February 23, 2008

Landmark Massachusetts Building Where Wharton Wrote Faces Foreclosure

By CHARLES McGRATH
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Mass., is in danger of being put in
foreclosure, says Stephanie Copeland, president of Edith Wharton Restoration, the
organization that owns and maintains this stately residence and its surrounding
gardens.

Since 2002, Ms. Copeland explained by phone this week, the Mount, which is open to
the public — much of it has been restored in recent years to match the period when
Wharton lived there — has been covering its operating expenses by borrowing from
the Berkshire Bank in nearby Pittsfield. It now owes the bank some $4.3 million,
and in mid-February, when it failed to meet a scheduled monthly payment of
$30,000, the bank sent a notice that it intended to start foreclosing unless the
default was remedied promptly, Ms. Copeland said.

To stay open, she added, the Mount needs to raise $3 million by March 24. “The
bank has really been very patient,” she explained. “They’re eager to help us work
this out.”

If the Mount succeeds in raising that sum, Ms. Copeland said, an anonymous donor
is waiting in the wings who has pledged to match it. The money could be used to
help restructure the bank loan and to settle another outstanding debt, roughly
$2.5 million, that the Mount incurred from a private lender in 2005 to buy
Wharton’s 2,600-volume library from George Ramsden, a British book collector. The
Mount also owes Mr. Ramsden roughly $885,000, to be paid off in nine yearly
installments, and recently it defaulted on a scheduled payment to him, too.

“The situation is quite serious,” Sandra Boss, interim chairwoman of the Mount’s
board, said in a telephone interview from London, where she works. “On the one
hand, the Mount is winning awards for preservation and is internationally renowned
as an institution. And it’s well run from an efficiency perspective. We’ve made
great progress by cutting costs and raising revenues. On the other hand, our
current debt levels are unserviceable and unsustainable. We’re not in control of
our own destiny unless we can mount a restructuring of our debt.”

Ms. Boss became a board member in late 2006, when the board was reformed to
include people with business expertise and fund-raising experience. “We knew the
situation was challenging,” she said. “But we didn’t anticipate it would get this
bad.” She added that raising money for nonprofit organizations was more difficult
in a downward-trending economy and ruefully recalled the flinty Mrs. Gryce, a
character in Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” who only “subscribed to
Institutions when their annual reports showed an impressive surplus.”

The Mount, which is open from May to October and weekends in November and
December, receiving some 30,000 visitors annually, was built by Wharton in 1902.
She designed it herself, in accord with the simple aesthetic — simple for the
time, anyway — she had championed in her first book, “The Decoration of Houses,”
written with Ogden Codman Jr. The house has 35 rooms, including an enormous piano
nobile, or first-floor gallery, but is noteworthy in part for its private spaces,
especially Wharton’s bedroom suite, where she did most of her writing.

Wharton lived at the Mount only until 1910, when her marriage to the troubled
Teddy Wharton became unsalvageable, and she moved permanently to France. But the
house, which she treasured in memory, was where she came into her own as a writer;
it’s where she finished “The House of Mirth,” her breakthrough novel (part of
whose profits paid for the Mount’s elaborate gardens) and got the inspiration for
“Ethan Frome.” It is now on the register of National Historic Landmarks and is one
of only a few such places associated with a woman and her accomplishments.

From 1912 to 1942 the Mount was owned by private parties, including Carr V. Van
Anda, a former managing editor of The New York Times, and then it was bought by
the Foxhollow School, a girls’ boarding school, which sold it to a developer in
1977. In 1980 the property was purchased by Edith Wharton Restoration, which
leased it to Shakespeare & Company, a local theatrical troupe, until 2001, when
long-postponed renovation began. The Mount has received numerous preservation
grants over the years, as well as private gifts, and much of the house now looks
the way it did when Wharton lived there.

“It’s easy to get people to pay for a new roof or to plant the garden,” Ms.
Copeland said. “What’s hard is to get them to pay for operations.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company