DOORWAY, BRISTOL, R. I.
several belt courses of East Indian flat-carving, and bore a semi-circular opening or a series of them (they may be semi-ellipses if preferred) upon the ground line or the projected edifice to afford a mode of ingress and egress corresponding, proportionately, to the same convenience designed for bees in a bee-hive. Next, pour in Alice in Wonderland’s “Drink me” elixir to make it grow, and await results of the magic drug. This is the critical moment. All must work harmoniously, and, having reached the height limit imposed by the elevator manufacturer, perhaps, quickly cap the building with some red, corrugated tiles, if you choose, in the form of a Moresque roof, ornament with lantern and flagstaff, and, behold!—the charm operates!—the great American “sky-scraper” of a commercial city has been achieved.
It is not within the province of this review to enter into a discussion of the problem of housing commercialism. It is odd that nobody hints how posterity is going to laugh at us, censure our cupidity, and eventually raze every one of our hideous “sky-scrapers” that shall be left standing. It is odd that the present congestion of Manhattan as a crime against decency, with all the idle land that is adjacent and available, is not painfully manifest in this so-called year of grace MCMIV. But it is within the province of this review to say that whenever the soaring kind of architecture precipitated itself upon the Anglo-Saxon dwelling-house there was a tremendous crash and revolution. It was telescoped, it was flattened—grotesquely flattened, but still it was remarkable for ingenuity, for cleverness, and, above everything, for novelty, as would be a dwelling-house loaned by another planet. So strange, indeed, this newly-invented architecture grew that it became simply impossible to prevail upon ancestral ghosts, legends and folk-lore, that habitually are part and parcel of the habitation of man, to have anything to do with a device à la mode that appeared to be in every way so very much better suited to the needs of a Roman bath-house after the manner of Alma Tadema. The following lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” may aptly express the injured feelings of those sentimental amenities:
“Oh, hasten!—oh, let us not linger!
Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must.”
AMERICAN RENAISSANCE.
| ANALYSIS. | ||
| Moresque Spain | 0 | per cent. |
| Moresque Algiers | 0 | “ |
| Moresque California Mission | 0 | “ |
| East Indian | 0 | “ |
| Newly reclaimed land | 0 | “ |
| Chinese ornament | 0 | “ |
| Modern invention | 0 | “ |
| Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere | 100 | “ |