Schwixon: the Schwab-Dixon Mansion

03/17/2026

View from the front porch last night. Orange is the flame from another batch of steel at the Edgar Thomson Works. Charlie would’ve been able to see and take satisfaction from the same thing, especially from the upstairs tower window in the billiards room, on the SW (downhill) side.

03/08/2026

Recall that Charlie was largely responsible for the briefly flourishing Rhyolite NV (not all that far from Las Vegas). Goldfield NV is not all that far from Rhyolite (by the standards of distance that exist out there), and it's not as complete a ghost town as Rhyolite. They even have their own radio station that operates out of the empty hotel there, Radio Goldfield. (One of my friends in the Chestnut Fdn was out there hiking and tipped me to it.) If you have an Alexa or like device you can listen by just saying "Alexa, play Radio Goldfield". I'm listening to it now.

One of the little features on the station is reading news from Goldfield from the early 1900s. So in that connection, here's a bit of news from Braddock about Schwixon from 1894. The power outage that we recently had here is nothing new. That's why light fixtures back then were combo gas/electric.

01/05/2026

This is pretty cool. There probably aren't too many mansions that have themselves facilitated events of historical significance. But one of those is in Tuxedo Park NY, owned by Alfred Loomis at the time of the event, which was development of radar just on the cusp of WWII. There's a good book about it, too: “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II” (Conant, 2003). Cheap copies abound on Alibris. Here's a short summary:

[Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century -- Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others -- at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, in the late 1930s. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, one of the leading scientific advisers of World War II, enjoyed unprecedented access to Loomis' papers, as well as to people intimately involved in his life and work. She pierces through Loomis' obsessive secrecy and illuminates his role in assuring the Allied victory.]

I read the book not all that long after it came out, and about 8yrs ago PBS did a special on Loomis and his secret lab, that people like Einstein Niels Bohr, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and Werner Heiusenberg had visited.

But what did/does it look like inside? Now it's for sale, and if you can mentally subtract some of the modern furnishings you can get a sense of the interior here. (I'm not a great fan of Tudor, bit the rustic stonework is great, as is the rustic setting):

On top of a scenic mountain with nearby lakes and within beautiful gate-guarded Tuxedo Park, the Loomis Lab is a three-storey stone and timbered mansion built in 1901 for Spencer Trask, philanthropist and founder of art colony Yaddo.

01/01/2026

Euclid Ave in Cleveland was Millionaire's Row. They're almost all long-gone, and until now I had never seen a collection of pix of Cleveland mansions, so this is just for reference. They're all larger than Schwixon, which is not a good formula for survival.

Discussing Millionaires' Row in Cleveland, OhioMusic: Decoherence (Scott Buckley)

12/20/2025

Yesterday, walking out back that is about ground zero of the 1755 battle and wishing the impossible - that I could see what the landscape looked like at the time, where, as I like to say, George Washington very nearly never made it to the dollar bill. I think I know which parts are about original grade and which aren't, but that's about it.

But then I started thinking of the timeline and calculated that Schwixon sits at about the midpoint between the battle and now. And checking the math back inside, it does, nearly exactly!

1889 is the usual date attached to the place, but I think that for most of that year, anyway, it was in the planning stages. They moved in in Feb 1892, so let's take 1890 as the year construction started. 1755-1890 is 135yrs, and 1790-2025 is 135yrs, so it's as close to the midpoint as you're going to get!

12/06/2025

Moving to some indoor projects that haven't gotten attention they've deserved, in this case the medicine cabinet from the 1920 renovations that came with the addition to the N corner (with the flat roof). I've had it out to strip and refinish for at least a couple yrs.

Since I periodically get asked if I ever find anything in the walls etc, (the answer is no), here's at least something that partly qualifies. This Nov 18, 1920 edition of the Jamestown Evening News was the padding between the mirror and the inner cover, put there by the nameless shop that made the cabinet. Once upon a time there was probably a shop decal somewhere, but that was long gone, or maybe under layers of paint. The left edge was trimmed to fit the cabinet. After this brief period in daylight, it is now back inside.

I took shots of a few other pages - I'll add them as comments later. Not much of special interest.

10/24/2025

Another architectural divergence:

In the late 18th century, Gustav III of Sweden embarked on a grand project to build a palace to rival Versailles just outside of Stockholm. The extravagance all came to naught with his demise in 1792, but the stone pillar foundations, which was as far as they got, remain and are a cool place to visit. (I've been there!)

Pix of the foundations at the end of the W'pedia page here, along with links to the event(s) of 1792. (His son Gustav IV Adolf, an unfortunate youth who proved incompetent, succeeded him and wound up losing Finland to Russia.)

The Haga Palace Ruins (Swedish: Haga slottsgrund or Swedish: Stora Haga slottsruin) are the remnants of King Gustav III's ambitious vision for a grand and opulent palace in Hagaparken (Haga Park). Known as the Haga Great Palace (Swedish: Haga slottsgrund), the ruins are located in Solna Municipality...

10/16/2025

Another of the very occasional posts on other pieces of wonderful architecture. I may have even posted Ramon Novarro's house here before. It's spectacular from the front, but this view that I'd never seen before is cool, too. What I didn't know was that Diane Keaton owned it in the '90s and put a lot into its restoration.

Another reason to like Diane Keaton, and miss her.

During the 1990s, Diane Keaton owned silent movie star, Ramon Novarro's house. designed by architect Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright). Diane worked tirelessly to restore this masterpiece to its original condition. The Mayan-themed Art Deco-style home was built in 1928. Novarro originally commissioned the house for his manager, Louis Samuel, but took ownership after discovering Samuel had embezzled funds to pay for it.

(This was not the house Ramon was murdered in. That tragedy happened later at his home in studio city)

09/12/2025

It's not official until the Certificate arrives, right?

08/02/2025

First notice. More to come, I imagine.

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06/03/2025

I started to write that it's official, but really it's just the second hurdle cleared. The first was writing and submitting the application for listing on the National Register if Historic Places. the second hurdle was for the application to go before the Preservation Board of the PA Historical and Museum Commission, and it was just approved without any objection or discussion, in contrast to some other applications.

Next hurdle should be acceptance by the Secy Interior, which is generally a pro forma thing, and then it will be official.

Since it's a three-step process and I need a pic, here are the three granite steps I built a few yrs ago, leading from the side yard down to the trough to enter the greenhouses from.

05/16/2025

Thank you Alissa! (Whoever you are.)