Casey's Cottage

Casey's Cottage. . , Formerly the Carriage House for Mexico Point Club, where horses and carriages were housed to bring guests from the train station. In the 1920s-30s, when the park switched to motorized vehicles, William Casey, Columbia University professor, asked permission to transform the building into a Medieval Manor House,, The Student-Artists , William Casey was extremely popular with his students, who frequently voted his class the most valuable of their college curriculum. He invited several students each summer to come and spend the summer at Mexico Point to enjoy the cool breezes and relaxed living. In exchange, they had to work on the artwork inside the cottage. They carved and painted the figures that Bishof designed, and often added designs of their own. It is clear from the many decorations in the Cottage that it was the work of many artists working together in comradeship and appreciation for the period they were depicting., The Moat and Windows , Casey worked with his friend, Severin Bishof to transform the carriage house. They built a moat, or defensive structure, around two sides of the building with narrow windows which in a true defensive structure would be used to shoot arrows from crossbows at the enemy. But Casey and Bishof were also interested in creating a place of beauty, and so although the windows were the size and shape for defense, they installed stained glass windows in them. Instead of lead to connect the pieces of glass, they used something like tar which became stiff and brittle over time, and the glass fell out. New stained-glass windows were built in 2020 as a community project financed by the Shineman foundation in which 18 new windows were designed by people aged 6 to 86 from Oswego to Pulaski., Archaic Writing on Ceiling Beams , There is a Latin quote by Cicero on the beams closest to the fireplace and a longer one by Chaucer (although some names have been inserted in various places, presumably names of some of the students who worked on the artwork and, perhaps, some of their girlfriends.), The Fireplace , Casey and Bishof constructed a fireplace {obscured], using the stones from the shore that had been weathered by the lake. Rather than a simple fireplace with a large firebox at the bottom tapering to a much narrower chimney, they built a hollow stone chamber on each side of the firebox and the chimney with openings at the bottom and at the top of the room so that cold air would be drawn into the chamber by the warmth of the fireplace. This air would warm and as it did so would rise to the upper opening where it would come out into the room again. In this way, they were able to get twice as much heat from their fire than from a more traditionally designed fireplace. This design was called a heatilator., Severin Bishof , Severin Bishof was an artist trained as a wood carver in Germany. He was teaching in the Art Department at Syracuse University when he and Casey met and Casey asked him to design and create a medieval manor house out of the carriage house at Mexico Point. Casey told Bishof what he had in mind, and Bishof drew all the medieval figures on the walls. He drew people of every walk of life from that period: bishops, kings, court musicians, knights, ladies, young people and old. Every surface of the cottage is decorated, with coats of arms over every doorway, heraldic symbols carved into the floors and doors.