PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ST. PAUL.
Gilbert & Taylor, Architects.
In the material and materializing development of the West, it is not surprising that the chief object of local pride should not be the local church, but the local hotel. “Of course a large hotel” is now, as in Trollope’s time,
WEST HOTEL, MINNEAPOLIS.
L. S. Buffington, Architect.
a necessary ingredient of a local “boom.” In respect of architecture the large hotel of Minneapolis has a decided advantage over the large hotel of St. Paul. For the caravansary of the older town is an example of the kind of secular Victorian Gothic that was stimulated by the erection of Sir Gilbert Scott’s Midland Hotel in London, than which a less eligible model could scarcely be put before an untrained designer, since there is little in it to redeem an uneasy and uninteresting design except carefully studied and carefully adjusted detail. This careful study and adjustment being omitted, as they are in the Hotel Ryan, and a multiplicity of features retained and still further confused by a random introduction of color, the result is a bewildering and saltatory edifice which has nothing of interest except the banded piers of the basement. The West Hotel in Minneapolis is a much more considerable structure. It has a general composition, both vertically and laterally, consisting in the former case of three divisions, of which the central is rather the most important, and in the latter of an emphasis of the centre and the ends in each front and of a subordination of the intervening wall. Here, also, there is a multiplicity of features, but they are not so numerous or distributed so much at random as to prevent us from seeing the countenance, for undeniably the building has a physiognomy, and that is in itself an attainment. In artistic quality the features are very various, and the one trait they seem to have in common is a disregard for academic correctness or for purity of style. This is conspicuous in the main entrance, which is perhaps the most effective and successful of them, being a massive and powerful porte-cochère, in which, however, an unmistakably Gothic dwarf column adjoins a panelled pilaster, which as unmistakably owes its origin to the Renaissance, and a like freedom of eclecticism may be observed throughout the building. In its degree this freedom may be Western, though a European architect would be apt to dismiss it indiscriminately as American; whereas an American architect would be more apt to ask himself, with respect to any particular manifestation of it, whether it was really, and not only conventionally, a solecism. In this place the conjunction does not strike one as incongruous, but there are other features in which the incongruity is real, such as the repeated projections of long and ugly corbels to support things that are pretty evidently there mainly for the purpose of being supported. The impregnable criticism of the Vicar of Wakefield, that the picture would have been better if the artist had taken more pains, is especially applicable to this edifice. It might have been both chastened and clarified by severer study; but it is a compliment to it, as American hotel architecture goes, to wish that it had been more carefully matured by its designer before being irretrievably executed. The interior presents several interesting points of design as well as of arrangement, but perhaps it owes its chief attractiveness to the rich and quiet decoration of those of its rooms that have been intrusted to Mr. Bradstreet, who for many years has been acting as an evangelist of good taste to the two cities, and who for at least the earlier of those years must have felt that he was an evangelist in partibus. The interior design and decoration of the opera-house at Minneapolis is a yet more important illustration of his skill; but interiors are beyond our present scope.