The Ed Zabriskie house, and what it means to steward a work of architecture

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Allow me a moment to gush about a house that is for sale here in Omaha. Called the Edgar Zabriskie house after its builder and first occupant, it is a beautiful Queen Anne-style mansion and was the first house built in the historic Bemis Park neighborhood, in 1889.

My wife and I both love old houses, and this is our favorite house in Omaha, and our second-favorite in the entire world, surpassed only by her own parents’ mansion where she grew up. Well guess what! The Ed Zabriskie house is currently for sale—and for the shockingly low price of a half-million dollars, which in the current Omaha housing market is unbelievably low. What a steal! Look at the woodwork—all original—in the front parlor!

Check out that mantelpiece!

Look at all that ornamental turnwork on the façade! And the period-appropriate paint job—aah!

The Edwin Zabriskie house is indeed a treasure. It was placed on the national Register of Historic Places in the 1970s and has since been kept in very-close-to-original state. And really, if I could afford it, I would buy it—EXCEPT—

It isn’t in very good physical condition. All that woodwork on the inside, those cherry parquet floors? It’s all frightfully scuffed up. They must have kept a dog locked up in the basement because the door at the top of the basement stairs is nearly scratched through. The basement itself stinks of mildew. We weren’t allowed to use the back servants’ staircase because it was in an unsafe condition. The two other staircases were tricky enough; the railings were barely hanging onto the walls. The third story has several holes in the floor from when the HVAC and electrical systems had been repaired. The front porch railing is rotting away, and the house needs a new coat of paint.¹ None of this, except for the broken porch railing, is visible in the real estate listing photos (realtors probably take classes in how to hide things like that). The house a beautiful building but anyone who lives in it could only use the first and second floors; everything else still requires an enormous amount of restoration.

How could anyone, these days, take care of such a house? Think for a moment about the modern American lifestyle and how this house simply could not be part of it. First, the homeowners would be in charge of maintenance. Sure, they might not do it themselves—but they still have to schedule it, to make decisions about what needs to be done. And then who will be cleaning this monstrous pile? I don’t know of anyone who has live-in servants anymore. Are you going to have a maid service come in on the regular to do the cleaning?

Even more: what would you do with all that space?? The house is listed as having seven bedrooms.² The average family today has something like 1.7 kids. You wouldn’t know what to do with so much room! Are you going to have houseguests at all times? Maybe you will throw wild Gatsbyesque parties at the house—if so, you’ll definitely need a live-in maid. Besides—you’re going to move out anyway in a few years. The average length of time between moves in America is what, like, five years? That’s not enough time to get deeply invested in a house, not enough time to watch your kids grow up in it; not enough time to fall in love with it. So why not let the rough spots fester, why not leave that scratched-up basement door, those broken back stairs; just close off the attic since you don’t need the space anyway—move out in a few years and let the next owner inherit the problems.

Outside of a deliberate multi-generational commitment by the builder’s family to make caring for their house a part of their family’s culture and identity, houses like the Zabriskie mansion will fall to ruins in a few decades. I don’t know much about the Zabriskie family. All I could find about them was a note about the house in Omaha City Architecture, a book published by the Omaha Junior League in 1976. The book states that Edgar Zabriskie, Jr. was “a gentle, lonely man who loved his home” and that he died of a stroke while sitting on his front porch in 1968. That’s kind of a sad story! Did he have any kids? I don’t know what happened to the house after he died. Someone, obviously, owned it, but I have no idea how much restoration, if any, they were able to put into it.

Several of Omaha’s great mansions have been preserved by being turned into apartments—and some have been destroyed in the same way. There is another stately Victorian only a few blocks from my house; it was converted to apartments, and now it’s falling into ruin. But it would be a falsehood for me to say that the only way a fine old house can be kept in good condition is by its being owner-occupied. The Cornish mansion—Omaha’s finest example of a Second Empire house, with 13-foot ceilings in the third-floor ballroom—has been thoroughly renovated by developers after a disastrous fire, and the outside looks like it is in excellent condition. But much of the character was lost in the process; the tall ceilings have been dropped, and of course a single-family home has a different feel to it than a collection of apartments. There is simply no great demand for grand, tall, ornate mansions in a densely urban setting. Culture has changed.

But what is an owner of one of these houses to do? Styles change, “fashion is the thing that goes out of fashion,”³ and are you really supposed to try and freeze time, keeping an old and unfashionable house in suspended animation while the world keeps rolling along without you? What is the best way to steward the artistic creations of an architect?

In architecture, questions of artistic integrity and original intent are not as important as in, say, a painting. A painting that has suffered damage cannot simply be repainted to match its former appearance; that wouldn’t be considered restoring—it would be destructive. Problems of proper restorative methodology in the fine arts can be very tricky to negotiate. One method, called tratteggio, involves making patterns of small lines in areas where the painting has been damaged.⁴ This is very similar to the Japanese art of kintsugi, the method of restoring broken ceramic ware in such a way that the cracks remain very obvious and become an important part of the repaired piece.⁵ It is considered important in these artistic traditions to define what is original and what is a restorative addition; what was touched by the artist’s hand and what was the work of later curators and stewards.

In a building, however, the goal of restoration is to make the building usable—nothing more. For this reason it’s not a travesty of the architect’s original intentions to retrofit a single-family house into apartments. But what if the house is kept as a single-family dwelling yet aggressively modified to suit the new owner’s tastes? Would it lose an essential aspect of its original character? There is a beautiful Queen Anne house only about a mile from where I live which has been thoroughly modernized; the servants’ back staircase has been removed, much of the woodwork has been painted, and the second-floor tower room—the best room in the house—has been turned into a closet.

Were these good choices, or bad? The house is certainly not as it was, but it’s still a single-family dwelling; is this close enough to the builders’ original intent for their artwork?

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1. How do I know all of this? Because my wife and I go to real estate open houses for fun, that’s why; it’s a thing we do, even though we have no intention of ever moving out of the house we currently live in.

2. At the open house we were only able to count five bedrooms. We asked the realtor about this and she told us they were counting some random room on the first floor as a bedroom, as well as a corner of the attic. So that’s cheating—but still, it’s an enormous amount of space.

3. I wish I could properly attribute this quote, but I can’t remember where I read it. I first read it only in this last month. Was it on Substack somewhere? I don’t know.

4. Described in depth by D. Graham Burnett in “Facing the Unknown,” Cabinet, issue 40 (Winter 2010 / 2011). The article explains at length the history and technique of tratteggio; it’s a very good article, worth looking for at your library. At one point Burnett asks if tratteggio counts as “a very small forgery.”

5. As far as I know, kintsugi is only done to repair ceramics which have been accidentally broken; if, though, I deliberately smash a vase and then use kintsugi methods to put it back together, would that be considered a forgery?