Philistines at the Hedgerow by Steven Gaines

Author:Steven Gaines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

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BEFORE LONG, the interior design of the house began to creep right out the front door, like a trailing vine, one tendril at a time, first covering the outside of the building, then all over the grounds of the estate itself. It began in 1970 when Ossorio built a controversial, 300-foot concrete retaining wall to protect The Creeks from the annual overflowing of the pond. This kind of retaining wall is illegal now, as it denudes the shoreline, but by putting it in when he did, Ossorio saved the foundation of the mansion from certain ruin. Every spring, the swollen waters of the pond turn much of the surrounding land into swamp, filling the basements of the mansions on its shores with water so high that some residents keep rowboats in their cellars. The brackish water also floods the septic tanks, adding an unpleasant urgency to bringing the water down. The simple solution is to “let” the pond into the Atlantic, via a dug channel, every six months, but environmental and wildlife protection laws prohibit disturbing the area’s natural ecological balance—health problems and foundations of the mansions be damned. In 1991, in frustration, one of the many millionaires who live around the pond secretly paid to have a trench dug in the dark of night to spare his house from flooding that season. There was a celebration when the other residents awoke in the morning to find the pond let and the waters receding; the police are still looking for the wealthy gentleman in question.

Ossorio might have saved The Creeks by building the huge retaining wall, but he also regretted having to look at 300 feet of unadorned concrete every day. His friends encouraged him to relandscape, but after studying the sweeping gray shape, Ossorio decided instead to accent the wall with an outdoor sculpture. This first outdoor piece was a soaring metal thing, twenty feet tall, triangular, painted the usual red, white, and blue enamel, as if one of the components of his congregations had become supersized and escaped from the house. It was in its own way hideous, as much of his work was, and disturbed everyone so much (it was visible from all over the pond) that Ossorio made dozens more—massive, giantsized statements planted throughout the grounds of The Creeks. About 200 feet from the main entrance on Montauk Highway, Ossorio installed a stepped red-and-white sculpture so startling that it slowed the traffic with gawkers. Along the driveway at one point were three giant spheres of bright red, white, and blue poured concrete, ten tons’ worth, like mammoth billiard balls erupting from the earth. Some of the sculptures were actually put into trees, hammered into the branches, or the treetops would be bluntly amputated and crowned with a barbed necklace of wheel rims. “That’s to remind you that you don’t always get what you want,” Ossorio explained of the lopped-off trees. “It’s an interplay between the truncated and the successful. Oh, it’s a very moralistic landscape.”

When Ossorio

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