What makes your house your home? Some may say their cozy couch or their perfectly curated knick-knacks. Andrea Mitchell of Clearwater Beach in Springs says it’s the people who lived their lives there before us, and she’s willing to bet that many will agree.
Ms. Mitchell, a film producer who lived in Hollywood for a time and worked there on the movies “Titanic” and “Girl, Interrupted,” is in the research phase of a new project which, from her perspective, could unlock memories from generations past. Inspired by the history of her own house, she believes that old houses, with their former inhabitants, hide many secrets. She is hoping, she said, that her story will inspire others to research their own homes and share what they learn with her, which will one day become part of a documentary and tabletop book.
“It’s what keeps us connected,” she said over coffee in her living room overlooking Hog Creek, and keeps us asking who we are and how we will be remembered.
The project began when Ms. Mitchell was renting the house she’d eventually buy in 2017. In the depths of a dark closet, she unearthed a framed photograph with a short note attached: “All the best, Dr. Freud.” She recognized the man in the photo as the founder of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sigmund Freud.
How did that photo get there? It turns out that Freud lived in the same Vienna apartment building as a man named Edmund Engelman, who would one day come to live in the Waterhole Road house where Ms. Mitchell lives now.
Engelman was a young man when Freud hired him to photograph himself, his family, his home, and his patients. Some of the photos are archived at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., and have been exhibited at Guild Hall. The photographer is said to have taken some 150 pictures of the psychoanalyst and his family during the time of the Nazi occupation in the 1930s.
Ms. Mitchell examined the photo in her closet carefully, with a loupe, and says that German soldiers are visible in the background. Freud is said to have warned Engelman to flee Austria immediately after the photo was taken.
Engelman took his advice, leaving behind all his possessions, including a trunk that contained many of the photos he’d taken. Freud himself would leave as well, settling in the United Kingdom. Years later, as the story goes, Anna Freud, his daughter, returned the trunk to its owner.
The Engelmans — Edmund and his wife, Irene — met in the early ’40s, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, where both were living, hoping to get to America. The photographer was briefly detained by German soldiers before they were able to escape.
The couple raised two sons between the Upper East Side and Springs. Engelman died in 2000; his wife lived to the age of 100 before dying in 2017.
Ms. Mitchell hasn’t changed much in the Techbuilt house that was theirs and is now hers. She winterized it and upgraded a bathroom, but the prefab house stands almost exactly as it did when it was built midcentury. (It could not be confirmed, but the house is rumored to have been built by the actor Dustin Hoffman’s family.) The floating red fireplace remains, as does the yellow Formica kitchen countertop. Engelman’s workshop bench and pegboard still sit proudly on display on the lower level.
Those connections to the past have made real-life connections for Ms. Mitchell, who has maintained relationships with the Engelman children, Ralph and Thomas. What has changed, though, is her view of her home and neighborhood. Everywhere she looks, she said, she sees the past. On her street alone, she discovered, were houses owned by the famed soccer player Pelé, the jazz drummer Chico Hamilton, who played with Lena Horne, and a Brazilian composer.
Ms. Horne’s granddaughter Jenny Lumet recently remembered visiting the house as a child. “She was struck with a heavy case of déjà vu,” Ms. Mitchell said of Ms. Lumet, who, she said, would come to jazz parties hosted by the Engelmans and presided over by Mr. Hamilton.
In her exploration, Ms. Mitchell has also met neighbors with stories of Andy Warhol, David Gamble, Marilyn Monroe, and more. But she said she was not interested only in tales of the rich and famous.
“It’s really about mentionables,” she said, meaning that everyone has a story, and when they tell them, they keep those stories alive. She is on the alert for stories of local history that start with the places people live or have lived.
We bond in this way to each other, she said. If you have a story to share about your house and its history, Ms. Mitchell wants to hear from you. Email her at [email protected].
