Well, here’s a bit of sad news: the Edgewood Yacht Club, historic site of my wedding reception (that’s not why it was historic) burnt to the ground yesterday. It was built in 1908, the year Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes got married and played the Follies, Gertrude Hoffman debuted her Salome Dance at Hammerstein’s, and Mack Sennett went to work for D.W. Griffith. The place weathered much in its over a century of existence, including Hurricane Carol in 1954, as evidenced by this startling photo:
The interior, where our highly unorthodox multicultural wedding reception included a zydeco band, a swing era all-female quartet, dada speeches, and a groom in a kilt being given an old fashioned Jewish chair dance (organized by the Cohen Brothers), looked like this:
And yesterday, it looked like this:
The Club’s new Commodore Jeffrey Lanphear said “We lost the most beautiful building on Narragansett Bay” in yesterday’s Providence Journal. There had once been dozens, scores like this – – with an outsized percentage having been lost to suspicious fires. No word yet on whether this one is suspicious. But it’s Rhode Island. I’m suspicious.
(Travalanche) 