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Community Corner

Spending Summer Vacation With Paint Brush in Hand

At historic Bartow-Pell, a group of visitors is learning about more than just the history of the house this week.

Call it archi-tourism.

Like the similar concept of ecotourism, the idea behind archi-tourism is to visit some place with architectural significance and maybe mix in some volunteer work along the way.

That sounds like a pretty good description of what’s going on for the next few days at the .

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A group of nine volunteers, including several from France and Florida, is spending the week at the stately house in Pelham Bay Park, where they are not only learning about the historic and architectural significance of the structure and its surroundings but also contributing to the ongoing restoration of the property.

As I wrote in a , the house, which was built between 1836 and 1842, has links to the Pell family, whose paterfamilias, Thomas Pell, bought 9,000 acres from the Siwanoy Indians in 1654, encompassing a large swath of what is today the Bronx and lower Westchester County.

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One of the features of the house, which is the only survivor of a number of country mansions that used to dot the area along Long Island Sound, are the interior shutters for the windows, which allowed the occupants to regulate the sunlight and, perhaps more important, the accompanying heat inside the house.

Some of the windows and their accompanying shutters are impressively large. In the mansion’s double parlor, for instance, some of the shutters are seven feet high.

Less impressive, however, is their condition. The paint is peeling away from the wood on many of them. It’s unclear when they were last sanded and painted.

“They’re a little worse for wear,” mansion executive director Ellen Bruzelius said diplomatically.

That’s where the volunteers come in. Participants in this week’s archi-tourism project, which was coordinated by the groups Adventures in Preservation and Preservation Volunteers, will learn how to do a historically sensitive restoration of 19th century shutters, using the mansion’s interior shutters for the exercise.

The workshop, dubbed the “Shutter Shop on Shore Road,” is being led by preservation specialists from Fifty Three Restorations, a New York City-based restoration firm.

The volunteers, who paid $295 to cover the cost of materials, instruction and food, will learn how to strip old paint, including how to remove old lead paint safely, then sand, prime and paint the shutters in an historically appropriate way. They’ll also refurbish the shutter hardware.

“This is a wonderful way to not only be able to teach restoration skills to volunteers who are interested in preservation, but also to get important work done at our site,” said Bruzelius. “I am very much hoping that by the end of the week, we’ll have 16 looking-like-new, ready-to-be-hung shutters for the parlor.”

Between work sessions, the volunteers will hear from a variety of speakers, including Sybil Young, the preservation projects manager of New York City’s Parks and Recreation department; Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, a non-profit group that advocates for New York City’s historic districts; and Arthur Scinta, a Pelham real-estate broker and architectural historian.

The shutter project isn’t the first archi-tourism effort at Bartow-Pell. Similar volunteer workshops restored the bluestone paths in the garden, an effort that stretched over three years, and last year the Sierra Club organized volunteers to clear brush on the grounds. The Bartow-Pell staff is looking forward to a repeat of that project this fall, and more shutter workshops are likely.

In fact, archi-tourism could prove habit-forming at the historic house, which needs constant upkeep.

“It would be great if we could become known for our preservation workshops,” Bruzelius said. “There just aren’t enough hands on deck to do everything that needs to be done around here.”

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