Following Fitzgerald: Winter Place

Winter Place

By Kelly Kazek

Are you a romantic? Would you enjoy having tea in the very room where the beautiful and vivacious Montgomery native Zelda Sayre met the dashing, soon-to-be-famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald?

For the right price, you can. The home where the famed Jazz Age couple met, Winter Place, is for sale.

Joseph Winter Thorington, a former owner of the home, claimed Scott and Zelda were introduced by his aunt at a tea in the mansion's gallery. Zelda lived with her family up the street at 6 Pleasant Ave. at the time, according to a story on HuffingtonPost.com.

Winter Place was built in 1855 for Joseph Samual and Mary Elizabeth Winter, presumably by architect Samuel Sloan of Philadelphia, who designed Winter's first home. The complex also housed the first offices of the Confederate Army.

The property was listed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage in 2005 and the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.

The conjoined homes on the property were listed on Alabama's Places in Peril in 2005. Today, the homes are unoccupied but were purchased in 2006 by Craig Drescher who had hopes of restoring the Italianate manor, the "North House," and its "fraternal twin" Second Empire-style home on the property, called the "South House."

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

“In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o' clock in the morning, day after day.”

“Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”

“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.”

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

“...he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

"Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind."