ONLINE - Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood

Name: ONLINE - Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood
Start: 2025-03-25T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-03-25T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Zoom

Schedule

Tue Mar 25 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Zoom | Cicero, IL

Celebrating the 147th anniversary of the birth of Frances Glessner Lee!
In 1886, Isaac Scott designed a log cabin playhouse for eight-year-old Fanny Glessner at the family’s summer estate, The Rocks, in New Hampshire. It was complete with child-sized furniture and a working stove. It was in the playhouse that Fanny honed her skills at homemaking, hosting tea parties and making jams and jellies. The playhouse still stands.
The newly published book, Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood explores children’s playhouses built on British and American estates between the 1850s and the mid-1930s, including Fanny’s house and the Sears family log cabin, built in the 1880s on Prairie Avenue and now located in Kenilworth. Different from the prefabricated buildings that later populated suburban backyards, these playhouses were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for British royalty, American industrialists, and Hollywood stars. As author Abigail A. Van Slyck shows, these buildings were more than extravagant spaces to cultivate children’s imaginations and fantasy lives.
From Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s Swiss Cottage, built on their Osborne estate in 1853, to the children’s cottage constructed on the grounds of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport mansion in 1886, and from the miniature bungalow commissioned in 1926 for the Dodge Brothers Motor Company heiress to the corporate-sponsored glass-block playhouse given to Shirley Temple in 1936, Van Slyck surveys a variety of playhouses and their milieus to trace the evolution of elite childhood and the broader social practices of wealth. Playhouses and Privilege makes clear that, far from being frivolous, playhouses were carefully planned architectural manifestations of adult concerns, integral to the reproduction of class privilege.
Abigail A. Van Slyck is the Dayton Professor Emeritus of Art History at Connecticut College and author of A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960 (Minnesota, 2010) and Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920.
This program will be recorded and a link will be sent to all registrants. The link will remain live for seven days following the program.
Co-sponsored by Forest Society North at The Rocks, and the Kenilworth Historical Society.
$15 per person / $12 for members