The Collection

The Pasadena Craftsman is the door the Greene brothers wanted every Pasadena house to have. Five panels, with the tapered upper rail that is the unmistakable Craftsman move — the upper panel narrows by about three-eighths of an inch at the top, a deliberate visual trick that makes the door feel taller. The maple inlay forms a cloud-lift, a Japanese-derived form the Greenes pulled into California carpentry. The kick plate is hammered copper, signed C.S., for an apprentice in the Greene workshop whose full name is lost.

The Charleston Piazza is a heart pine six-panel cross-and-Bible — six panels arranged in a cross-on-top-of-a-book composition, sometimes called a 'Christian door' for its devotional layout. Heart pine is the densest pine in North America, with growth rings so tight you can barely see them. The door is mortise-and-tenon joinery throughout, pinned with hand-shaved wooden pegs. There are no nails. There have never been nails.

The Santa Fe Portal is the second-oldest door in the Collection and the oldest in continental North America — 1769, twenty years before the U.S. Constitution. It is a Spanish colonial portal, two pieces of vertical ponderosa pine joined with hand-forged iron strap hinges and studded with forty-seven clavos. The clavos are decorative iron nails, hand-forged, individually unique. We have counted them and we have measured them. We love them.

The Maplewood French is what happens when a 1924 Tudor revival builder takes French doors seriously. Twelve true divided lites per leaf, original putty on every pane, cremone bolt instead of the modern surface bolts. We love the astragal — that's the molding strip that covers the gap where the two leaves close. Modern French doors use an applied astragal that you can pry off. This pair has integral astragals, milled from the same mahogany as the stiles. They will never separate from the door.

The Utrecht Dutch is the oldest door in the Collection and the only one that predates the United States. The lower half is shorter than modern Dutch doors by about four inches, which suggests it was built for a household where most adult men were under five-foot-six — a useful piece of evidence about 18th-century Dutch nutrition. The current red paint is 1832. We are not going to touch it.

The Portland Screen is the only new door in the Collection. The Society commissioned it in 2024 from a small shop in southeast Portland to demonstrate that screen doors of the old quality can still be built — they are simply no longer mass-produced. Vertical-grain Douglas fir frame, phosphor bronze mesh, compression-spring closer, hand-rubbed tung oil. The door cost more than the kitchen renovation it accompanied. It will last a hundred years.

The Wexford Screen is a 1958 aluminum-framed screen door with the original bronze mesh still intact, which puts it in roughly the top one percent of surviving screen doors of the period. Bronze mesh oxidizes to a deep brown that aluminum and fiberglass never reach. The kick panel has hand-painted house numbers — 1413 — that were touched up in the 1980s and again in the 2000s by successive owners. We love it because every dog the family ever owned signed it.

The Sun Valley Slider is from the high point of American sliding door design — the early 1970s, when ski lodges and ranch houses wanted glass walls and the manufacturers responded with extruded aluminum frames that have outlasted three generations of vinyl replacements. The bronze track is the secret. Aluminum tracks pit and bind. Bronze does not. This door slides with one finger after fifty-three years.

The Oak Park Pocket is what every modern remodeler's pocket door wishes it were. Quarter-sawn oak, beveled mirror, flush pulls that you can run your hand across without catching. The Prairie School architects designed pocket doors for rooms that needed to be both private and large; the door disappears into the wall when not in use. When the doorway becomes a wall again, it remains a wall.

The Key West Jalousie is the most controversial door in the Collection. Jalousie doors are sixteen horizontal panes of glass on a crank-driven linkage, designed to admit Florida breezes while keeping out direct sun and rain. They are also famously easy to defeat — every slat slides out from the outside. We will not pretend otherwise. But the door is a perfect technical answer to the climate it was built for, and the Society's mission is not security.

The Galveston Louvered is a Gulf Coast invention — a fully louvered patio door designed to permit airflow during summer storms while keeping rain and insects out. Forty-eight fixed cypress louvers at thirty degrees, with a bronze fly screen behind. Cypress is the right wood for the application: rot-resistant to a near-supernatural degree, takes a soft silver patina that protects against UV. The door has weathered eight named hurricanes.

The Levittown Aluminum is the door the Society had to include even though it is not, by traditional metrics, a good door. It is a first-generation 1953 aluminum storm door, mass-produced for the Levittown tract — the suburb that invented the American suburb. The frame is thin. The hardware is stamped. The glass is just glass. It is not a craft object. But it is the door that landed on three million houses between 1953 and 1965, and the Society's mission is to appreciate doors as they are, not only as we wish them to be.

The Savannah Storm is a three-season storm door — a single frame with three swappable inserts, allowing the same door to serve as winter glass, summer screen, or louvered hurricane shutter. The Society acquired it from a Greek Revival townhouse near Forsyth Park. The owner had all three inserts, in original storage racks in the carriage house. It is the only complete three-insert set the Society has cataloged.

The Burlington Barn door is a Z-brace door — vertical planks with a diagonal brace forming a Z — and it represents the dominant American agricultural door form for roughly 150 years. What makes this one worth a placement is the saw marks. The vertical planks show the long parallel cuts of a water-powered sash saw, which puts the milling at no later than 1890. The iron was forged on the property by the farm's grandfather. The Society has the receipt.

The Anchorage Vestibule is an inner door — the second door in a two-door vestibule arrangement, which is what you build when winter is real. It is the boring door. It has mineral wool insulation and triple-stage weatherstripping. It is not beautiful. But it is correct for the climate, and it has worked perfectly since 1965, which the Society respects more than any number of stained-glass transoms. Vestibule doors are usually thrown away first in renovations. This one was saved.

The Coaldale dispatcher's door, salvaged from a Canadian Pacific Railway maintenance shed near the Alberta-Montana line, is the kind of door that records its own use. The brass kickplate shows a hundred years of train-yard boots. The handle is worn on its left side, because every dispatcher who pushed it open had paperwork in the right hand. We love it for the kickplate. A door can be both a barrier and a record.

The Brooklyn Fire door is from a New York Fire Department ladder company building, decommissioned in 1991 and salvaged before demolition. It is a steel-clad pine-core door with an asbestos-board fire backing — a 1908 Class B assembly that was certified to hold a fire for 90 minutes. The asbestos has been encapsulated in a 2024 conservation pass. We are not pretending it isn't there. We are not removing it either. The door is meant to be looked at, not opened daily.

The Cheyenne Saloon doors are bat-wing cafe-style — the kind that swing both directions, hung from pivot hinges, with enough spring tension to close behind a man carrying two beers. They are not the full-height swinging doors of Hollywood Westerns. Those did not exist in the actual West, except as outer storm doors. The waist-high bat-wings are the real article, and these are the article.