TYB
>>20231380, >>20231801, >>20232067, >>20232113 CALL TO DIG INTO THE COLONY HOTEL, KENNEBUNKPORT, MAINE
>con't
Charles A. Birnbaum- President + CEO - President + CEO
Posted: Jun 17, 2013
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Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is the president, CEO, and founder of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF).Prior to creating TCLF, Birnbaum spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park ServiceHistoric Landscape Initiative (HLI) and a decade in private practice in New York City, with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design.
Since taking the helm at the foundation in 2008, Birnbaum’s major projects include the web-based initiative What’s Out There (a searchable database of the nation’s designed landscape heritage) and the creation of the first International Prize in Landscape Architecture named for Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. He has authored and edited numerous publications, including: Experiencing Olmsted: The Enduring Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted's North American Landscapes (Timber Press, 2022); Shaping the Postwar Landscape, (UVA Press, 2018); the Modern Landscapes: Transition and Transformation series (Princeton Architectural Press, Volumes printed in 2012 and 2014); Shaping the American Landscape (UVA Press, 2009); Design with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage (UVA Press, 2005); Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture (1999) and its follow-up publication, Making Post-War Landscapes Visible (2004, both for Spacemaker Press); Pioneers of American Landscape Design (McGraw Hill, 2000); and The Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes (National Park Service, 1996).
In 1995, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) awarded the HLI the President's Award of Excellence. In 1996, the ASLA inducted Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society. He served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, during which time he founded TCLF. In 2004, Birnbaum was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation and spent the spring and summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome. In 2008, he was the Visiting Glimcher Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University's Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture. That same year, the ASLA awarded him the Alfred B. LaGasse Medal, followed by the President’s Medal in 2009. In 2017, Birnbaum received the ASLA Medal, the Society's highest award. Birnbaum has served as a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, a visiting critic at Harvard’s GSD, and currently serves as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He was also a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post (2011-18). In 2020 Birnbaum received the Landezine International Landscape Honour Award as well as the Garden Club of America’s Historic Preservation Medal. In 2023 TCLF received ASLA's Olmsted Medal.
> https://www.nps.gov/articles/summary-and-conclusion.htm
Article • OSS Training in the National Parksand Service Abroad in World War II
Summary and Conclusion
Catoctin Mountain Park, Prince William Forest Park
The 65th anniversary ofthe opening of OSS training camps for spies, saboteurs, guerrilla leaders, and clandestine radio-operators in the National Parks—in particular Catoctin Mountain Park and Prince William Forest Park—occurred in 2007. Although the training camps were closed and the OSS terminated in1945, the valuable contributions to the Allied victory made by those facilities and by Donovan’s organization itself are an important part of the history of World War II. William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan believed that intelligence, deception, subversion, and psychological and irregular warfare could spearhead the Allied liberation of Europe and the Far East, and he crafted a novel instrument to serve that purpose.
>OSS Training in the National Parks
…
While the most popular topics concerning the OSS for the public and scholars alike have been the cloak and dagger work of the spies and counterspies, and the behind enemy lines operations of OSS guerrilla leaders and saboteurs, the least explored area of the OSS has been its training schools. The present study,commissioned by the National Park Service to help understand the role of the National Parks in the OSS’s activities in World War II, provides considerable new light on that aspect of the OSS—and indeedon the CIA and the Special Forces which inherited some of its personnel and adopted much of the training techniques of Donovan’s organization.
…
OSS’s Secret Intelligence (SI) Branch replicated British Secret Information Service’s (SIS) use of country estates as schools for introducing recruits into the murky world of espionage. Thus, it established Training Areas E and RTU-11 (“the Farm”) in spacious manor houses with surrounding horse farms. Yet some members of each of the two American branches trained at the other’s facilities. This was particularly true in the teaching of rugged survival and close-combat techniquesat the Special Operations training camps at the two National Parks, where men preparing to be spies or other operatives sometimes joined the military recruits who were being trained physically and psychologically for clandestine raids from forest or mountain hideouts upon enemy outposts, command centers, or vital communication or transportation facilities.
Relationship of the OSS and the National Park Service
The OSS not only contributed to the eventual emergence of the CIA and Special Forces, its main institutional legacies, but it had an importantimpact upon the two National Parks, which provided a home for some of its most important training camps. The superintendents of the two parks—Ira B. Lykes at Prince William Forest Park and Garland B. (“Mike”) Williams at Catoctin Mountain Park—attested to the effects as they sought to preserve the parks while also benefiting in the long run from the military’s wartime occupation. During the war, the superintendents and their superiors worked assiduously with OSS training camp commanders to ensure that the military abided by the terms of the special permit that allowed them exclusive use of the property during the war. That meant ensuring respect for the National Park Service’s mission of preservation of the land and the resources and facilities that Congress had designated as worthy of maintaining in the public interest. But this mission had to be carried out in the extraordinary circumstances resulting from the U.S. declaration of war and America’s full scale mobilization in World War II. The War Department took over the two parks for OSS training purposes, brought firearms and explosives into the woods and declared the area to be off limits to the public for the duration of the war.
Obituary for GEORGE MADDEN BOUGHTON, 1906-1986 (Aged 80)
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Obituary for GEORGE MADDEN BOUGHTON, 1906-1986 (Aged 80)
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The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Florida •
Tue, Dec 30, 1986
Page 11
>GEORGE MADDEN BOUGHTON, 1
EORGE MADDEN BOUGHTON died of lung cancer December 26, 1986 at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He owned and managed the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach since 1935 and the Colony Hotel in Kennebunkport, Maine, since 1948. Both hotels will continue to be owned and managed by his family.
George was a member of the Atlantic City, N.J., High School" swimming team known as the "Wonder Mermen" and national champions for two years. He was elected to the Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale. At Dartmouth George was a halfback on the freshman football team, was on the swimming team all four years, and was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. In 1925 he helped Dartmouth win the New England Swimming Intercollegiates. Following graduation, he attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
During World War II he served on active duty in the navy from 1942 to 1945 and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander.
He was a charter member of the Country Club of Florida and a member of the Gulfstream Bath and Tennis Club, both of Delray Beach. In Kennebunkport, he was a member of the Cape Arundel Golf Club.
He was active in Dartmouth alumni affairs and served as chairman of the regional committee for the Hopkins Center project.
He is survived by his wife of 52 years, Agnes (Christy) Boughton, and a daughter, Jestena.
https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/1987/4/1/deaths
Just happened to pop over to Cuba for some revolution. Purely a coincidence I'm sure.
A Tale of 2 Colonies
December 2015 | view this story as a .pdf
We know and love The Colony in Kennebunkport. But have you met her uptown little sister in Delray Beach, Florida?
By Colin W. Sargent
Colonies-Dec15“My father bought this hotel with his father in 1935,” says Jestena Boughton of her landmark Colony Hotel & Cabana Club, a Mediterranean Revival palace built on the corner of stylish East Atlantic Avenue and U.S. Route One in Delray in 1926.
“He and my mother were newlyweds. After their wedding in Atlantic City, they drove down the Post Road to Key Westand caught the ferry to Havana for their honeymoon. But there was shooting in the streets” in the tumult from Batista’s rise to power, so they headed back.
“Dad had noticed this hotel, but it wasn’t open.” On the return trip, they stopped again and just stared at it. Three stories high, capped by a pair of fanciful domes and dressed in red roof tiles, The Alterap, as it was first known, was a masterpiece in stucco with distinct European flair.
Designed by Addison Mizner associate Martin Luther Hampton, the creator of numerous National Historic Landmark properties (including this one), it was shuttered because its first owner had lost his shirt in the Depression. “My father, George Boughton, was just 22. He called his father,” Atlantic City hotelier Charles Boughton, “and said, ‘Why don’t we buy this?”
Eighty years later, the Boughtons still own it. Not only is the Colony on the National Register of Historic Places, it’s the centerpiece of the downtown revitalization of Delray as this year-round resort finds itself awash in delicious restaurants, music venues, and trendy destination shopping. “Here we are, the only historic hotel still standing on Atlantic Avenue,” Jestena says.
>A Tale of 2 Colonies
The answer is Jestena, a landscape architect by training. She earned her master’s from the University of Pennsylvania before taking a job with “the city of Seattle for five years,” according to a fine story in the Delray Coastal Star by Mary Thurwachter. “Later, she taught landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Massachusetts.”
Jestena has let slip that she’s a modernist, but the Mediterranean allure of the hotel keeps pulling her in. “My dad died in 1986. When my mother died in 1994, I came here as general manager.” But this city, a paradise between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, hadn’t taken off the way it has now. “I thought of it as Dull-Ray,” she laughs. “The interior walls here were pale beige.”
Now they pop in lime, persimmon, and turquoise, with fabrics decorators would give their eye-teeth for. How does she do it?
“That’s my favorite part of the business,” she says. “Procurement,” finding the unfindable. “Procurement is even on my email address.”Not to mention understanding her guests with astonishing canniness.
Today, both the Delray and Kennebunkport Colonies are famous for their repeat visitors. “In 1994 in Delray, we didn’t have that,” Jestena says. “What we had was a handful of little old ladies. A few years later, the Photographic Workshop was built in Delray, so we were able to add middle-aged men who wanted to take a photography course. We used to have wall-to-wall carpeting upstairs, but I knew we had luscious, original Dade County pine floors under there. When the carpets left, the old ladies left.” She waits a beat. “These floors are harder. I guess they felt if they fell, they’d fall on a nice white carpet.”
The founding sense of the hotel was “for train travelers, who came here with their big trunks,” she says. “The season was from January 10 until April 10. Do you know why? They had to get home and do their taxes by April 15. And they weren’t going to miss Christmas and New Year’s in New England!”
For fledgling travelers in the motoring set, there were, and still are, 18 double-door garages in one of the hotel wings where the cars could be parked, from Model-T to Pierce-Arrow, with the chauffeurs staying in rooms directly above. Think Sabrina.
While the Colony proper is five blocks from the beach to be in the center of all the action, a shuttle relays guests to the Cabana, Club, with its stunning, private sweep of Delray Beach and 80-degree turquoise water. “Dad bought the Cabana land in 1951,” Jestena says. “We had a woodie” to shuttle guests to this oasis. There are umbrella tables, shaded beach lounge chairs, and above the dunes, a new edgeless pool designed by Jestena with opalescent glass tiles designed by Jestena that light up for incredible magic at night.
How often is it true that there’s enchantment on both sides of a looking glass? The difference here is, The Colony in Kennebunkport (sample guest across the centuries, Gregory Peck) is a complete destination in itself, taking guests into its embrace and answering their every need. The more Bohemian Colony Delray (sample guest Leonard Nimoy) connects you to urban discoveries. Hey, just because they’re sisters doesn’t mean they have to be the same, does it?
https://www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/2015/11/a-tale-of-2-colonies/
AGNES BOUGHTON,
By
PUBLISHED: July 16, 1994 at 4:00 a.m. | UPDATED: September 25, 2021 at 4:00 a.m.
Agnes Christy Boughton, the matriarch of the venerable Colony Hotel in Delray Beach, has died at her summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Mrs. Boughton was 82.
She had been a part of the Colony since 1935, when her husband, George, and father-in-law, Charles D. Boughton, bought the nine-year-old Alterep Hotel at 525 E. Atlantic Ave. They changed its name to the Colony Hotel and started a tradition of graciousness that has lasted through the present.
In addition to being involved in the operation of the hotel, Mrs. Boughton had been an avid golfer since high school and had been a women’s champion at several courses in Delray Beach. She still holds the women’s course record at the Cape Arundel Golf Club in Maine.
Mrs. Boughton was also an avid reader, recalled Chris Brown, executive director of Delray Beach’s Community Redevelopment Agency.
“She was an extremely energetic woman,” Brown said. “Outside of her family, she liked golf and reading. She read two or three books a week.”
As president of Boughton Hotel Inc., she had been actively involved with the hotels until recent years, said hotel general manager Carol Thomas.
The Colony is the last of Delray Beach’s seasonal hotels, opening its doors only from November to April. From May to October, the family and many of the staff go to the Colony Hotel in Kennebunkport, bought by the family in 1948.
After George Boughton died in 1986, day-to-day operation of the hotels was taken over by their daughter, Jestena. The 103-room Colony was remodeled and has become an integral part of the restoration of the downtown area of Delray Beach.
A native of Philadelphia, Mrs. Boughton was a member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and The Little Club in Delray Beach.
Mrs. Boughton died July 10. A memorial service has been scheduled for Aug. 11 at St. Ann’s Church in Kennebunkport. Bibber Memorial Chapel in Kennnebunk is charge of arrangements.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two nieces.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1994/07/16/agnes-boughton/