Trail Site #15 : Harbor View Hotel Site, 21 Eastern Point Road
DIRECTIONS: From Rockaway Hotel site walk back on Rackliffe to Wonson Street and take a sharp right. Walk past the Rocky Neck Cultural Center continuing onto Rocky Neck Ave. You will pass the parking lot on the left. Walk or drive to the end of Rocky Neck Avenue, turn right and stop at 21 Eastern Point Road to see the site of the former Harbor View Hotel.
“…in those good old Gloucester days [when] Twachtman, DeCamp, Tarbell, Childe Hassam and other equally strong painters met for endless discussion before the log fire of the Harbor View.” — GDT, Oct. 4, 1915
Once plentiful and now gone, the summer hotels and boarding houses on and in proximity to Rocky Neck were mostly founded around the turn of the 19th century. Literary figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, and Longfellow graced this area, as well as composers, inventors, artists and adventurers. The Harbor View was the residence of Mrs. Benjamin Brazier. She first opened it as a summer boarding house, then expanded by annexing neighboring homes and constructing a large new building with a fine view of the harbor, a long pier, and a float for fishing and boating.
Eventually, the Harbor View accommodated 135 guests in eight buildings. The smoking room boasted a frieze created by various artists. The dining room and lobby were hung with valuable etchings and paintings, many presented to the McLoud family, who later became proprietors. They were, “friends as well as hosts of their distinguished guests. The house, in fact, has that same atmosphere, the atmosphere of a home where a family has lived graciously and hospitably for generations.”
Among the famous artists who stayed at the Harbor View were Frank Duveneck (1848- 1919) and John H. Twachtman (1853-1902). Twachtman was at the forefront of the American avant-garde. Although a “loner” generally, he was well liked and greatly respected by his fellow artists who included Thomas Dewing, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Joseph DeCamp, and his former teacher and friend Frank Duveneck.
Twachtman spent the last three summers of his life in Gloucester. These were exciting times for the colony of artists who gathered there. Many of them were old friends of his from Cincinnati, New York, and Europe. During his last year, 1902, he lived in a cottage on the grounds of the Harbor View Hotel, overlooking Wonson’s Cove. He died unexpectedly that year and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, in Gloucester.
“By the death of John H. Twachtman, the world has lost an artist of the first rank…He is too modern, probably, to be fully recognized or appreciated at present: but his place will be recognized in the future.” Thomas Dewing, in the North American Review, April 1903.