Different as they are, this Bradford façade and that of Godwin’s contemporary warehouse at 104 Stokes Croft in Bristol, so much more subtly Ruskinian than anything by Deane & Woodward, are the two masterpieces of the genre at its best moment (Plate #113:pl113). Of very high quality also is 60 Mark Lane in the City of London built by George Aitchison in 1864-5. There the existence of a complete iron skeleton, presumably but not certainly present in most of the other examples, is fully documented. Moreover, on the rear the metal comes through to the outer face of the wall much as it did at 50 Watling Street, built some twenty years earlier.
In Philadelphia William Johnston had begun in 1849 the seven-storey Jayne Building in Chestnut Street,[[302]] introducing a new vertical formula of design for commercial façades. Above a conventional ground floor, narrow granite piers in the forms of clustered colonnettes rise the full height of the building, merging into Venetian Gothic tracery below a terminal parapet. Whether or not Samuel K. Hoxie, the contractor who provided the Quincy granite for this and other Philadelphia buildings, was familiar with the ‘granite-skeleton’ work of Parris, Rogers, and others in Boston is not clear. But in the next few years a good many façades with a similarly vertical and ‘skeletonized’ treatment were built in Philadelphia by J. C. Hoxie and his sometime partner Button. That across the street from the Jayne Building has already been mentioned, since the openings between the piers are covered with segmental arches throughout. Button’s building at 723-727 Chestnut Street of 1853 and his extant Leland Building at 37-39 South Third Street are even more ‘proto-Sullivanian’, so to put it. Louis Sullivan probably saw and admired such things as the Jayne Building and the Leland Building when he was working for Frank Furness in Philadelphia in the seventies; certainly they are very premonitory of his characteristic work of the eighties and even the nineties.
Various other ways of reducing the wall to little more than a masonry cladding of the iron structural members were also in use in England as well as in America by this time. A notable small edifice in the City of London, of uncertain date and authorship but probably by Thomas Hague and of 1855, is at 22 Finch Lane, with another front to the court at the side. On both these façades the two lower storeys are joined together visually by setting back the horizontal spandrel between them, and the moulded stonework of the very narrow piers is of almost metallic scale and crispness.
Still more striking is Oriel Chambers[[303]] in Water Street in Liverpool, built in 1864-5 by Peter Ellis (fl. 1835-84), and another smaller building by him at 16 Cook Street of a year or two later. On the front façades of these the masonry is scaled down quite as much as at 22 Finch Lane but given a more decorative treatment, in both cases of rather metallic character. At Oriel Chambers, oriels of plate glass held in delicate metal frames are cantilevered out in every bay of all the upper storeys, producing a regular rhythm broken only by the clumsy cresting on the top (Plate [114A]). At 16 Cook Street all the stone spandrels are set back, thus emphasizing even more strongly than at Oriel Chambers the continuous vertical lines of the mullions. The over-all pattern is once more somewhat confused, however, by the arches across the top that link the mullions together. The rear walls of both of Ellis’s buildings are even more open in design and directly expressive of the metal skeleton. Towards the narrow court at the side of Oriel Chambers only every third iron pier is clad with masonry; those between rise free behind the glass of the horizontally sashed windows whose upper planes are slanted inward. This is, in effect, an early example of the ‘curtain-wall’ (see Chapter [22]).
If in some technical respects the Chicago skyscraper of the nineties seems almost to have come to premature birth in Liverpool in the sixties, as in some other respects it had done in the Philadelphia commercial buildings of the fifties, the immediate influence of these buildings by Ellis seems to have been almost nil. Eventually Owen Jones, in a façade at Derby of 1872, and Thomas Ambler, in a corner building at 46-47 Boar Lane in Leeds of 1873, did come to use only iron and glass, omitting all masonry; but more characteristic commercial work of these years is to be seen in such warehouses by unknown hands as the one at 1-2 York Place in Leeds, with an arcade crisply detailed in moulded brick rising through all the upper storeys, somewhat as on the Philadelphia buildings of the fifties, or a larger example in Strait Street in Bristol, with a much heavier arcade subsuming several upper storeys, handsomely executed in stones of different colours and textures and very boldly and simply detailed. Such things, however, very soon seemed to the English not advanced but retardataire as contemporary attention focused on the Queen Anne of Shaw’s New Zealand Chambers of 1872-3.
Richardson’s very un-Shavian American Express Building[[304]] in Chicago of 1872-3 first brings that Mid-Western metropolis into this story. That had no arcading, but the windows were very closely set, sometimes (it would appear) with only light metal colonnettes as mullions between them. There was also a directness and a ‘realism’ of treatment throughout comparable to that of Richardson’s more monumental work of this date, notably the Hampden County Courthouse and the Buffalo State Hospital, both designed the previous year and at this time still in construction. But Richardson’s dependence on English commercial work of the preceding fifteen years became closer still in his first really fine business building, the Cheney Block (now the Brown-Thompson Department Store) built in Hartford, Conn., in 1875-6 (Plate [116A]). Here the wide ground-storey arcade, including a mezzanine, and the narrower arcade above, subsuming several storeys—as on the very proto-Richardsonian warehouse in Strait Street in Bristol—are carried out with typically Richardsonian stoniness in quarry-faced brownstone. But the banded arches introduce a bold note of High Victorian Gothic polychromy, and the carved detail is in the harsh but richly naturalistic vein—also High Victorian Gothic in spirit—of the ornament on the earliest executed portions of Trinity Church in Boston, probably of a year or two before.
Already, in New York, the skyscraper[[305]] had been born by this date, and leadership in commercial architecture had crossed the Atlantic for good and all. None of the structures dealt with so far in this chapter except the Jayne Building were more than five or six storeys high, since it could not be expected that business clients would climb more than four or five flights of stairs. But the average height of buildings in the financial districts of cities had, even so, almost doubled since the eighteenth century, partly because of the general rise in the number of storeys, partly because of much increased storey heights. Vertical transportation of human beings, which would allow the erection of office buildings considerably more than five storeys high—industrial buildings were often much taller already—became increasingly feasible during the forties and fifties. Hoists for goods were a commonplace of English warehouse design after 1840, and in 1844 the Bunker Hill Monument had a passenger-hoist operated by a steam engine. In New York the Haughwout Store on Broadway had in 1857 the first practical passenger lift or elevator to be installed in an ordinary urban structure. This was of the type developed by Elisha G. Otis. A lift of another sort was introduced in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York later that year. Those of 1860 in the Westminster Palace Hotel in London apparently did not function, at least for some years. The Equitable Building, for which Arthur Gilman and Edward Kimball, with George B. Post (1837-1913) as the associated engineer, won the competition in 1868, was the first office building in New York to have a lift from the time of its completion in 1871. Immediately after this lifts were introduced in several other comparable structures, and one- or two-storey mansards were often added to the tops of existing buildings. A great change was thus at hand in New York in the early seventies.
Despite the Panic of 1873, the mid seventies saw the construction of what may properly be considered the first skyscrapers, the nine-storey (260-foot) Tribune Building and the ten-storey (230-foot) Western Union Building. Both were therefore about double the height even of the tallest office structures, such as the five-storey (130-foot) Equitable Building erected during the preceding boom period. These first skyscrapers rose to altitudes reached hitherto in America only by church spires, as general views of the New York skyline around 1875 make evident. Neither Hunt’s New York Tribune Building, extant but since carried many storeys higher, nor Post’s Western Union Telegraph Building, long since demolished, incorporated any other technical innovations;[[306]] nor was their design at all closely related, like that of Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, to the advanced English commercial work of the previous decade. Paradoxically, the French-trained Hunt’s building is somewhat the more English of the two in character; but, for all the direct expressiveness of the window grouping in triplets in each bay, the detail throughout is coarse and gawky, and the silhouette of the very tall mansard and the asymmetrically placed tower was from the first overbearing. The later addition of many more storeys has made the building even more top-heavy in appearance. The Tribune Building was of interest chiefly for its relatively great height, now unnoticeable among the much taller skyscrapers built around it later. Its almost complete avoidance of any sort of archaeological styling, however, such as the Romanesquoid of Richardson’s Cheney Block or the violently polychromatic and spiky Gothic of Hunt’s own Divinity School at Yale, on which construction was still at this date proceeding, is certainly worth remark also.
The Western Union Building of Post was only nominally French, for its rather heavy-handed Second Empire treatment owed more to earlier English and American designs in this mode than to anything Parisian (Plate [115A]). But the exterior was more orderly, if less expressive, than that of Hunt’s skyscraper and the mansards on top piled up as grandly to the centrally placed tower as on the big contemporary Post Office near by. Yet stylistically both Post’s and Hunt’s buildings were out of date almost as soon as they were finished; and after the hiatus caused by the depression of the seventies the locus of the skyscraper story moved westward to Chicago.
Chicago, already the metropolis of the Middle West, had almost no architectural traditions at this time. First developed as a city in the thirties, the need for rapid building in timber had led to the invention or development of what is called ‘balloon-frame’ construction, in which relatively light studs or scantlings, rising wall high, form a cage or crate whose members are fastened together by a liberal use of machine-made nails. Balloon-frame construction, thus, is a typical offshoot of the industrial revolution, becoming feasible only with the mechanization of the saw-mill and of the manufacture of nails. Theoretically, there might be thought to be some analogy between this New World method of carpentry, so different from the heavy framing of the Old World, hitherto always used in America as well, and metal construction. There is no evidence, however, that Chicago took to iron with any greater enthusiasm in the fifties and sixties than did New York or various other cities; indeed, St Louis seems to have had more and finer examples of cast-iron fronts, particularly in the early seventies. As late as that, moreover, the new cities of the American Northwest were obtaining cast-iron fronts prefabricated from Britain, just as San Francisco had obtained many of her warehouses and immigrant dwellings in 1849-50.