There are plenty of reasons I’ve chosen to live on the West Coast over the East (living in the flyover hinterlands is a non-starter). The summers are much better, truly wild places still exist out here and there’s an optimistic, inventive spirit in our populace that makes up for the meth problem and sky-high unemployment rate.
But, one thing the East Coast has on the West is historic architecture. In Portland’s Old Town, the buildings boast their age – 1869, 1886, etc. And for Portland, that’s old. But in cities on the East Coast, there are houses that were built over a century before that. There’s a confidence of place that comes with age, a sense that the neighborhood has settled into a character that will remain unchanged in the decades to come.
In 2007, Kes and I visited Washington, D.C. over Labor Day weekend. We spent several hours roaming around Georgetown, between eating breakfast at a crêperie and escaping the afternoon heat with gin & tonics in an excessively air-conditioned bar.
As we walked about Georgetown, we noticed a pattern in the door knockers. Most were heavy, elaborate affairs, no doubt forged in a time when there were still blacksmiths. The ones that really caught our attention were foxes. We speculated they marked the inhabitants as members of a secret society, the kind of society that determines which countries we’ll be invading in ten to twenty years. We brought up the fox door knockers with our bartender and he dismissed them as showy affectations of the newly rich. Which is exactly the sort of thing you’d say if you didn’t want outsiders sniffing around your secret societies.
Since that trip, I’ve traversed the Internet looking for a fox knocker for our own door. I even inquired at Chown, a local hardware purveyor catering to wealthy mechanism fetishists. My search was fruitless for the first year. Undaunted, I kept checking back, secure in the knowledge that the Internet Provides All to the patient, finally finding the perfect fox door knocker this May. The misspelling of “Manufacturers” in the Web site’s banner is distressing – nothing says “we’ll sell your credit card info to the highest bidder” quite like blatant typos. But, I took the chance and a short week later, my fox knocker arrived.
We installed it over the weekend, a feat that was complicated by the “hand crafted” nature of the knocker (read: nothing about it lines up and the bolts are, suspiciously, metric). Kea loves banging it. Our nanny thinks it is a little on the threatening, scary side. I’m just waiting for the emissary from the West Coast cell of the Società delle Volpi to come a’knocking.
Doors of Georgetown
Knockers & Handles
