(Last week we explored a fascinating piece of 20th century Cape Cod architectural history, focusing on one soulful, rotting example in the Cape Cod National Seashore. This week we learn about how that came down — all-but literally.)
The Cape Cod National Seashore had every legal right to take the Kuhn house in 2003. They could have sooner; the family sold to the feds in the 1970s with a 25-year rental tacked on that expired years earlier.
What happened next became the small tragedy.
The last representative of the Kuhn family, Gina Coyle, was removed.
“We wanted to get her out and clean the slate,” recalls Cultural Resources Manager and Park Historian Bill Burke. “We used it as researcher housing. (Available) housing gets more researchers to do things, that’s the big hang-up usually.”
But the Seashore was confronted with a problem created in part by the nature of modernist design: The flat roof (with a skylight, to make matters worse) was leaking.
“We invested in a rubber membrane roof” to replace the original tar and gravel, Burke continues, “but the roof started leaking again. At that point, we couldn’t get funding to repair it.”
Most homeowners would scramble, improvise, do anything to protect their investment. Not the Seashore. The house was abandoned, not so much as a blue tarp tacked over the leaks.
Was the Seashore’s decision to “let nature take its course,” understanding the destructive implications?
“That’s fair,” acknowledges Burke.
Growing recognition of the unique history and design of these “Bauhaus” homes, none considered important or worth preserving years earlier, drove the Seashore to commission a comprehensive survey. The Kuhn house was one of 11 owned by the Park Service that were “found to be significant,” eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Criteria included architectural elements and intriguing personal histories as well as cultural and social context.
The Cape Cod Modern House Trust, created after and apart from Gina Coyle’s early advocacy, won rights to protect, rehabilitate, and use four of those 11 houses after years of fundraising and negotiation.
But Kuhn was too far gone.
“Sadly the house had longstanding roof leaks that I notified the Park about on multiple occasions,” writes Peter McMahon, head of the Trust. “When I photographed the interior almost 10 years ago for Cape Cod Modern (a handsome coffee table book McMahon co-authored) we had to wear respirators due to the black mold inside. It’s way past being saved and it would have to be an all-new replication of the house from scratch.”
Coyle would not give up. In August, 2023, she wrote to then-Seashore Superintendent Brain Carlstrom to request she be allowed to make “emergency repairs.” She outlined steps to patch roof leaks (including a collapsed skylight) and get fresh air in to fight more black mold growth. She offered up to $100,000 she said she had raised to take on the work, promising support from local “builders and tradespeople.”
She never heard back.
“It was a nice offer,” says Historian Burke, “but it didn’t change our minds … From our maintenance team’s point of view, it’s beyond repair.”
The Kuhn house is slated for demolition, with yet more irony: Burke reports that the Seashore does not have funding to level the little building, much as it didn’t have funding to preserve it.
So seasons pass, rot spreads, ruin descends: Nature’s course.
“CCNS has over 75 historic buildings and related ancillary features,” Burke added in an email. “When new properties are added to our inventory (like Highland Light from the US Coast Guard in 1996) and when these modern period houses were found to be historic, it never comes with baseline funding for their maintenance. All parks have to chase funding from various pots of money from the national park system and compete with all the other national parks to plug holes to keep everything afloat.
“A less than ideal system,” he wryly concluded.
Sarah Kuhn, granddaughter of the original owners, “carried the torch for the family” on Cape Cod, but she is resigned:
“I gave up on the house. It’s become a lovely memory for me.”
She still wonders if the posts and beams could be saved; perhaps some professor of modern American architecture could turn it into a great hands-on class project. But she has no energy to push the Seashore and has settled into the Maine coast.
“I’ve walked away,” she says.
NEXT: CAPE COD’S MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT WAS BORN IN ANOTHER HOME IN THE SEASHORE — ALSO DESTROYED BY NEGLECT.
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Thank you again Seth for this update on a fascinating bit of our history. There has to be a better partnership between the Park and the "peoples" on buildings the Park can't afford to maintain. We are having a real live housing crisis on the Outer Cape. There is no argument for allowing potential housing to be neglected into demolition.