Chapter 2

RECESSED BALCONY, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTH AVENUE.Herter Brothers, Architects.

RECESSED BALCONY, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTH AVENUE.

Herter Brothers, Architects.

part of the outfit of a journeyman. Although Jefferson complained that in his time and in rural Virginia it was impossible to “find a workman who could draw an order,” it is evident that there was no difficulty of that kind in other parts of the country. These trained workmen, it is to be noted, were all carpenters, and there is probably no work in stone which shows an equal precision and facility in workmanship. Such buildings as the New York City Hall and the Albany Academy were clearly the work of architects of culture according to the standard of the time. The only architectural qualities of the works of the mechanics were the moderation and respectability of detail, which they had learned as part of their trade, and it is quite absurd to ascribe to these buildings any value as works of art. It is particularly absurd to assign the degradation of house-building which undoubtedly followed, and which made the typical American house, after the Greek temple had spent its force, the most vulgar habitation ever built by man, to the substitution of book-learned architects for handicraftsmen. People talk as if the middle part of Fifth Avenue, the brown-stone high-stoop house with its bloated detail, which displaced the prim precision of the older work, had been done by educated architects. In fact, there was hardly a single building put up in New York after the design of an educated architect between the works we have mentioned and the erection of Trinity Church by Mr. Upjohn in 1845, which not only marked a great advance over anything that had been done before, but began the Gothic revival to which we directly or indirectly owe whatever of merit has been done since, including so much of Queen Anne as, not being Queen Anne, is good. But the bulk of the building which gave its architectural character to New York and to the country continued to be done by mechanics,who continued, so far as they could, to supply the demand of the market, who gradually lost the training their predecessors had enjoyed, and who lost also all sense of the necessity for that training in the new demand that their work should be, above all things, “American.” As the slang of to-day puts it, they were exhorted, as the architects are still sometimes exhorted, to “talk United States.” They might have answered that there was no such language, and that a few bits of slang did not constitute a poetical vocabulary. The feeling which urges an artist to be patriotic by being different from other people not long ago led Mr. Walt Whitman to resent the absence of an “autochthonous” poetry, and has lately led a newspaper writer to call the attention of a New England building committee to the log cabin as the most suitable motive for a town-hall they are going to build.

The Northern reader notes with mild amusement the occasional resentment in the Southern press of the absence of a “distinctive Southern literature,” and perceives the plaint to be provincial; but he is not so quick to perceive that his own clamor for an American this or that is equally provincial. The hard lot of the American painter has often been bewailed, in that, when he has tried to rid himself of his provincialism by learning to paint, and has learned to paint more or less as other men do who have learned to paint, he is straightway berated for not being provincial. If American literature or painting or architecture be good, the Americanism of it may safely be left to take care of itself. But a man cannot be expected to innovate to much purpose upon usages with which he is unfamiliar; and the effects which Mr. Whitman’s admonition to his fellow-poets to “fix their verses to the gauge of the round-globe” would probably have upon an aspiring young poet, conscious

DOORWAYS ON MADISON AVENUE.G. E. Harney, and McKim, Mead, & White, Architects.

DOORWAYS ON MADISON AVENUE.

G. E. Harney, and McKim, Mead, & White, Architects.

of genius, but weak in his parts of speech, are the effects which the demand for aboriginality actually had upon the race of builders, whether they were content with that title, or without any sufficient provocation described themselves as architects. They undoubtedly attaineddifference, and their works did not remind the travelled observer of any of the masterpieces of Europe. It is quite conceivable and not at all discreditable that the wild work of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should have led architects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Washington Square, and to sigh for a return of the times when the common street architecture of New York was sober and respectable, even if it was conventional and stupid.

This justifiable preference for Bowling Green and Washington Square and St. John’s Park over Broadway and Madison Square and Murray Hill, for an architecture confessedly colonial over an architecture aggressively provincial, is no doubt the explanation why so many of our younger architects made haste to fall in behind the Queen Anne standard. What we really have a right to blame them for is for not so far analyzing their own emotions as to discover that the qualities they admired in the older work, or admired by comparison with the newer, were not dependent upon the actual details in which they found them. To be “content to dwell in decencies forever” was not considered the mark of a lofty character even by a poet of the time of Queen Anne. If virtue were, indeed, “too painful an endeavor,” and if there were no choice except between the state of dwelling in decencies and the state of dwelling in indecencies forever, we could but admit that they had chosen the better part. But they were not, in fact, confined to a choice between these alternatives. The Gothic revival in England, after twenty years, had succeeded in establishing something much more like a real vernacular architecture than had been known in England before since the building of the cathedrals—an architecture which, although starting from formulas and traditions, had attained to principles, and was true, earnest, and

ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET.C. C. Haight, Architect.

ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET.

C. C. Haight, Architect.

alive. It was quite inevitable that it should be crude in proportion as it was alive, according to the frankness with which it recognized that we live in times unknown to the ancients, and endeavored to respond with changes in its organism to changes wrought in its environment by new requirements and new knowledge, with forms necessarily rude, inchoate, embryonic, as beseems the formative period of letters and of arts as of life, in contrast with the ultimate refinement which is the mark of a completed development. But that these crudities would be refined was also inevitable; that they were in process of refinement was apparent. Another generation of artists as earnest as those who began the Gothic revival might have brought this rough and swelling bud to a splendid blossom. But in an evil hour, and under a strange spell, the young architects of the United States followed the young architects of England in preferring the refinements of a fixed and developed architecture to the rudenesses of a living and growing architecture. Because they did not see their way at once to “supply every deficiency and symmetrize every disproportion,” they did not leave this for their successors, but abandoned the attempt at an expression of the things they were doing for the elegant expression in antique architecture of meanings that have grown meaningless to modern men.

They have had their way in New York for seven or eight years, during a period unprecedented in building activity, and out of all comparison in the profusion with which money has been lavished upon building and decoration. What have they gained for architectural art? They have, indeed, subjected many miles of sandstone to the refining influence of egg-and-dart mouldings (the designer of a house in Fifth Avenue has so much faith in the efficacy of that ornament that he has belted his street front with three rows of it, one above the other), and triglyphs (faithfully to have contemplated which softens the manners, nor suffers to be rude) have been brought within the reach of the humblest in the decoration of tenement-houses. They have built so much and so expensively that they have produced in minds—like some of their own—which do not reflect much upon these things the impression that if luxury and art be not synonymous, they are at least inseparably connected, with the latter in the capacity of handmaiden. But will any educated architect assert that the characteristic monuments of the last five or six years—greatly superior in quantity, and superior by a great multiple in cost—are equal in architectural value to the work of the decade preceding? Suppose that Mr. Norman Shaw had not bedevilled the weaker of his brethren, and that this unprecedented building activity and this unparalleled spending of money that have fallen under the control of architects had been directed along the lines laid down by the Gothic revivalists, and had extended, consolidated, and refined the work begun and carried on here by such architects as Mr. Upjohn, Mr. Eidlitz, Mr. Withers, Mr. Cady, Mr. Potter, and Mr. Wight, will any educated architect maintain that the result of such a process would not have been nobler monuments than any to which we can point as characteristic products of the later movement?

DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET.R. H. Robertson, Architect.

DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET.

R. H. Robertson, Architect.

We might ask Mr. Harney, for example, who has been one of the noteworthy contributors to the works of both periods, whether in falling to “grace” he has not fallen from something more important. One can readily understand that Mr. Harney, in contemplating the effect of his completed work in the respectable warehouse at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, should have been disappointed in the effect of much of the detail he had designed for his building, should have found some of it rude, some of it disproportionate

HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET.Bruce Price, Architect.

HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET.

Bruce Price, Architect.

to its function and position, and none of it exquisite in modelling. It is also intelligible that he may have been dissatisfied with some parts even of his still more successful house at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, which, always a grateful object, has lately acquired an air of additional distinction from the eager architectural competition which has set in alongside of it, and the results of which give an air of unquestionable animation—the animation of excited controversy—to Fifty-seventh Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. This dissatisfaction, if the architect underwent it, was a wholesome discontent which we should have expected to see allayed by more thoroughly studied detail in Mr. Harney’s succeeding work. But it seems to have been a morbid sensitiveness to the defects of his work which led Mr. Harney to abandon altogether, and in despair, the practice of architectural design, and, when he had another commercial building to do, to erect in Wall Street an entirely ineffectual structure,of which the architecture that one carries away with him consists in a crow-stepped gable, an irrelevant entablature appliqué which crosses the building half-way up, and windows covered with flat arches, the key-stones of which are “shored up” by the mullions; and, when he had another city house to do, to depute the design of it to some unknown carpenter who died before he was born, and to reproduce accurately in Madison Avenue a Vandam or Charlton Street house built out of due time, with a familiar “old New York” doorway, in the jambs of which quoins intercept sheaves of mouldings. This confession that a carpenter of 1825 was a better-trained designer than an educated architect of 1880 is very possibly creditable to the personal modesty of the latter; but Mr. Harney’s own earlier works sufficiently testify that it does not do him justice.

Mr. Cady, one of the most important and distinguished of the contributors to the Gothic revival in New York, has also of late years become a convert to the new movement, and seems from our point of view to have thrown himself away with even less sufficient cause than that which impelled Mr. Harney to his rash act. For we have distinctly admitted that Mr. Harney had reason to be dissatisfied with his Gothic detail, while we cannot make that admission in behalf of Mr. Cady. Mr. Cady’s newer work is shown in a house of red-brick and brown sandstone, which he contributed to the architectural competition just noticed. This edifice shows a desire to live at peace in the midst of very quarrelsome neighbors. Mr. Cady, indeed, could scarcely design a vulgar and vociferous work if he tried. At any rate, he has never tried, and does not in the least need to be put under the bonds of a style in order to insure his keeping the peace. One wonders what Mr. Cady believes himself to have gained in abandoning thestyle of his brilliant Art Building in Brooklyn for the style of his not very noticeable house in Fifty-seventh Street.

Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; but it can also be attained, by architects who are really in quest of it, in other styles quite as well, which admit a much wider range of expression, while the student is forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre repertory of Queen Anne any other quality than quietude can be expressed. Its successes in domestic architecture are mainly the successes of unnoticeableness, which is really the character not only of the dwellings just mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, and of a house, which has the great advantage of double the usual frontage, by Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s reproduction; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street by these latter architects, which looks less like a work of architectural art than a magnified piece of furniture “with the Chippendale feeling,” can scarcely be called successful, while the house they designed for Mr. Astor in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street front in brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called Queen Anne, in spite of the three rows of egg-and-dart moulding, already remarked, which crown its rock-faced basement. The highest praise to which these typical Queen Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thoroughly studied detail, such as the treatment of the oriel in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is that they look like eligible mansions for highly respectable families content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also the highest praise that can be bestowed upon their prototypes of the Georgian era. We can repeat the admission that it is far better they should look like that thanlike the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons, without thereby admitting that the prim and prosaic expression of respectability never so eminent can be scored as a triumph in domestic architecture. The domestic architecture of Venice, or Rouen, or Nuremberg has something more to say to us than that. And a touch of such spirit and picturesqueness as Mr. Bruce Price has given us in a brick house in Fifty-sixth Street (p. 22), or as Mr. Hunt has given us not only in the elaborately ornate house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, but in some dwellings in upper Madison Avenue, is more to be desired than a mere omission to outrage decorum.

HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE.R. M. Hunt, Architect.

HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE.

R. M. Hunt, Architect.

Such as the successes of Queen Anne in domestic architecture are, they are its only successes,although it is only fair to say that much interesting work has been done in it, if not strictly of it, in suburban houses and sea-side cottages, which do not come within our present scope. A “feature” suffices for the architecture of a narrow street front, and a feature may be compiled out of the repertory of Queen Anne by a designer who thinks that result a reward of his pains. The oriel, for example, in effect comprises the architecture of the house just mentioned as designed by Mr. Haight. But even in a house which is only a feature the classic detail is not always adjusted without a visible incongruity to the constructions, out of which classic detail cannot spontaneously grow as it grew out of classic constructions. The doorway, for example, of the house designed by Mr. Robertson, which is virtually repeated in the window over it, is a moulded round arch standing upon pilasters of its own width, and thus apparently making of the jamb and arch a complete and detached construction. That is to say, the pilasters seem to carry the arch. The architect of the New York Post-office has done the same thing in a much ruder way. But the elegance of Mr. Robertson’s detail cannot rid even the spectator who does not stop to analyze the source of the feeling of an uneasy sensation that what is thus elegantly expressed is not the fact. An arch does, in fact, exercise a lateral as well as a vertical pressure; and if the arch and its vertical supports formed a detached construction, as they here appear to do, the arch would be unstable. Insensible as the classical Romans were to considerations of artistic expression, they were not so insensible as this. They recognized the existence of a lateral pressure by marking the impost of the arches with a continuous moulding, thus allying the arch with its lateral abutment as well as with its vertical support; and here the architect of the Post-office, wiser, or, ifthought be not predicable of his architecture, more fortunate than Mr. Robertson, has been content to imitate them.

The buildings in which these solecisms appear, we repeat, are the successes of Queen Anne. For structures more complicated most of its practitioners have shrunk from invoking it. Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, indeed, took the ground, when they designed the Union League Club House, that a “feature” supplied a sufficient idea for that edifice; and that a portico of four large Roman Corinthian columns in front, subdued to an equal number of brick pilasters on the side, would meet the architectural requirements of the case, if they let their consciousness play freely over the remaining surfaces without reference to this central thought. But the result has scarcely justified this belief, and the spectator finds that the building, in spite of the unifying influence of a large and simple roof, in addition to the feature in question, does not make a total impression, but is scattering and confused; while its parts, taken singly, are feeble in spite of their extravagant scale. This, indeed, is not even a sacrifice to the conventions, but a specimen of what can be achieved in a style of gentle dulness gone rampant. If tame Queen Anne is a somewhat ineffectual thing, what shall be said of wild Queen Anne? There is nothing wild about two other public buildings in which architects have ventured upon Queen Anne—one a hospital, in Park Avenue, by Mr. Haight, and one an “institution” of some other kind, in Lexington Avenue, by Mr. Fernbach. Both of these, indeed, are tame, and whatever the differences of detail may be, both have much the same expression, so that one carries away from either, as from one of the commonplace faces which we are always confounding, an impression which maybe that of the other—in either case of a centre with projecting wings separately roofed, and the whole wall overlaid with a shallow trellis of brick-work, too shallow to be serviceable as buttresses, and serviceable only as the badge of the alleged “style.” It seems hard upon an owner that he should be required to pay money for rectangular applications of brick which can scarcely strengthen his building appreciably, and can hardly be held to beautify it, by way merely of labelling it, “This is Queen Anne.” And this resemblance, be it noted, which is not so much a specific resemblance as the expression of an amiable characterlessness common to both, is not all to be imputed to the architects, except upon the ground of their choice of a style. The works of both of them have character, and not at all the same character, when they are working in a style which is a real form-language in which meanings can be expressed, and not a mere little phrase-book containing elegant extracts wherewith to garnish aimless discourse. Mr. Fernbach,[C]as is testified by such works as the “Staats-Zeitung” building and the German Savings-Bank in New York, and the building of the Mutual Insurance Company in Philadelphia, is one of the most accomplished practitioners in this country of academic Renaissance. Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is a highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not their fault if Queen Anne, when spread over an extensive façade, spreads thin.

Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the temerity to attempt a Queen Anne church, and the success of his essay is not such as to invite imitation. The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue, with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, whichare of a rugged rusticity, with the needful openings left square-headed and unmodelled; but these walls are crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow shingles, under a broad gable, and its openings united under a thin ogee canopy of painted pine. There is here and there a little classic detail, which, if it pleases the designer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the interior that is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what the German critics call the “playful use” of forms devised for one construction and one material in another material and with no visible construction; and the result of this pleasantry is what a German professor, celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “an important joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, the treatment passes a joke, for the mahogany nave arches, with their little protruding key-woods, and their supporting posts incased in boxed pedestals, are actually doing the work of carrying the clere-story—unless, indeed, there is a concealed system of iron-work—although their function is so far sacrificed to their form that they are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne contains no forms that can be even tortured into the construction of an open ceiling, the architect has omitted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere loft, sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as in the fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is entirely playful, so that the interior of the church seems to be a collection of pleasantries. In a dining-room, for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes seems to be ruled out by the previous question as to the admissibility in the sacred edifice of levity even of the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for the appliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeedfor the designers of “cozy” churches in general, that there is no official censorship of church architecture as there is of church music, and that no rubric makes it the duty of every minister, with such assistance as he can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to suppress all light and unseemly architecture by which vain and ungodly persons profane the service of the sanctuary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the spirit in which we have been asking other architects, what he has gained by abandoning such an effort as he made some ten years before in the Phillips Memorial Church to develop a composition out of his subject in favor of these scraps of quotations, and of quotations neither fresh nor very pregnant! He might answer that the church in which we admire at least the effort was a somewhat untamed and obstreperous fabric, and that the present edifice is much more chastened and subdued. It is tame, no doubt, and Mr. Robertson’s talent, when he works in Queen Anne, is subdued—

“subduedTo what it works in, like the dyer’s hand;”

but, upon the whole, it is difficult to see how the architect, comparing the earlier with the later work, could fail to feel that the attempt to express something, however crude and so far unsuccessful the attempt might have been, was a more manly and artistic employment than this elegant trifling, in which the highest attainable success has an element of puerility. In truth, it is gratifying to remark that the argument by which we have supposed the architect to have solaced himself for the result of his ecclesiastical labors in Queen Anne does not seem to have convinced himself, and that a later work still, a sandstone church farther down the same avenue, is a much more serious piece of design,being an attempt to develop the architecture out of the structure itself. It would be especially unjust to misapply to Mr. Robertson’s Queen Anne church the saying that the style is the man, for the church last mentioned shows that Mr. Robertson is a man of talents, when he gives his talents a chance.

Thus far we have been speaking of the respectable and conservative element in the new departure, of the Extreme Right, so to speak, and generally of works which were seriously designed, and so are entitled to be seriously considered. It is not so pleasant to turn to the Extreme Left, a frantic and vociferous mob, who welcome the “new departure” as the disestablishment of all standards, whether of authority or of reason, and as an emancipation from all restraints, even those of public decency, and who avail themselves of the remission of them from academic restraints to those imposed by their own sense of propriety by promptly showing that they haven’t any. The tame decorum of one phase of the new departure is supplemented by the violent indecorum of another. Sometimes the same designers march now with one wing and now with the other of the divergent host. Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, for example, have consoled themselves for what now almost seems to have been the enforced sedateness of the houses we have noticed, by a mad orgy of bad architecture in East Fifty-fifth Street. The scene of this excess almost immediately adjoins the dignified and respectable dwelling designed by Mr. Haight, and almost frights that edifice from its propriety, and the designers seem to have been led into it by the baleful example of older persons who ought to have known better, and who committed the maddest freaks in the artistic quarter of the London suburb of Chelsea while in a condition of total irresponsibility alike to any convictions and to any conventions of architectural art. The present indecorum has been committed in the design of two dwellings which consist of a ferociously rugged basement and parapeted cornice in granite, with two or three irregularly disposed tin dormers emerging above, and with a flat and shallow screen of brick wall inserted between them, as between the upper and the nether millstone, and having its thinness emphasized at all the angles by shallow incisions forming a series of brick weather-strips, as it were, a square reticulation of which traverses the plane surfaces also. It is quite conceivable that rugged simplicity may have suggested itself to a designer as a desirable character for a city house, but it seems scarcely possible that squareness and flatness and thinness should have appeared desirable, and quite impossible that beauty should have seemed to dwell in a building the top and bottom of which were characterized by rugged simplicity, and the middle by squareness and flatness and thinness. The details, whether in brick or granite or tin, are as preposterous as the conception of a building with its parts thus swearing at each other. The round-headed doorway is surmounted with the imitation in granite of a metal flap secured to the rest of the block from which it is cut by similitudes in granite of iron bolt-heads. In the basement respectable blocks of granite are subjected to the indignity of being decorated with streaming ribbons in low-relief. In truth, the only detail of the work which one can contemplate even with tolerance is a grill in the basement doorway which is the simplest possible trellis of iron rods.

Indecorous and incoherent as this edifice unquestionably is, it has yet the air of a gentleman taking his pleasure, albeit in a perverse and vicious fashion, when compared, for example, with the dwellings in red brick

DOORWAY AT FIFTH AVENUE AND SIXTY-SEVENTH STREET.

and brown stone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street. In these there is no composition whatever, and the effect is so scattering, and the whole is so fortuitous an aggregation of unrelated parts, that it is impossible to describe the houses or to remember them when one’s back is turned. Their fragments only recur to memory, as the blurred images of a hideous dream. So one recalls the Batavian grace of the bulbous gables; the oriel-windows, so set as to seem in imminent danger of toppling out; the egg-and-dart moulding, niggled up and down jambs of brick-work connected by flat openings with protruding key-stones; the whiplashes cut in sandstone blocks; the decorative detail fished from the slums of the Rococo. These are not subjects for architectural criticism; they call for the intervention of an architectural police. They are cases of disorderly conduct done in brick and brown stone. Hazardous as the superlative degree generally is, it is not much of a hazard to say that they are the most thoroughly discreditable buildings ever erected in New York, and it is to be noted that they are thoroughly characteristic of the period. Such a nightmare might, perhaps, have entered the brain of some speculative builder during the wildest vulgarity of the brown-stone period, but he would not have had the effrontery to build it, being deterred by the consideration that nobody would face public ridicule by consenting to live in it. Some speculator is, however, convinced that there is now a market for a house which stands upon the street corner, and screeches for people to come and look at it, when there is nothing in it worth looking at; and we must take shame to ourselves from the reflection that the speculator may be right in counting upon this extreme vulgarization of the public taste, and that, at any rate, there is no police to prevent the emission of the screech upon the public highway.

This is the result of a demand for “something new” upon a mind incapable of producing anything good. The screech is the utterance of the Sweet Singer of Michigan, exhorted not to mind about grammar, but “to fix her verses to the gauge of the round globe.” It is an extreme instance, to be sure; but there are others only less discreditable, and only to be dealt with in the way of what is called “slashing” criticism, which

GLIMPSE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE FROM MADISON AVENUE.C. C. Haight, Architect.

GLIMPSE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE FROM MADISON AVENUE.

C. C. Haight, Architect.

probably never yet served any more important purpose than to ease the critic’s mind. It is enough to indicate these things, and to point out that they are all produced by the strain in the minds of incompetent designers after originality and aboriginality—a purpose essentially vulgar, which would vitiate the work even of a competent designer wherever it could be detected. For although the pursuit of excellence is sure to result in novelty, the pursuit of novelty is sure not to result in excellence. The extreme instance we have cited is stillan instance of a tendency to which all the younger generation of architects, of whom so much was hoped, and of whom, considering their opportunities, so little of value has come, have more or less yielded—the tendency to take themselves too seriously and their art not seriously enough, and to imagine that anything that occurs to them is for that reason good enough to build, without asking it any questions. Such caricatures of architecture as these houses would not occur to the mind of an educated architect; but when all restraints, rational and academic, are removed, even educated architects, as we have seen, will not always take the trouble to analyze their conceptions before embodying them in durable brick and stone. It is from this that it comes that, as we said awhile ago, the characteristic works of the present period are distinctly inferior to the characteristic works of the preceding period. It is not that thoroughly good buildings have not been done within the latter period, but that they are not characteristic of the period. The buildings which appear to have been done by architects, and yet fail to stand the tests either of sense or of style, date themselves infallibly as having been done since 1876. One must resort to external evidence to ascertain whether the buildings that are honorable monuments to their architects were done before or since Mr. Norman Shaw did all this mischief.

First among these, one has little hesitation in placing the new buildings designed by Mr. Haight for Columbia College. Mr. Haight has not here been in pursuit of novelty, but has been content with conforming his structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus arrived at so as to heighten their inherent expression. And although he has kept within the limits of historical English Gothic in doing this, the result of the process is an individual building with a characteristic

FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN’S HOUSE.Calvert Vaux, Architect.

FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN’S HOUSE.

Calvert Vaux, Architect.

expression of its own, the most successful piece of Gothic design that has been done in New York since Mr. Withers designed the Jefferson Market Court-house. In Queen Anne, as we saw, Mr. Haight’s work was not very distinguishable from the work of a very different architect. With a vocabulary limited to fifty words, not much can be expressed. But when he permits himself the use of language, it is seen that Mr. Haight can express thoughts. In composition and in detail these buildings are thoroughly studied and thoroughly effective. In the earlier, a street front of a whole block on Madison Avenue, the designer has resisted the temptation to diversify his building into unrest, but has built a wall of three stories in red brick and light sandstone, the broad and quiet aspect of which is enhanced by the grouping of the openings, and not disturbed by the chimney-stacks and the oriel and the turret which animate the composition. The later building, of the same materials, has been builtfor the library of the college, and the large hall which contains this is in effect the building. This is treated with equal skill, and to the same result of cloistral repose, of harmony and dignity and grace. These vigorous and refined works show, if the showing were needed, except by the architects of the new departure, that vigor does not necessarily involve bowlders, nor refinement microscopic mouldings, and that these short-cuts to architectural effect are rather sorry and shabby substitutes for faithful and skilful design. That these works of Mr. Haight’s are grammatically “correct” Gothic is not, to our mind, either a merit or a defect. But it shows how wide is the range of expression possible in the architecture of the Middle Ages, and of its pliability to modern uses, that without a departure from precedent the needs of an American college in the nineteenth century can be completely answered in that architecture; for there is no innovation in Mr. Haight’s work, unless we include the iron roof, which is partly visible from the floor of the hall. There are one or two “survivals” of forms which have lost their functions, as the unpierced pinnacled turrets at the angles of the library building and the crenellated parapet of the porch in the quadrangle. But, upon the whole, the result upon which the college and its architect are to be congratulated has been attained by following the advice of the sculptor who informed his pupil that the art was not difficult: “You simply take a piece of marble and leave out what you don’t want.” Mr. Haight has taken what he wanted in Gothic architecture for the uses of Columbia College, and with the trivial exceptions we have noted has left out the rest. And what is true of this work is equally true of an unpretending and picturesque piece of late Gothic, erected from Mr. Haight’s designs for St. Thomas’s School, in East Fifty-ninth Street.

ORIEL IN W. K. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTY-SECOND STREET.R. M. Hunt, Architect.

ORIEL IN W. K. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTY-SECOND STREET.

R. M. Hunt, Architect.

Another interesting piece of Gothic work, though this time of distinctly Victorian Gothic, is the house designed by Mr. Vaux for Governor Tilden. The interest of this, however, is rather in the detail of form and color than in general composition, since the building is architecturally only a street front, and since the slightness of the projections and the lack of visible and emphasized depth in the wall itself give it the appearance rather of a screen than of one face of a building, and the small gables which surmount it too evidently exist for the sole purpose of animating the sky-line. But the color treatment of this front is admirable, and recalls the best work of the most successful colorist in architecture whom we have ever had in New York—Mr. Wrey Mould. It is characteristic that interesting treatment of color, like every other properly architectural development, has been stopped short by the new “movement.” An unusually large variety of colors, and those of the most positive tints that natural stones supply, has here been employed and harmonized; and, what is even rarer, they have all been used with architectural propriety to accentuate the construction and to heighten its effect. An ingenious and novel use of dark granite, which when polished is almost black, and which is employed in narrow bands precisely where it is wanted, deserves particular remark. The decorative carving attracts attention chiefly by its profusion, and by the exquisite crispness and delicacy of its execution. In both these respects the only parallel to it is in the house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, for, as we have seen, the carving upon the houses of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt does not count. That this carving counts so fully is the result of the skill of the architect in fixing its place and adjusting its scale so that it everywhere assists the architecture, and is better in its place than it would be in another place.

REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH AVENUE.George B. Post, Architect.

REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH AVENUE.

George B. Post, Architect.

These things are equally true of the equally profuse carving in the house designed by Mr. Hunt for Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt; but this, although in a monochrome of gray limestone, would have a high architectural interest without the least decoration by force of design alone. The decorative detail is scarcely so well adjusted to the building in scale as that in the house just mentioned, or in the house designed for Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt by Mr. Post, being partly lost by its minuteness, but it has the same merit of being in the right place, and designed for its place, and is cut with the same perfection. In a more recent work of Mr. Hunt’s, the Guernsey Building, in lower Broadway—a street front in distinctly modern Gothic—there is assuredly no error in scale on the side of minuteness; but the treatment, in mass and in detail, is marked by great vigor and animation, and the architecture of the building is an emphatic expression of its structure.

Another commercial building, at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, is by the architects of the Union League Club, and seems to have been designed under the pressure of a recent discovery that that building would not do. There is no doubt about the discovery; it is only a pity that it should not have been made from the drawings before they were translated into masonry. Clear, however, as the architects were on this point, they were not so clear when they began the United Bank Building what would do, and the first two stories look like a series of tentative experiments to find out. They were proving all things, perhaps, with the intention of holding fast that which was good. The practice of projecting bowlders, especially in soft sandstone, has already been mentioned as a somewhat slovenly substitute for the expression of vigor by modelling. Bowlders are projected from the piers of this basement in the most ferocious and blood-curdling manner—so ferocious, indeed, that the architects repented them of their bullying behavior. It is like the fear that came upon Snug the joiner, of the consequences that would ensue if ladies took him for the king of beasts: “Another prologue must tell he is not a lion.” And so the architects seem to have taken the counsel of Nick Bottom: “Half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck;

DOORWAY OF GUERNSEY BUILDING, BROADWAY.R. M. Hunt, Architect.

DOORWAY OF GUERNSEY BUILDING, BROADWAY.

R. M. Hunt, Architect.

and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect—Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or, I would request you, or, I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No. I am no such thing: I am a man as other men are:and there, indeed, let him name his name; and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner”—that is to say, Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, architects. The “other prologue,” which is calculated to reassure the most timid, is the treatment of the first floor, where a disclaimer of any offensive intention is made in the insertion between the openings of pairs of banded pilasters, between the capitals of which is inserted the novel and pleasing ornament of a key-stone. In order to make sure that they are not strong enough to do any harm, they are not only designed with much feebleness, but they are projected from the face of the wall they might otherwise be imagined to strengthen, and set upon brackets. Between these Renaissance pilasters are Romanesque entrance arches, in which there is a return to truculence of demeanor; but these are seen to be not entrances at all, but only innocent windows of bank parlors, and the real entrances under them, covered with trefoiled gablets in cast iron, are obviously harmless. It is quite fair to say that up to the top of the first story there is no design in the building, nothing that betrays any evidence of a general intention. But having built thus far in futile search of a motive and of a style, they came upon both, and built over this aimless and restless collection of inconsistent details a purposeful, peaceable, and consistent brick building, a series of powerful piers connected by and sustaining powerful arches, defined by a light label moulding, and enriched at the springing with a well-designed belt of foliage. It seems incredible that the authors of this respectable building should be also the authors of the basement on which it stands. At the angle is the ingenious device of a griffin “displayed,” and with one wing folded back against either wall, to carry the metal socket of the flag-staff. This feature in all its detailsis designed with great spirit and picturesqueness. But the architectural impulse fails in the attic story, which should obviously be here the richest part of the building, and which is the baldest, being only a series of rectangular holes, without either modelling or decoration, and without relation in their grouping to the openings immediately under them.

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