I was looking at the Wikipedia page on Bangor, Maine (the county seat and nearest significant city to where I grew up and still live) a bit ago, and one of the photos the article's editors chose as a representative visual for the city is a shot from the street of author Stephen King's house. I've seen it before, of course, but not for a while, and seeing its picture for the first time in a while made me realize:

Stephen King basically lives in the earlier version of Maison Écarlate from before Victor got married and enlarged the house into a proper Sprawling Country Manor. Picture that house as the nucleus of a much larger building with a twenty-room wing on either side of it, and a clock tower, and you pretty much have what it's like in 1946.

(Yes, King's house is of a substantially more recent architectural idiom than you would expect from an Alsatian nobleman's house that was originally built in the 11th century and heavily rebuilt in the early 16th--that style dates only to about 1850--but hey. Artistic license. Besides, I didn't say it looked exactly like that. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

When will Gryphon and Meiling repair the clock tower? I don't recall it being mentioned at all in the stories, and I assume it no longer works at this point in the story.

>When will Gryphon and Meiling repair the clock tower? I don't recall
>it being mentioned at all in the stories, and I assume it no longer
>works at this point in the story.

It's presumably on the to-do list somewhere. G might have in mind converting it to electrical operation once the dynamo room is up and running.

(Canonically, sources indicate that it does work, but only chimes at night; but then, that version of the mansion hasn't been all-but-abandoned for 150 years, so it probably is safe to assume that in GG it has long since stopped.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

As an aside, I should note that from the frontage, King's house looks smaller than it is; if you look it up on Google Maps and zoom in on the aerial view, you can see that it's about four times as deep as the frontage is wide, and then appears to have a greenhouse or something out back of that, so it's quite a large house, if not quite a mansion by old-money standards. That neighborhood is where Bangor's prosperous professional class lived back in the day--doctors, lawyers, that kind of thing. Not rich by the standards of the era, but quite well off.

House lots with narrow frontages like that are pretty common in these parts. I'm not sure specifically why the tony part of Bangor is laid out like that, but here in Millinocket it's because the original street plan was designed with the idea that the people who lived on the lots would be walking to the mill for work. As such, even though it's a small town and you would think there would be all the space in the world, the houses in the old part of town are quite close together and have much more back yard than front. Garages out back of the house instead of beside it are not uncommon around here, because in a lot of cases, it was the only place to put them when people started getting their own cars in the 1920s and wanted somewhere to keep them.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

My wife's family are all from back east and, when asked about the narrow frontage so prevalent there, maintain that it's because taxes were assessed based on the part facing the street and not the total area, back in the day. Therefore, people built long and narrow to avoid the Tax Man's grasp.

I have no idea if that's true or not but it's at least as plausible as some of the other bizarre tax dodges I've heard of.

--sofaspud
--few times I've been back east I've felt claustrophobic; everything's so cramped, feels like