Francisco failures on the overly religious tone in the selections.
The eight out of original twelve San Francisco pieces in
exhibit indeed lack the edge of her Art Deco era,
despite similarity in techniques. De Young conjectures that she perhaps

(33:26):
wanted to avoid attention of anti Semitists by selecting this theme,
but those interpretations appear too speculative to me, considering her
parents converted before she was even born, considering that she
was well received in the US in the thirties when
anti Semiti's sentiment was heightened, these pieces, as well as
the Casette first Communion, which Cosette could not recall, could

(33:48):
easily be common subjects of an artist of that time,
especially someone who had great grasp of previous masters. I
looked into Tomorrow's Granddaughter's book in the gift store and
could not find anything to support them. Uns Zium's interpretations either.
Thanks again for the reminder that the exhibition was to
close soon. I had a joyful day at DeYoung. A
new exhibit of on Rematis's original plates for jazz was

(34:10):
another big surprise. If you remove his name, I couldn't
connect the book to Matisse. Thank you so much for
this email. I will say also a couple of people
have emailed us because I mentioned with some woe that
I was not going to make it to San Francisco
in time, and said, hey, you know it's coming to
Houston after that, so see you soon Houston. I'm gonna

(34:32):
make it work. However, I have to, even if it's
just a quick day trip where I fly out and
see it and come right home, because I really want
to see this exhibit. So thank you, thank you, thank
you for writing us. It is an interesting thing. Her
name becomes this kind of swirl of nobody really has
a solid decision on it, which cracks me up a
little bit. It seems very much in line with her

(34:55):
as a person. She'd probably chastise us and take our
plates of food away in any case, So if you
would like to write to us, you could do so
at History Podcast at iHeartRadio, dot com. You can also
subscribe to the show if you haven't already, on the
iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

(35:17):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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