The Fight to Save a Decrepit Pink House by the Sea The Fight to Save a Decrepit Pink House by the Sea
The New York Times
The 99-year-old house on Boston’s North Shore is battered and uninhabited. And yet, it is beloved by artists and locals — so much that they helped pause its demolition.
There is no shortage of beautiful houses along the coastline north of Boston: houses with graceful white columns and gleaming granite stairs. Houses with sparkling bay windows and manicured gardens.
The Pink House, perched alone above a sprawling salt marsh at the edge of Plum Island, has none of those features. Decrepit and uninhabited — grungy, even, by now — the house is scarred by peeling paint and missing windows. When an auction in the summer drew no bidders, it was scheduled for demolition.
And yet, for reasons that defy easy explanation, the 99-year-old Pink House is beloved by artists, locals and summer visitors to this windswept marshland just south of the New Hampshire border. Since its owner, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, announced in August that the house would be torn down, an uprising among its admirers has led to a $1 million dollar gift from an anonymous donor seeking to preserve it and an intervention by Gov. Maura Healey.
The governor — who grew up a dozen miles away, in southern New Hampshire — stepped in just before the cupola-topped house was to be razed this month, asking for more time and dialogue to reach an alternate solution. For now, the demolition is on hold, and talks are underway, a spokeswoman for Ms. Healey said.
As they waited to learn if the Pink House would be saved, its devotees described it as a tough old beauty with an air of mystery, and a kind of empty vessel, taking on whatever meaning and emotion each of its beholders brings to it. Many used feminine pronouns to refer to a building they consider family.
“I always saw her as a ballerina, sitting in the marsh alone in her tattered tutu,” said Edith Heyck, 75, an artist who first painted the Pink House in 1978. “To watch her neglect, to watch her changing — there’s an aura of romantic tragedy about it.”
