The Fight to Save a Decrepit Pink House by the Sea

There is no shortage of beautiful houses along the coastline north of Boston: houses with graceful white columns and gleaming granite stairs. Houses with sparkling bay windows and manicured gardens.

The Pink House, perched alone above a sprawling salt marsh at the edge of Plum Island, has none of those features. Decrepit and uninhabited — grungy, even, by now — the house is scarred by peeling paint and missing windows. When an auction in the summer drew no bidders, it was scheduled for demolition.

And yet, for reasons that defy easy explanation, the 99-year-old Pink House is beloved by artists, locals and summer visitors to this windswept marshland just south of the New Hampshire border. Since its owner, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, announced in August that the house would be torn down, an uprising among its admirers has led to a $1 million dollar gift from an anonymous donor seeking to preserve it and an intervention by Gov. Maura Healey.

The governor — who grew up a dozen miles away, in southern New Hampshire — stepped in just before the cupola-topped house was to be razed this month, asking for more time and dialogue to reach an alternate solution. For now, the demolition is on hold, and talks are underway, a spokeswoman for Ms. Healey said.

As they waited to learn if the Pink House would be saved, its devotees described it as a tough old beauty with an air of mystery, and a kind of empty vessel, taking on whatever meaning and emotion each of its beholders brings to it. Many used feminine pronouns to refer to a building they consider family.

“I always saw her as a ballerina, sitting in the marsh alone in her tattered tutu,” said Edith Heyck, 75, an artist who first painted the Pink House in 1978. “To watch her neglect, to watch her changing — there’s an aura of romantic tragedy about it.”

The house’s history — both real and embellished versions — has deepened its mystique. Local legend says it is a “spite house,” built by a husband for his soon-to-be ex-wife, in a then-isolated outpost far from the comforts of town. Sandy Tilton, a leader of the nonprofit Support the Pink House, who spent months combing through local records and archives, found no evidence to prove that claim.

Yet the seeds of the legend can be found in the facts she did confirm: A local widow, Gertrude Cutter, built the house on the marsh in the summer of 1925. Her son Henry Cutter moved in with his wife Ruth and their young son that fall. The marriage was troubled; years later during divorce proceedings, Henry would admit to frequent visits with a fashion designer friend in Boston.

Ruth lasted 12 days in the Pink House, “while the wind howled and the windows rattled,” according to newspaper accounts, before fleeing to her mother’s home.

To Ms. Tilton, 67, the house conjures up childhood memories of summer trips to visit her aunts on Plum Island, when she would glimpse it from the back seat of her family’s station wagon and feel a thrill of curiosity.

“I wanted to know who lived there, and what it was like to wake up there, surrounded by the marsh and the birds and the wind,” she said. “Every time I go by, even now, I want to be up in that cupola, surrounded by the wild.”

In 2011, the house’s last residents sold it to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the surrounding Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. But the agency — which also acquired nine acres of surrounding land — found no purpose for the house.

Over time, the agency has said, the Pink House attracted vandals and demanded costly maintenance, sitting in an increasingly active flood zone where sea levels are predicted to rise.

Fish and Wildlife officials concluded that “the long-term viability of the structure in its current location” was “untenable,” and tried unsuccessfully to auction it off to a buyer willing to move it elsewhere. They have stressed that their mission is to protect wildlife and its habitat, not buildings.

Bruce Stott, a member of the last family to live in the Pink House, said that when the government bought the house, he had cherished the thought that it would be well cared for. He imagined it being repurposed for public use, maybe as a wildlife research center, or a residence for rangers working at the refuge.

“Instead, they just let it go, and go, and go,” said Mr. Stott, 72, who moved into the house he calls “Pinkie,” or “the Big Pink,” at age 9, in 1960.

The house was not always pale pink, according to Mr. Stott. The family that owned it before his painted it that delicate shade, resembling the inside of a conch shell, he said, inspired by their travels to the Caribbean.

It may be that its color, more than any other factor, made the Pink House a totem of sorts. Many of the thousands of artworks featuring the house depict it at sunrise or sunset, when the sky mirrors its hue, and the sun’s glow lights its windows “as if someone were inside,” said Rochelle Joseph, president of the nonprofit that has fought to save the house since its demolition was first proposed in 2015.

The colors surrounding the house change with the seasons, said Ms. Heyck, from the “rusts and siennas of the marsh in fall, to the tender greens of spring — so delicate, with the pink — and then in winter, the pink house against the icy tundra and blue shadows.”

Not everyone familiar with the house feels driven to save it. Christopher Husgen, a retired ranger who spent years roaming the Parker River refuge, said he saw possibility in the land it sits on. It could become a new viewing area, with parking, at a marsh that is one of the country’s premiere spots for bird-watching, he said.

“I remember when it was just a house. Now it’s Valhalla,” Mr. Husgen, 61, said, sitting in his truck at the edge of the marsh one evening last week as the moon rose over the Pink House.

Leaders of the campaign to save the house are already planning a party for its 100th birthday next June, a celebration they say will go on regardless of what happens to the house.

From his winter home in Florida, Mr. Stott said he was ready to travel north if word comes that the Pink House will be torn down.

“It’s something I would need to be there for,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “To witness the end of its story.”