Anthropology of Cities Research Paper

Sifting Sand into Stones at Pine Orchard:
Examining a Community in Transition

As the sixth generation to make use of a family house situated on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound I am confronted with an internal conflict that is wearying to the soul. It is not a unique conflict—on the contrary, it manifests in a myriad of locations and at inconsistent stages of life. It is fundamentally a conflict between a desire to maintain traditions that link you to previous times, people and places and a need to adapt and sometimes even abandon those traditions in consideration of an evolved reality. In my case the tradition is summers on the sound and the evolved reality manifests in a changed community context. My interest in this ethnographic piece centers on the role of physical continuity and constancy in the maintenance of a common sense of history and identity. How do we export or transfer our memories to places and what breaks that connection between thought and thing? Can those connections endure through physical change? Pine Orchard, and my family’s house in particular, is a case study addressing these queries.

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My cousin, Maia, had not come this year. In fact, none of my relatives aside from my grandparents would be there. It was just my mom and me—but we were used to the routine. The two and a half hour drive from Cambridge, MA to Pine Orchard, CT was engrained in my mind starting from our gravel drive in Cambridge and continuing on to the signs, the trees of the highways, the exits we took year in, year out, the landmarks and street corners of each turn. It was a familiar place—my grandparents’ house on Long Island Sound—but a place that had also extended itself, spidering along the many routes taken to it. It was never meant to be a point of origin—it was a destination, a place measured by its relationship to other places. A point of convergence, yes, but never a point of origin. And it is because of this peculiar character that the memories I tie to Pine Orchard, layered year after year, are not restricted to the bounds of Pine Orchard but rather extend along the path of roadways that I take ritually to arrive in this place that carries such meaning for me. This year, however, I am not arriving at Pine Orchard via the usual route, rich with rituals and remembrances.


I duck into my own bright blue Toyota wagon rather than my mom’s veteran white one. I sit in the driver’s seat—I am not a passenger, not along for the ride this time. A map and notepad sit beside me in the place of my family. I am driving along an unfamiliar path at an unusual time of year (winter) towards Pine Orchard where I will not be greeted as family but rather as researcher. This time around, Pine Orchard is not only my ritual summer family vacation; it is also the subject of an ethnography. Mine is not a unique dilemma—many have grappled with the tension between “knowing” a place as a member or participant and “knowing” a place as an observer or analyst. I am not accustomed to approaching Pine Orchard from this direction—I move in and out of familiarity experiencing the new and old in rapid succession and striking proximity. I have, through this process come to recognize the ways in which my one routine route has colored, edited, shaped and restricted my physical understanding of Pine Orchard.
Every year I can remember, I have T-boned into Pine Orchard Road, taken a brief jog to the left and driven along Island View Avenue as it curves along the shore to my grandparents’ red-roofed house. This time there was no jog—I was already on Pine Orchard Road. I pulled over wanting to check if I was in the right place, on the right road—without seeing all my landmarks from the right direction, in the right order, I could not make sense of this place despite being just a few hundred yards from the T. I parked the car snug up against a hedge and reached for the map as I looked across the way to see if I could place any of the buildings I was seeing in my memory of Pine Orchard. As my fingers finally stumbled upon the crumpled edge of the map, my eyes latched onto something my mind was still struggling to place. It was not a building that oriented me, but the lack of one. I was staring along a grand corridor of majestic trees…oaks. Turning around I saw a sign peeking out from behind a branch reading “Anchorage road.” And there: I had placed myself both in my own memories of beach-combing culminating in the climbing of a large oak tree and in the collective memory of the community’s first and arguably most extravagant house, The Anchorage.


I got out of the car and crossed the street hardly taking my eyes off of the ocean, walking along the walkway shaped by the strip of age-old oaks. This walkway once led to what my grandmother, Granny Franny (or Frances P. Taft for those who aren’t related), tells me was a majestic estate overlooking the sound. Franny, though now 89, still seems to remember more of her childhood in the 1920s than I can ever seem to recall of my own childhood only ten years ago. Her stature hardly conveys her chutzpa just as her cultured aesthetic is hardly consistent with her wild competitive drive. She is an uncommonly sprightly and forward woman. Worried that her incredible back-log of memories will be lost either with her aging or her passing, she has recently written two documents that treat Pine Orchard with great care and detail—Pine Orchard Recollections and Chapter two of her memoir, Summers on the Sound. What follows is an excerpt from her recollections book relaying the story behind the Anchorage just as she has to me:

In 1874 Alden Young and his bride, Ella Shepardson, on their honeymoon in Stony Creek, looked across the harbor past Phelp’s Island and could see a far shore that was quite distinctly unoccupied. Alden eyed this point of land with great interest, and by 1900 he had acquired all the open land available. Today this is Pine Orchard. All his original holdings were named “The Anchorage,” as was the great Victorian towered and turreted mansion that he built in 1897. In 1900 when he occupied the mansion, the seven members of the family were matched by seven servants. Less than 50 years later when, in the summers, some of his grandchildren and great grandchildren occupied the house, there were often 14 in residence, but there were no servants—times change. The Anchorage was torn down in 1948. Styles change and lifestyles change and no one could afford the upkeep for a summer vacation.

The Young family (which would become the Warner family), like so many of Pine Orchard’s original families is no longer a presence in the community despite their immense importance to its establishment and initial character.

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Today it may not seem so out of character or noteworthy that the younger generation has chosen not to live or vacation where their family did when they were children. But, for Pine Orchard, this is an uncommon and recent phenomenon. My grandmother is the 4th generation to own and vacation in the red-roofed house perched atop the sound’s improvised seawall; I would be the 6th. But, I have doubts that the house will survive to my generation. It is already one of the last original buildings in the community just as our family is one of the last “original” families. My mother, Cindy, is one of two children to live for any stretch of time in the Pine Orchard house. My mother has an uncanny ability to make all those who are close to her open up and dump out their deepest insecurities and fears for the future, frustrations and revelations all in an emotional slurry. It is because of her calmly focused and intent brown eyes, her soft wispy and quietly wild salt-and-pepper hair, her erect but unimposing posture and her considered and encouraging expression that she has become the confidant of my grandmother. It is with these two lineages that she recalls the generational inheritance and overlap on the shore explaining

the Pine Orchard of my childhood seemed continuous with the Pine Orchard of Franny’s childhood. All of her stories made sense. Many of the characters in her childhood stories were still alive when I was young… We children belonged in Pine Orchard because we were Franny’s children and Milly’s grandchildren…. It was a conservative world. Pine Orchard seemed eternal to a young child.

My grandmother writes of the intergenerational intertwining saying,

Our Cindy babysat the children and when the twins were infants, she came east from Cleveland to help Wendy [of the Young family] care for them. Today Wendy and Wheel are considered by our children and our grandchildren as an important extension of the family. We have a strong Pine Orchard and Cleveland bond and I have known four generations of the Warner family, and Wendy has known three generations of our family…. The thing that is sad for me is that none of the Warner family lives here now, nor do they summer here. The only family that still has a presence is the Noyes family.” (Franny memoir, 18)

My mother, Cindy, being Franny’s confidant of sorts, is most able to see Pine Orchard through her eyes—to filter the Pine Orchard community through the lens of my grandmother’s memories. Franny’s Pine Orchard has not been entirely subsumed—there are still remnants, but they are scattered fragments, relics.


I stumbled upon just such a relic—the chapel—on my way to the Pine Orchard Yacht and Country Club to interview Michael D’Adetta, the club manager. Even after a full nineteen years of visiting the shore, I realized I had never walked, biked or driven down this street and certainly had never noticed the chapel. It was humble in its construction and scale (especially when compared with its current built environment) but it had a compelling intricacy that is conspicuously lacking in the houses that box it in. Every corner, every joint is maximized, embellished, given a distinct character through the woodwork. This can hardly be said for the low, pale blue house across the way—its aesthetic is one of pristine, uninterrupted lines, flat planes, clear divisions and subdivisions, insertions and extractions. Standing in the street, I found myself looking back and forth between the clean clarity of the pale blue house and the intricate intimacy of the whitewashed chapel. It was a glimpse not only of a by-gone aesthetic I recognized from my grandparents’ house, but also of a by-gone community life. I don’t mean to romanticize the chapel—for it was never a true center of the community—but I do mean to call to attention that it used to have a place, used to be integrated (at least physically) into the community it served. It even operated as the gathering point for camp programs run in the summers of the 50s and 60s. Now it is, for all practical purposes, a museum of a shore lifestyle that lends the perfect nostalgic tone to the weddings and memorials that take place there.


After having stood in the street long enough, I approached the door as I read the plaque that reminded me of the building’s date of dedication—1897—only to find it locked. As I was turning the handle of the screen door to slip it into its original position, a group of three college-age kids drove up in an SUV, parked hastily, and began walking towards me complaining of having to clean so early in the morning. I put together that they were here to pick up after a wedding that took place the day before. I followed them in, feeling a bit sheepish and timid because my intentions and attitude were so radically different from theirs in entering the chapel. I felt foolish observing the architecture of the interior, lingering and meandering through the pews when this was so obviously the last place these three peers of mine wanted to be on a Sunday morning.


I left sooner than perhaps I should have due to my discomfort. I managed to glimpse the simple altar framed by a carved wooden stage of sorts, the tall paned windows creating a regular rhythm that was filled in by the rows of dark wooden pews below. The whole interior was the rich, deep color of weathered wood, burnished in places by years of human contact. The roof rose high, supported by hefty rafters—planed and chiseled from their original shape as old-growth trees. This construction outdated perhaps every other building in the community including the ballroom of the club and the original core of my family’s house. These other relics of the past carried the hallmark intricacy and density of detail that characterized original shore architecture but they lacked the massive gestures made possible by early forestry and wood milling that were so clearly evident in this structure. Perhaps it was in part the choice not to winterize the chapel that made it possible to maintain its authentic shore look.


Winterization was just the final of many construction and technological advances that brought plumbing, electricity, heat and insulation and ultimately fire proofing to the cottages built in the 1880s and 90s. The Club history reminds us

by the middle of the decade, the building boom of summer cottages had more or less peaked. Some of these were quite large and reflected the prosperity, increased family size and availability of servants of the time. The waterfront lots were essentially used up…during the twenties only three Pine Orchard houses were winterized and occupied year round, so that club life remained strictly a summertime activity. (29, club history)

It was Michael D’Adetta, the club manager at Pine Orchard Yacht and Country Club that was able to bring me up to the present.


D’Adetta greeted me from behind as I stood hopefully by an empty reception desk calling out “Zoë?” I turned to find a well dressed a clean-shaven man standing at the periphery of the massive wooden compass inlayed in the entranceway flooring. I soon learned that D’Adetta worked at the Club during the summer of 1977 as a line cook after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America. He then returned in 1981 as Executive Chef and was named General Manager eight years later. Originally from Northford, CT, he lived in an apartment at the Club until two years ago when he bought a condo nearby in Branford. Before we dove into the interview, he managed to slip in that, unless it is cold, rainy weather, he rides a “really cool Vespa” to work every day. D’Adetta explained to me that, over during his time working at the club, a lot of houses have been raised and rebuilt or extensively remodeled—many to winterize. They’ve changed styles quite a bit. If you renovate a certain amount you have to conform to flood plane regulations. He concluded by saying with a twist of sarcasm, “I mean, a middle class family in this day has to have a granite counter top and 12 foot high ceilings.”


One of the curious but perhaps not surprising by-products of winterization was the turning inward of the shore houses, which historically were not only open structures but also structures that encouraged their inhabitants to get out and stay out throughout the day. Cindy explains that,

most of the current houses existed when I was a child, but they were all summer houses—spacious, but relatively simple buildings; wood shingle on the outside and wood beaded boards on the inside, often unpainted. As the houses began to be winterized, the open porches disappeared. They began to seem more inward in focus. Open porches invited interaction between the folks on the street or on the beach wall and the folks on the porch. I think of old Pine Orchard as a sociable place, but of course all of my early memories are associated with summer, when everyone lives more open lives.

It becomes clear in Cindy’s description that the physical remodeling of the houses of Pine Orchard, in order to accommodate year-round dwelling, was not only the effect of changing lifestyles… it was also the cause of changing lifestyles. Each reinforced the other, accelerating the transition from an open, communal summer resort to an inward, individualized year-round suburb.


My family’s house did not escape this transition unaffected—it too went through many transformations since its original incarnation. The difference lies in the ultimate product—our house, despite the additions has essentially maintained the scale and aesthetic of the original shore architecture as opposed to the many homeowners who effectively enveloped their houses in new, modern and regionally deviant architectural skins.


Each addition altered the entrance sequence—the first created a second “back” entrance that serves largely as a trash room and storage closet, the second replaced the entrance parallel to the shore with one that was perpendicular and further blocked and delayed the view, and the last eliminated the original back entrance and extended the house further towards the street. These changes may seem un-related to the broader transformation of the PO shore community but they each represent one step further from the shore as the focal point and identity of the community. First, the creation of a more sheltered room from which to experience the shore, next the further obstruction of the view to the sound and the delay of that view until after entering into the core of the house, and finally, the construction of a master bedroom that has no connection whatsoever with the sound.


The responsibility for the physical retreat and turning away from the shore is not all to be born by the residents of Pine Orchard—nature too played a roll. The shore has experienced several profound physical transitions since 1900. The first being the construction of a break wall and the last being the damage inflicted by the hurricane of 1938. In 1939 a swimming pool was proposed for the club and by 1940 it was built with salt water. The pool water was filtered starting in 1959 and heated by 1999. With each stage the shore swimmers were further removed from the ocean—its tides and temperatures, the life it supported and the community it sustained. I never witnessed these changes nor saw the immediate aftermath of any—the closest I have come is the nine by eleven inch photo that hangs over the living room mantle in the Pine Orchard house and shows waves crashing not against the retaining wall that breaks the force of the waves, but rather against and over the top of the line of houses that includes my family’s red-roofed house. Other than that, I was eight when the pool began being heated and can’t remember what it was like beforehand.


In reading my grandmother’s description I could sense the dissapointment of a shore veteran confronted with the loss of what was arguably at the heart of the community’s identity—the communal stretch of beach that lies in front of my family’s house. I have included her words in full because I have come to believe that this loss of the natural sands and the shoreline relationships they fostered is truly at the heart of the transition of this community more so than societal shifts, technological advances or transportational revolutions (though those all played their part). Franny speaks of the shore landscape and the ocean that defines it very fondly making clear that her love of the landscape is intimately connected to the activities and communal life she associates with it. She describes the shoreline of Bradford as

ragged with numerous fingers of Connecticut granite jutting out into the Sound, and between the rocky points of land a curving piece of shorefront that should be a beach. Many of the semi-circles of land between rocks are covered with sand. Our particular waterfront beach was sandy when I was a child. There was about ten feet of sand, even at high tide. Below that were lots of small pebbles, skipping stones, and three- or four-inch stones. They were worn smooth by the tides and were very black when wet.

The color of the water here is never the brilliant blue-green of the Bahamas and is seldom clear. It is a soft blue-gray-green, tending to gray on a cloudy day. The Connecticut granite rocks are yellow ochre, but the low tide line is a dark greenish brown color, revealing a tide change of five or six feet. The trees that cover most of the islands and points appeared as a soft dark green. The landscape is not spectacular, but very pleasing and beloved by real Pine Orchardites.

Long Island Sound can be ferocious and responds quickly to a squall or to heavy winds from the southeast or southwest, but much of the summer it is quite benign and was extremely popular for swimming. The water in June was pretty cold, but warmed by the summer sun, and was okay by July.

In the ‘20s and ‘30s, everyone swam off the front beach. There was no Club pool and no private pools…. One neighbor, who we called Railroad Smith, to distinguish him from other Smiths and because he was Vice President of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, swam the length of our shore front from the breakwater to Flirtation Point and back every morning before work. He was a breast-stroker and it was reassuring each morning to see his head bobbing up and down about 50 feet off our beach….

The first substantial change Franny speaks of is the breakwater which took advantage of a natural rock formation called the “Great Chair” and jutted out to create a harbor protected from the south, southeast and southwest. The wall was an Army Corps of Engineers design approved in 1904 that was meant to create a basin for boats that could be dredged out and where the currents would send the sand to the waterfront helping the beach there and preventing the harbor from filling with sand. It was finished by 1926. It profoundly changed the character of the shoreline but not in the anticipated way as Franny elaborated on.

Ever since the 1930s the sands have been slowly shifting into the harbor and away from the “front beach.” When we were young, the cement wall that ran in front of the houses on the harbor front had about a six-foot drop to the beach. Today their beach is within one foot of their walk wall, and the harbor proper has to be dredged every few years. So much for the Army Corps of Engineers. The harbor is quite well protected, but the sand leaves the front beach yearly and migrates to the harbor. This is the exact opposite of the engineer’s prediction.

The next important event to re-shape the shoreline was the hurricane—its damage and the changes made in the re-building of what it destroyed. Franny begins by describing the state of the shore before the storm and then goes on to paint a vivid picture of its aftermath.

Running from the breakwater to a rocky point called Flirtation Point, there was a sea wall about 3_ feet wide complete with a substantial iron railing on the sea side. Each house had a set of steps that went from the front lawn to the beach. Many of these steps were also built of stone. The sea wall walk was part of our Pine Orchard look. The 1938 hurricane was so ferocious that it took out the sea wall and left the huge Stony Creek quarry stones of the steps strewn along the beach. Today individual homeowners have solved the sea wall problem in different ways, but it is no longer continuous along our waterfront, destroying the old sense of community.

[After the hurricane of ’38,] our precious Pine Orchard was a mess. There was glass all over the beds in our house and the sun porch was crumpled. The amazing thing was that the seawall and all the stone steps were gone. The front porch steps were hanging out over the abyss where the wall and fill had been.

It was the spring of 1939 that the waterfront people by themselves or in groups rebuilt their front walls (the sidewalk was no more), just a retaining wall made largely of cement. After the wall came the dirt to fill the gap between house and beach. The waterfront at Pine Orchard would still be attractive, but would never have the wonderful integrating wall and walk that had defined it, nor the sand that made it a beach.

After the hurricane for fifty years, this section of the shore was jellyfish free, but starting in the ‘90s they have returned to menace the swimmers and drive them from the now rocky beach to the Club swimming pool, a post-hurricane undertaking. It has filtered salt water from the Sound and is heated.

Franny’s initial description of the water, the rocks, the shore line and contours of the land (which has now been all but eclipsed) is about as close as one can get to the original motive for vacationers to make the pilgrimage to the Connecticut shore—with the nineteenth century growth of steam and eventually electric railways, summer resorts and hotels began to pop up all along the Branford shoreline. These vacationers weren’t all headed for houses as they would be now—many of them had set out to pay for a room in one of the many shore side resorts such as Owanego Inn (the only original one that has survived). The inn describes its own history on its website saying

A shoreline oasis, conveniently located between New York City and Boston, Branford was once one of the most popular summer resort destinations on the Atlantic Coast. Traveling by train, trolley, steamer or horse and carriage, people would make the pilgrimage to Branford, where they would spend the entire summer. While the height of Branford’s by-gone hotel era boasted over 30 resorts, only one remains.

But soon, the transportation changed and with it, the addition of stiff fire safety regulations requiring many of these hotels to face major renovations with decreasing profit margins. Many chose to shut down, to sell their property instead of investing the money to continue operating the hotels. Franny recalls that,

one of the dramatic changes that occurred in the middle of our century, or during these years from 1900 to 1950, is the shift from a summer haven to a full-blown suburb. This really began gradually. I think it began after the hurricane of ’38, but the major changes came a little later and related to transportation. We were part of the transportation revolution. The early residents took the train, and later, in 1907, the trolley, which was first horse-drawn and later electrified. The automobile, the Merritt Parkway, and finally Interstate 95 came upon us and came very close to Pine Orchard. It was possible, after the middle of the century, for me to drive from Cleveland to my mother’s home in Pine Orchard and have only two stoplights on the way. With these major changes in highways, people could very easily live in Pine Orchard and work in New Haven or even farther away, and that’s exactly what happened. (4, Franny PO recollections)

Today the transformation is near complete—with a seasonal membership of only 20% or so as compared with the original 90%, the club can hardly claim it’s primary purpose is to serve the summer vacation crowd.


The club as an institution has maintained continuity but not constancy. In 1987 the club undertook a comprehensive renovation in collaboration with an architect, Eric Epstein. The Reception among club community was far-ranging and conflicting (186 in favor, 184 against) but the board ultimately voted 14 to 3 to go ahead with the first phase of construction—the installment of air conditioning in the ballroom, dining room and main lounge. It was very contentious—it got personal. As D’Adetta put it, “the old Yankees had the Yankee stinginess and argued that there was no need to spend any money especially because they felt that as a shore community we should be able to open the windows and feel the breeze. But, the infrastructure was old, the heating was old—it was an old building.” D’Adetta recalls that the club was chasing maintenance and repairs constantly and needed a thorough update. D’Adetta added in that, “part of it too was [that] we were getting a younger membership that had higher expectations. This new membership was a part of the transition to a year-round community—people would put up their summer homes and someone would buy them, bulldoze them and build a year-round place.” One day not too long from now my family’s summer home will have to brave the generational transition—either someone in my mom’s generation or someone in my own will have to step up and take responsibility for the work that will need to be done to maintain the red-roofed house as a vacation house for the generations to come.

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My mom and I had arrived at the house and walked around to the side entrance. We entered into the mudroom—the room that by all counts should be the main entrance—and called out for my grandparents unsure of where they were in the house. (Though they couldn’t be far seeing as they only lived on the first of three floors now). We got a strained response and moved further into the house carrying our bags. My grandmother was writing letters and my grandfather puzzling.


I’m aware now that my relationship to the house has changed but, for my mom, this is not a new relationship to the house—she lived there while she was studying for her PhD at Yale. She explains that the experience of living in the house as a graduate student led her to identify herself as a caretaker for the house, but it also began the process of separating her from her childhood memories of the house. I can feel that process acting on me now…the realization that this house is not eternal just as the community is not continuous. We spent the weekend clearing and cleaning all the rooms on the second and third floors, making them presentable and prepared for guests. We hardly had time to weed the garden—this one weed has been and will continue to be dastardly and persistent to the point of frustration. Its root system is composed such that when you pull up the stalk it breaks off from the tubers underground and regenerates itself when you aren’t looking. It has come to represent and encapsulate the perpetual battle we are fighting to maintain the illusion of continuity and consistency—to resist the transition of the community from vacation community to luxury suburb.


But, why do we feel the need to resist? What keeps my mom and me here fighting against the inevitable when so many gave up long ago? For my mother, it is in part a deep commitment to my grandmother and a fond understanding of what this community represents for her. My mother admits

I don’t have much affection for the community…. The small town/suburban life does not appeal to me—there is too little variety, too much conformity. The house itself still has great charm. It is rich with my own memories and the collective memories of Mom’s family, but it is also in need of care. It would cost a great deal to fix all of the things that need fixing.

I am left wondering whether this progression of associations my mom describes from a youthful enchantment with the sheltered freedom of life on the Pine Orchard shore to a complex attachment in young adulthood and finally to a sense of responsibility in middle age is a pattern shared by other families who have returned generation after generation to this community and others like it. What sustains the community’s adults through the sacrifice involved in adopting responsibility?

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My mother’s comments bring me back to how we establish and maintain the links between immaterial memories and physical spaces and things. She reiterates that, “what I value most about Pine Orchard now are the memories associated with it.” Why, when both my mother and I associate our memories of Pine Orchard with the family house, do I still have an attachment to the physical structure? This returns to my consideration of the scattered fragments of earlier versions of Pine Orchard. It would seem that the transition carries too much momentum at this point and the physical anchors I have mentioned in this paper—the chapel, the original club ballroom, the empty anchorage lot, my family’s house—do not carry sufficient weight, do not take up sufficient space to hold out against the inevitable storms of social change.


These anchors have already been metaphorically strewn about the beach in the same way the stone steps were. The next social hurricane will surely sweep them even further apart, render them meaningless and weak. But for now, they represent material meaning; they permit a physicalized connection to powerful pasts that have been all but subsumed. Society has changed all around Pine Orchard and one can’t expect it to endure in a time-freeze—however, the transformation of transportation, the alteration of the shore and the re-modeling of houses all seem to tie the shifting physical form of Pine Orchard to the shifting demographic.


And so we stand at the last front…the last ones to withhold (and thus preserve) our family house with all its rich layering of pasts and embodiment of communities past. How much would be lost if one of us does not take this daunting project on? And what would we be sacrificing to do so? Even more to the point, what would we gain from it? Why would we do it? As time goes on I think about it with greater and greater frequency and find myself at a loss. What would I be trying to preserve should I be the one to take on the red-roofed house? Or is my motivation not one of preservation but rather defiance—defiance in the face of a way of life I see engulfing what was once invaluable to my family. But what would it prove to maintain this last relic of a community gone by? I am left without an answer and with an ever-approaching deadline.

Theory, Context and Sources
Theoretical texts read and considered in preparation

Marc Augé’s “In the Metro”

By Auge’s definition, I consider Pine Orchard to be an Anthropological Place (a place to which the inhabitants attach meaning, where collective history and a social bond is evident). Furthermore, I find that the anchors or relics I consider in the paper seem to operate as history to be consumed rather than lived.

Tim Cresswell’s “Place: A Short Introduction,”

I argue that the physical changes of Pine Orchard activate a different set of norms and expectations (behave as a normative geography) that render previously normalized behavior (such as swimming on the beach) transgressive. In this ideological framework, my maintenance and restoration of the family house would represent a substantial and conspicuous transgression of the new set of norms and expectations that would challenge their increasing power over residents.

Nestor García Canclini’s “Ciudad de Viajeros.”

I employ Canclini’s idea that the way we travel to somewhere directly shapes our understanding of it in my introductory description of my trip to Pine Orchard.

Walter Benjamin’s “Berlin Chronicle”

Benjamin’s philosophy permeates and is the pretext for my ethnography: in the implication that memory and metropolis are interconnected, that my subjective voice as participant is potentially more valuable than facts, that my narrative, although not itself fragmented, exposes the physical fragmentation of the community and thus the experience of it. It is because of his urging to show not say that I have chosen to relocate theory to a sort of epilogue—I want the experience and thoughts it provoked to stand on their own without the over-arching explanation implied with the introduction of theory. I also connect this work to Benjamin’s idea of excavating the layered pasts of a place.

Graeme Gilloch’s “Urban Memories: Labyrinth and Childhood”

I am using an autobiographical format and so found Gilloch’s meditation on autobiography and memory to be a quite useful prompt and starting point for my thinking about both form and content in this piece. I connected especially with his conception of memory as a labyrinth and so employed free writing as a method of journeying back in time.

Michel De Certeau’s “Walking in the City”

I engaged in particular with the question posited by De Certeau of how we regain power, re-appropriate the city? I find application for his idea of the act of walking as an act of resistance to the givens in my walking in Pine Orchard and more particularly my thoughts about the maintenance and use of my family’s house—how can that act of preservation or alteration physicalize a set of values and priorities in the same way a walking path can in an urban context?

Written First- and Second-Hand accounts of Pine Orchard consulted

An excerpt from my grandmother’s memoir (Chapter II: Summers on the Sound)

Pine Orchard Recollections by Franny Taft.

Pine Orchard Yacht & Country Club: The First One Hundred Years (A Condensed History) by Earl P Carlin (book commissioned by the club)

Transition and Progress of The Alden M. Young Company by Milton W. Goss, Secretary (history of the company that founded the community)

Interviews conducted and incorporated into written work:

Frances P Taft, My Grandmother

Cynthia B Taft, My Mother

Michael D’Adetta, Pine Orchard Yacht and country club manager