Now here’s where things start to get strange. The house sold three more times, to Lawerence and Mary Holmes Shaffer (their son reported to House Beautiful that the couple paid about $23,000 for the home), then to Seth and Floy Bakes, and in 1990 to John and Andrea Woods for $370,000. The house went on to Davies’s son and daughter-in-law, Frances Ernest Davies, who sold it to Dillard and Mary Bird in 1951, again for a reported $1. Davies was a one-term mayor of Westfield while living in the house, and he died there in 1947 (four years after his wife). In 1914, the Davies family purchased 657 Boulevard for $1 (a trend of property transfer). The house’s original owner was Harry Lincoln Russell, a real estate agent and early property developer in Westfield who purchased the house in 1905, according to House Beautiful. “Many of Westfield’s Shingle Style houses retain their wood shingle siding but most have been repainted in hues of green, gray, or yellow,” the Preservation Society notes. The house’s most prominent features are the uniform sheathing of wood shingles, grouped windows, a front porch with Ionic columns, and the front-facing, center gambrel roofline, a popular feature in American architecture at the turn of the century. The Westfield Historic Preservation Society has labeled the house a Shingle Style design, an American style that evolved from the Queen Anne style and showed renewed interest in the shingled homes of New England.
THE WATCHER HOUSE SERIES
While the series was filmed at another New York home that was much more grand (and included a pool), the real 657 Boulevard-built in 1905 rather than 1921 as the series denotes-is an exquisite example of Gilded Age wealth in 20th-century America. What is the real house’s architectural style? Now, Westfield is back on the true-crime map. Westfield is best known for its vibrant downtown and magnificent historical homes, which offer fodder for inventive folklore (it was the hometown of Charles Addams, the creator of the Addams Family), as well as some more grisly occurrences (including the infamous 1971 John List murders, which the series alludes to). Having been compared with the fictional family-friendly town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, it was ranked the 30th-safest town in America in 2014 by NeighborhoodScout. The house is located at 657 Boulevard (thus, its nickname) in Westfield, New Jersey, an idyllic upscale suburban town about an hour’s drive from Manhattan. While the show was filmed in New York’s Westchester County, the real house that inspired this story is still standing. And the eeriest part? The series is based on an actual cold case. And as the Broadduses become increasingly unhinged, the queasy unfolding of the story raises far more questions than it answers.
The new homeowners-played by Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts in the series-get an anonymous letter from someone who claims to be “the Watcher” of the house who had been put in charge of “waiting for its second coming” and referring to the children as “young blood.” More letters come. The seven-part series, which followed Reeves Wiedeman’s viral 2018 article for New York magazine, chronicles the events that occurred after Derek and Maria Broaddus (in the show, Dean and Nora Brannock) moved into their stately six-bedroom residence in the New Jersey suburbs in 2014. Ryan Murphy’s hair-raising psychological thriller The Watcher has officially hit Netflix, and bingers everywhere are doing a double check on their door locks at night.
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