Hallowed Home

The Historical Society of Princeton invites you to look back in time Dec. 7 during a tour of seven venerable houses.

By: Ilene Dube

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski

The Italianate structure at 104 Mercer St. (above) has been home to such notables as author Svetlana Stalin and sculptress Dorothea Greenbaum. Albert Einstein lived just two houses away.

   There is something about the fairy-tale-like structure at 104 Mercer St., Princeton, that beckons. Perhaps it’s the circular drive leading to the entryway, or the pairs of narrow arched windows mirrored by shutters, or the way the light falls on the sunny white façade. The house seems to sing of Victorian gentility.
   Ticket holders to the Historical Society of Princeton Holiday Open House Tour Dec. 7 will have the opportunity to stroll through the parlor with its antique refectory table, the dining room with shelves of ruby Czech glass, and see such architectural nuances as tiny windows through paneled doors and wood finials dripping from old newel posts on an upper landing. To visit the house is to take a trip back in time — it is brimming with stories of past and present residents, and fits current residents Ellen and Dana Charry like a glove.
   With steeply pitched gables and rounded windows, the Italianate abode at 104 Mercer St. was built in 1870 on land once owned by Richard Stockton, according to research conducted by Historical Society board member Wanda Gunning. The first owner was Abby Gulick, who died three years later. In 1879, it became a rental property, owned by Alexander McGill, a Princeton Theological Seminary professor.
   "He died in 1889 and left it to his youngest daughter, who married and moved to New York," reports Ms. Gunning. "It wasn’t cared for and came to be called a ‘lady’s house.’ Women rented it and lived there with servants or companions.

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski		Princeton Theological Seminary Professor of Theology Ellen Charry (left) and her cat, Honey, are current residents. Professor Charry’s husband, Dana, a psychiatrist, also lives in the house.

   "Thomas Parrott, a Princeton University English professor, made an offer to the McGill daughter and she sold it for $6,000," continues Ms. Gunning. "It had quite a bit of land, and he lived there until the mid-1920s."
   Polly Dale, a member of the Historical Society, lived in the house circa 1930-1943. "I remember looking out the bathroom window and seeing Albert Einstein padding around in his garden," she recalls of Mercer Street’s most well-known resident. Looking through the bathroom’s wavy glass today, an observer still gets a view of stately trees and shrubs.
   In 1954, according to Ms. Gunning’s research, the house was sold to Edward and Dorothea Greenbaum. Ms. Greenbaum was a painter and sculptress whose work is represented in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Princeton Public Library and the Institute for Advanced Study, among many other places. Using the carriage house as her studio, she worked in bronze, stone, marble and alabaster and received many awards for her work.
   The house was purchased by Princeton Theological Seminary in the early 1980s for use as faculty housing. Former PTS Vice-President Frederick Cassell and his wife, Jo Anne, were the first to live in it after the PTS purchase. The carriage house was restored as faculty housing.
   An interview with Dr. Cassell on the house, conducted by former PTS archivist William Harris, tells much about the mid-20th century history, including the time Svetlana Stalin lived there.

At right, gilded tomes from Dana Charry’s collection in the house’s "archives room."		TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski

   As quoted by Barbara Chaapel, director of communications and publications for the seminary, Mr. Greenbaum, an attorney for Harper & Row, was a good friend of U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Princeton resident George Kennan. Mr. Greenbaum accompanied his friend on at least one trip to the USSR. The two met Svetlana Stalin, daughter of Joseph Stalin, who was writing about her childhood for Harper & Row.
   She complained of the lack of privacy in the USSR, and so Mr. Greenbaum invited her to stay at 104 Mercer St. for three months. He told her of his celebrated neighbor, Albert Einstein, whose privacy was respected. After her stay at 104 Mercer St., Svetlana decided she liked living in Princeton and bought a house of her own.
   Dr. Cassell retired from the seminary in 1999, just two years after Ellen Charry joined the faculty. A professor of theology, Dr. Charry came to Princeton from Texas, where she had taught at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
   Dana Charry, a psychiatrist and medical director for Catholic Charities, Diocese of Metuchen, and his wife were accustomed to living in large homes. Before Dallas, they had lived in a 1902 house in Maplewood. The Charrys’ adult daughters live in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and Philadelphia, so the 14 rooms at 104 Mercer St. are shared only with Honey, the Charrys’ cat.
   When the seminary purchased the house from the Greenbaums, structural upgrades were made, including modernizing windows and heating, restoring ceilings, painting and a new kitchen. For the Charrys, the seminary remodeled the house again, sanding floors and woodwork, painting and wallpapering.

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski

Dana and Ellen Charry have named one of the guest bedrooms the "Ten Commandments Room" because the shape of the windows is reminiscent of a tablet. The rounded-top windows, echoed on the exterior with similarly shaped shutters, are characteristics of Italianate architecture.

   "We picked out the colors," says Dr. Charry. "It all reflects my taste. We found some of the lighting fixtures and the seminary bought them." All the bathroom fixtures are new, some vintage, all the brass hardware has been polished, and the seminary landscaped the property last summer.
   On accepting the professorship, Dr. Charry selected 104 Mercer St. from the stock of available seminary housing, although she had to live in temporary quarters for the two years prior to Dr. Cassell’s retirement. Then it took a team of carpenters, painters, electricians and plumbers five-and-a-half months to complete the restoration. Even the kitchen, which had been redone for the Cassells, was further modernized with new stovetop and countertops, and the oak cupboards were refinished by hand. The seminary took care of storing the Charrys’ antique furnishings for the duration.
   In 1870, the original structure was three stories with two rooms on each floor, recounts Dr. Charry, standing in the light-filled sun room off the parlor where a jungle of house plants thrives. "It was a modest Victorian house and rooms were gradually added on to the back in three stages," she says. "The sun room was added first, to support the interior plumbing when bathrooms were built off the upstairs bedrooms." Crown molding in the parlor is original, but the Charrys added vintage ceiling medallions. Most rooms have marble fireplaces, although the one the couple uses is a brick fireplace in the den.
   The 14 rooms comfortably accommodate the antiques the family has collected over the years, everything from the refectory table and leather-topped monastery table from Dr. Charry’s mother-in-law to family heirlooms and pieces purchased while the couple lived in Lancaster County, Pa. In what was once a window from the dining room before the parlor was added, the seminary installed glass shelves to display the ruby cut-to-clear Czech glass collection (Dr. Charry switches to crystal in the warmer months).
   During the final years of the Greenbaums’ ownership, Mr. Greenbaum had been confined to a wheelchair and a first-floor room had been added for him. That room has been converted to Dr. Charry’s commodious home office — her husband’s home study is just off the master bedroom, with forest-green walls, a burnt sienna ceiling and Art Deco frieze. He does his paperwork at an old schoolteacher’s desk from the 1920s and has an oak armoire for a TV and VCR.

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski

   Perhaps one of the most exciting rooms in the house is the red-walled "archive room" on the second floor. Dana Charry collects books from the American Gilded Age, mostly literature and Victorian treatises on everything from childrearing to house building. The room is lined with these gold-embossed tomes in bookshelves and on mantels. There is a table and chairs from his mother for perusing the collection of old magazines, carefully organized in a cabinet that had been made for storing player-piano rolls, and a bureau with book-size drawers from the Pottstown, Pa., post office stores family memorabilia and ephemera. Pumpkin pine floors give a warmth to the archive room as well as Dana Charry’s study.
   Given the history of the seminarians who lived in the house, the Charrys have appropriately named one of the three guest bedrooms the 10 Commandments Room. "Its windows form the shape of a tablet," says Dr. Charry.
The Historical Society of Princeton’s Holiday Open House Tour Dec. 7 features seven private homes representing different eras and architectural styles decorated for the holidays by area garden clubs. Tickets cost $25 in advance at Bainbridge House, 158 Nassau St., Princeton, Tues.-Sun. noon-4 p.m., or Coleman’s Hamilton Supply, 65 Klockner Ave., Hamilton; $30 day of tour; $65 with tea at Jasna Polana. For information, call (609) 921-6748.