'Three Ponds', the Victor Morawetz estate designed by Delano & Aldrich c. 1912 in Woodbury. Click HERE for more on 'Three Ponds'.
Pictures from Architectural Record, 1918.
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'Three Ponds', the Victor Morawetz estate designed by Delano & Aldrich c. 1912 in Woodbury. Click HERE for more on 'Three Ponds'.Pictures from Architectural Record, 1918.
2 comments:
This is a house I can admire without reservation. So impossibly elegant, a bit chilly but beautiful. And that porticoed entrance to the garden, through the wall is fantastic. Director of the Norfolk Western Railway and other corporate entities, millionaire lawyer Morawetz (1859-1938) wrote a fascinating letter to The New York Times in 1914, suggesting that the US government tax not "the mere ownership of personal property" but "the unproductive consumption of wealthy." He complained that "expenditures of the rich for luxuries or display benefit the masses by furnishing employment and by causing wealth to circulate is a fallacy," though he admitted "that to diminish luxury and display might cause temporary hardship to some of the people by depriving them of employment, but the ultimate result would prove beneficial to the whole people." His suggestion was to create a tax that was a personal tax, based not "upon their personal property" but instead by "taxing the unproductive consumption of labor and capital. ... a tax measured by the value, in excess of a moderate exemption, of the house or houses and land occupied by him for comfort, pleasure, or display and by the number of servants employed by him for similar purposes. The tax upon thosse living in apartments or hotels should be fixed according to the rents they pay." Morawetz, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, married twice. His first marriage took place in London in 1911 to Violet Westcott, daughter of novelist Edward Noyes Wescott; she died in 1918. Morawetz's second wife was Marjorie Nott (died 1957), whom he married in 1924.
Elegant and tastefully restrained, I like them a lot. Every happiness to you in the new year.
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