For more than a century, they have captured our attention. Their doings gave birth to the first society columns in American newspapers. They set the standard everyone wanted to emulate in clothes, domestic architecture, entertainment, and socializing. They were, undisputedly, our first celebrities. To this day, we know their names; we catalogue their excesses; we laugh heartily at their foibles but often forget their contributions to American growth and culture. They were the Cottagers.
The Gilded Age (1865–1917) created an American economic dynasty. As symbols of their economic power and social position, these princes of commerce and barons of industry built city palaces and country cottages. The towns where cottages were built became known as Gilded Age resorts. The king of Gilded Age resorts was Newport, R.I., but Lenox and Stockbridge were chief among the resorts.
The Cottagers created careers for builders, architects, and landscape architects. They opened portions of their homes to the public as the first art galleries. They employed grounds men, poultry and dairy men, and servants; they created business for the purveyors of goods. Wherever they went they built concert halls, churches, hospitals, and roads. They were the gold standard in food and fashion. The press followed their every move; they were adored but not always approved.
Some disdained the Cottagers: December 25, 1901, Letter to the Editor, “The reign of the summer visitor in Berkshire is already complete enough … to attract still more of the swarm of patronizing pleasure seekers. They fence off our mountains and valleys and forbid the natives to place a foot on their precincts.”
Some saw their coming merely as an economic opportunity: Sunday Morning Call, 1890, reported that with the arrival of the Cottagers building “summer villas … it is well-known that folks who own property here can expect good offers.” Apparently, the arrival of the Astors and the Vanderbilts was the “rising tide that lifts all boats” and raises all property values.
Even for frivolous reasons, locals deferred to the Cottagers. When Colonel Richard Lathers of Abbey Lodge in Pittsfield had a garden fête, the judge adjourned court for the day so he and the lawyers could attend.
Many more misunderstood them. Colonel Lathers was invested in commerce, agriculture, insurance, banking, and railroads, and those ventures rewarded him richly. His art collection of old masters “collected to educate my family” was renowned. A millionaire twice over, he was treated as a patrician and was asked by a real estate broker what he would think if his adjoining property were sold to laborers.
“Then they work for a living?” Lathers asked. The real estate agent nodded and waited.
“Good! Sell to them,” Lathers replied. “I would rather have activity and industry for my neighbors than some gentlemen poor in activity and making no progress.”
Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?
In a flight to safety during COVID, those who could afford it abandoned the crowded urban areas and fled here. They paid amazing prices for anything available. They tore down modest dwellings and built immodest ones. Fourteen-hundred square feet was replaced by 3,000 square feet. The buying and building created a new marketplace. Over the course of 50 years, it was not unique for a house to go from $47,000 to $300,000 to over a million. Granted the cost of many things rose, but not everything rose exponentially—housing did.
All at once there was no affordable housing in Stockbridge. Affordable housing is a term that means more than one thing. It is probably true that, as a function of the marketplace in Stockbridge, there is not enough affordable housing, and many limit the meaning to building something folks can afford.
How? Well, rather than allowing the marketplace drive cost, the government steps in and does a number of things to drive prices down or augment buying power of certain buyers. There is a piece missing from that definition.
There are ordinary homeowners. They are not buying anything. They are trying to stay in the houses they own. To them, affordable housing means keeping monthly costs down to an amount they can afford. For them, benevolent government intervention means implementing the residential tax exemption now being discussed in South County towns. It reduces one cost: property taxes. It means controlling the cost of utilities like electricity and necessities like water. Good government means helping and smoothing the distribution of goods and services for all—not just the few.
There is also a tipping point. Without a distribution of population—rich and poor, worker and retiree, old and young—a town ceases to function. We have people vulnerable to (say) a heart attack, and we need the EMT who answers the call. The rest of us need the policeman, fireman, teacher, doctor, and nurse, and we need to provide so they can live among us.
It is a new Gilded Age—with the best and worst that economy has to offer.