Tivoli's Victorian Man

A time machine, as envisioned by H.G. Wells and other romantics, actually exists in the remote upstate New York hamlet of Tivoli (pop. 800). It is embodied in Lawrence Gilbert Broad-moore, 23, who has successfully propelled himself, not forward, but backward, into a proper Victorian environment. Totally rejecting contemporary values, mores, language and technology, Broadmoore is a self-made relic, a Thoreau in retreat from time.

Bachelor Broadmoore looks like a daguerreotype of Great-Grandpapa. Sporting a straw boater, spats, walking stick, wire-rimmed pince-nez, and suits copied from turn-of-the-century magazine illustrations, he uses a Gladstonian vocabulary, reserving for his strongest expletives such terms as "Oh perdition!" and "Balderdash!" He spurns television, the telephone, central heating, refrigeration, indoor plumbing and all literature published hi the past 60 years. Thoroughly true to his lifestyle, he supports himself by repairing player pianos, Victrolas, nickelodeons, and other fin de siecle artifacts, drawing customers from all over the state.

A nut? By no means. An eccentric? Certainly. Like Peter de Labigarre, who fled the French Revolution to the U.S., built the Chateau de Tivoli where the village now stands and planned a Utopian commune there, Broadmoore is a refugee--not from revolution but from what he regards as the all-pervasive standardization of American life. "I like to imagine that I am living in the 19th century," he told TIME'S Eileen Shields. "I call it an experiment. I am capable of discoursing in modern terms. But as soon as I am alone, I revert to my imagination, which is the past."

Broadmoore, the son of a Cincinnati wine broker, had a conventional boyhood until, at 13, he began reading 19th century catalogues. "I was attracted by the suspenders and collars," he explains, "I wanted a gold watch and chain and wire-rimmed spectacles instead of plastic ones." As he acquired the accouterments of the past, "the magnetic grip of this way of life began to settle on me." At Bard College, where he spent three years, he decorated and refurnished his room. "It was the epitome of Victorian gloom," he recalls.

Dropping out of school three years ago and settling in Tivoli, he transplanted that gloom to a six-room, rented house that he named "Bleakmoore," evoking echoes of Emily Bronte. But he is by no means a recluse. At least once a month he invites four or five like-minded friends over for a "banquet" of turkey cooked on a 1915-vintage parlor stove, plays the piano (Chopin is his favorite composer) for them or else puts some of his 3,500 Golden Oldie records on the gramophone. A painstaking craftsman who charges up to $1,500 to recondition an old player piano and often works into the small hours on a job that excites his imagination, the squire of Bleakmoore is far from bleak. Indeed, he may well be the best-adjusted citizen of Tivoli. As a friend and fellow craftsman puts it, "He has discovered the past --and it works."

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