![]() Mamaroneck’s converting the old cafeteria space into a ‘STEAM Design Lab’ as part of a $50 million capital improvements bond project. In March, though, they’ll be walled over or destroyed. At Mamaroneck High, eight culturally-significant murals by notable midcentury artists, all depicting scenes from Cooper’s Leatherstocking and life, are mounted in the old cafeteria. At Fenimore Road, the historic DeLancey-Cooper House, once slated for demolition, has been redone in the ‘ creeping New Jersey’ mode and split into apartments and an Italian restaurant. A Warren Chase Merritt mural depicts The Marriage of James Fenimore Cooper to Susan DeLancey, 1811 in the Public Library. How does the ‘essential American soul’ compromise past with progress, or imagination with profit? In Mamaroneck, this tension’s felt strongest in the commonplace. For Westchester, in turn, managing Cooper’s legacy has long been a bellwether for Lawrence’s maxim. Where Mark Twain diagnosed ‘literary delirium tremens’ in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Lawrence saw the ‘essential American soul’ in Cooper’s creative friction between ‘real historical narrative and true romance.’ For Cooper, this sensibility was inflected through longstanding ties to Westchester County, where he lived and wrote over some years. Lawrence tried to figure America out through its literature. When he wasn’t imagining plinths in Lady Chatterley’s garden, D.H.
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