Connections between Chapter Three and the McAllister House

Through further research about my beloved historical museum, I have made a few connections between our text, The Virtual Widow, and the McAllister House! I never thought a twenty-first century tome about film history and virtual perspectives could have anything in common with a nineteenth-century home in Colorado Springs. No...the McAllister house was not written by Anne Friedberg and no it is not 357 pages long. I know my sarcasm is simply building scintillating tension and now I have you on the edge of your seats. Well you might as well slouch back into your culturally constructed bad posture- I don't have anything THAT profound to report. If you remember, in Chapter Three Friedberg addressed that between the 17th and 19th centuries, European citizens were taxed by the number of windows their house possessed. Thus, glass became a governmental standard for the measurement of economic success. Well...this trend must have jumped ship and scurried over to the Wild West of the then booming United States. In the McAllister house, I've been instructed to share with tourists that the cottage's pocket windows were incorporated to evade a similar window tax. You see, the windows travel the full height of the parlor and dining room, and on hot summer evenings they were swung open, like a door, to allow air circulation. Well, since homes in the early decades of the Fountain Colony were intermittently taxed on the number of their windows and doors- such pocket windows helped to save the McAllister's some major bucks! On years that homes were taxed on doors, the pocket-windows were propped open to assert that they were actually doors. Then on years they were taxed on their doors, the pocket-windows were kept shut and curtains elegantly draped to showcase their obvious existence as paned windows. Nifty huh?!?!? I have to say my heart swelled with pride for Major McAllister and his architect when I first stumbled across that tidbit in my studies. How extraordinary! I would never have come up with such a scheme in a million years.

Friedberg also asserts that glass was used as an indicator of wealth and status. This notion of material being a measure of an individual's wealth also parallel's my research of the McAllister House. First of all, Fountain Colony did not have the timber available to support the construction of homes for the invading Colorado immigrants. So Major McAllister, like all his neighbors, imported the materials for his home's construction. However, since he was a man of means, Major McAllister spared no expense and brought only the best bricks, steel, wood, marble and GLASS by train from Philadelphia for his quaint Victorian cottage. Could you imagine shipping glass from so far away on the rickety trains of the nineteenth century? I couldn't. I've been on my fair share of twenty-first century railways and I don't know how panes of glass could survive contemporary voyages, let alone a voyage more than a century ago. The McAllister's also had the marble for their fireplaces and mantles quarried and shaped in Pennsylvania then transported to the Colorado prairie. Perhaps its because I'm a pessimist...but I don't think I would have had the faith to let such precious materials travel so far with no guarantee that they would survive. Anyway- both the glass and marble as well as the fortune it took to ship all the materials so far are what attest to the financial value of the McAllister house. If any of you have ever visited, you'd know that the place is so teeny that its value could not be accurately estimated by its size alone, unlike it's colossal cousin- Glenn Eyrie.

Please come see me at my favorite spot in all Colorado Springs- McAllister House Historical Museum!