No European public edifice has a grander Greek Doric portico than that which dominates the tremendous four-storey front block of the Lunatic Asylum in Utica, N.Y., of 1837-43, designed by no architect, according to the records, but by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, William Clarke (Plate [46]). Still later, in 1850, after the Grecian mode was passé with most architects if not with the general public, Davis built in the Renaissance Revival mode that he called ‘Tuscan’ the Insane Asylum at Raleigh, North Carolina; this is distinguished by his characteristic arrangement of the windows in tall vertical bands. Such American institutions are not at all unworthy of comparison with the best French productions of the period by Gilbert and others, although generally of rather smaller size (Plate [20]).
Figure 13. Isaiah Rogers: Boston, Tremont House, 1828-9, plan
Hotels in Europe had not as yet received much architectural elaboration, nor did they in general before the mid century. Such English hotels of Grecian pretension as the Queen’s by W. C. and R. Jearrad at Cheltenham, which opened in 1837, or the Great Western in Bristol by R. S. Pope (1781-?), opened two years later, are rather exceptional, being located at spas, and in any case a decade later in date than the first notable American example. It was in Boston, at the Tremont House built in 1828-9, a Grecian granite structure of dignified grandeur externally (Plate [41]) and of considerable functional elaboration internally (Figure [13]), that Rogers and his clients consciously initiated a new standard of hotel design. For thirty years Rogers himself, in various hotels from New Orleans—the St Charles—to Cincinnati—the Burnet House—all long ago demolished, personally maintained and, at least in terms of functional organization, continued to raise that standard. Not for nothing did the big new London hotels of a generation later label their bars and their barber-shops ‘American’.
In 1832 Rogers began the Astor House in New York; when completed in 1836 this already outranked the Tremont House in every way. Not least extraordinary must have been the elaborately fan-vaulted hall. This reflected that eclectic interest in Gothic of which Rogers’s wooden Unitarian Church of 1833 in Cambridge, Mass., provides extant evidence. The last hotel that he built was the Maxwell House in Nashville, Tennessee, of 1854-60.
Rogers’s pre-eminence at hotel design was signalized from the first by the publication in 1830 of a monograph on the Tremont House;[[97]] thus the hotel joined the prison as a type of building in which American influence became important internationally. But Rogers’s practice was by no means confined to hotels; among other things he gave both Boston and New York their Merchants Exchanges long before he became Supervising Architect in Washington. The colonnade of the latter, a little like that of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, still survives at the base of McKim, Mead & White’s First National City Bank in Wall Street to illustrate Rogers’s high competence at handling a standard Romantic Classical theme.
Resort hotels repeated the same Grecian themes in wood, their columns being often much attenuated in order to rise three and four storeys above the circumambient verandas. However, an early example, the first Ocean House of 1841 at Newport, R.I., had a colonnade only two storeys tall set against the main four-storey block. On the Atlantic House there of 1844 the fourth storey occupied the broad Greek entablature surrounding the entire main block, but the front portico of elongated Ionic columns was only hexastyle. Both were burnt many years ago, but later examples of inferior quality remain in several forgotten spas and mountain resorts of the period, particularly in New York State.
New York City was drawing architectural talent in these years from other cities. Before Rogers moved there from Boston in 1834, mid way in the Astor House campaign, Town & Davis had arrived from Connecticut. Davis’s Sub-Treasury in Wall Street begun in 1834,[[98]] however, is rather less successful than the earlier New England houses of similar temple form that he and Town had designed. Davis was himself more notably a protagonist of the Picturesque, despite all the very large and prominent Grecian buildings for which he was responsible (see Chapter [6]). Yet his Colonnade Row in Lafayette Street of 1832, a terrace all of freestone with a free-standing giant Corinthian colonnade, equals in grandeur anything of the period that London or Edinburgh have to offer (Plate [42A]). More typical of New York in this period than Colonnade Row, and of uncertain authorship, is the terrace of red-brick Grecian houses built on the north side of Washington Square in the thirties, of which a few have survived on sufferance the vandalous encroachments of New York University.
Some of the finest Greek houses are by provincial architects. One such is stone-built Hyde Hall in Cooperstown, N.Y., very crisp and severe as it was remodelled in 1833 by Philip Hooker (1766-1836) of Albany, who had built it originally in 1811. Still others are of uncertain authorship, notably the Alsop house of 1838 in Middletown, Conn. This is a symmetrical Grecian villa almost worthy of Schinkel’s Potsdam, with very fine murals on the exterior as well as inside. The Alsop house (now the Davison Art Centre of Wesleyan University) was probably designed by a relative of the family who had access to the resources of the Town & Davis office; however, the painters employed were Italian or German. The Wooster-Boalt house of 1848 in Norwalk, Ohio, indicates the late continuance of real restraint and sophistication of design in the Middle West, something already lost in the sumptuous mansions of New Orleans and the Deep South. But many Middle Western houses illustrate rather the surprising elasticity of Carpenters’ Grecian.
A mode that approaches the German Rundbogenstil—indeed, in the work of such foreign-trained architects as the Prague-born Leopold Eidlitz (1823-1908) relatively authentic examples of that mode—was not uncommon in the America of the mid century.[[99]] The Astor Library in Lafayette Street opposite Colonnade Row, built by A. Saelzer in 1849, was a good example. Less successful was Appleton Chapel at Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., by Paul Schulze (1827-97), who sent over the drawings from Germany, and later settled in America. Begun in 1856, this was a very reduced version of Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche in Munich with only one tower. However, the largest and finest example was by a precocious student at Brown University, Thomas A. Tefft (1826-59).[[100]] This was the Union Station in Providence, begun in 1848 and gradually carried out by Bucklin and his partner Talman (Plate [44]). This station rivalled in extent and in the distinction and ingenuity of its rather Lombardic Romanesque detailing, simply executed with ordinary red brick, the German ones by Eisenlohr and Bürklein in Baden and Bavaria; without much question it was the finest early station in the New World. Tefft also designed various New England churches of somewhat similar character, all dominated by very tall and simple spires. However, his churches in the East are outrivalled by such a Middle Western example as the Union Methodist in St Louis, built by George I. Barnett (1815-98) in 1852-4. Tefft’s best works, other than the station, are not Rundbogenstil but Barryesque; such is the brownstone Tully-Bowen house on Benefit Street in Providence of 1852-3, for example. Others were building as fine ones there, however. The consistent use of brownstone and red brick well illustrates the sharp reaction that had set in by his time against the pale tones and untextured surfaces of the Greek Revival.