Law & Order: Special Dollhouse Unit

Long before Lenny Briscoe & Quincy M.E were cracking tough cases, millionaire heiress and New England socialite Frances Glessner Lee was teaching police officers around the country how to play with dolls.  Ms. Glessner Lee was very serious about her doll houses, deadly serious - as you can see above. Realizing that there was no way for students in the then nascent field of  forensic investigation to gain practical experience interpreting crime scenes, Ms. Glessner Lee combined her lifelong love of miniatures and her considerable talent, wealth and drive to construct a series of elaborately detailed, dollhouse dioramas depicting real life crime scenes.  Her attention to detail was staggeringly gruesome, everything was depicted exactly as it had been in real life, and most of the scenes are deeply disturbing.  As gruesome as these depictions are, you can't help mentally trying to decipher the events leading up to the scene, and that is what makes these models such a fantastic teaching tool. Even today, in the age of virtual reality, many of these models are still in use, and a new generation of modelers have been inspired by her work.  Photographer Corinne May Botz has written a fascinating book about Ms Glessner Lee and her unusual dollhouses that I highly recommend.

Henry Beston's Outermost House

In 1927 Henry Beston from Quincy, MA moved into this little (20x16) cottage way out on the spit at Nauset Beach on Cape Cod.  What had originally just been a vacation stay turned into a full year on the beach, documented in his book, "The Outermost House".  The Nauset beach spit for those who have not been there is an extremely narrow barrier beach peninsula formed by sand washing down from the north.  Below we see the house looking towards the mainland over the great marsh, what we cannot see is the open Atlantic on the other side of the dunes.  The unique location, between the tranquil marsh and the open ocean really comes through in Beston's beautiful narrative.  Beston's patient and thoughtful descriptions of the weather, wildlife, people and place really capture the essence of this dramatic setting, it is one of my favorite books.  The house unfortunately is no more, having been swept out to see along with much of Coast Guard beach during the blizzard of '78