indeed perhaps the costliest and most “important” of all the business block of St. Paul, is the building of the New York Life Insurance Company. In saying that the total impression of this edifice is one of picturesque quaintness, one seems to deny its typicalness, if not its appropriateness, as a housing and an expression of the local genius, for assuredly there is nothing quaint about the Western business man or his procedures during business hours, however quaint and even picturesque one may find him when relaxing into anecdote in his hours of ease. The building owes its quaintness in great part to the division of its superstructure into two unequal masses flanking a narrow court, at the base of which is the main entrance. The general arrangement is not uncommon in the business blocks of New York. The unequal division into masses, of which one is just twice as wide as the other, looks capricious in the present detached condition of the building; though when another lofty building abuts upon it, the inequality will be seen to be a sensible precaution to secure the effective lighting of the narrower mass, the light for the wider being secured by a street upon one side as well as by the court upon the other. Even so, this will not be so intuitively beheld as the fact of the inequality itself, and as the differences of treatment to which it gives rise and by which it is emphasized; for the quaintness resulting from the asymmetry is so far from being ungrateful to the designer that he has seized upon it with avidity, and developed it by all the means in his power. Quaintness is the word that everybody uses spontaneously to express the character of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance, and the treatment of these unequal gables is obviously derived from Flemish examples. The origin of their crow steps and ailerons is unmistakable, and the treatment of the grouped and somewhat huddled openings, and their wreathed pediments and bull’s-eyes, richly and heavily framed in terra-cotta, is equally characteristic, to the point of being baroque. This character is quite evidently meant, and the picturesqueness that results from it is undeniable, and gives the building its prevailing expression; howbeit it is confined to the gables, the treatment of the substructure being as “architecturesque” as that of the superstructure is picturesque. A simple and massive basement of two stories in masonry carries the five stones of brick-work heavily quoined in stone that constitute the body of the building, and this is itself subdivided by slight but sufficient differences, the lower story being altogether of masonry, and the upper arcaded. An intermediate story, emphatically marked off above and below, separates this body from the two-story roof, the gables of which we have been considering. The main entrance, which gives
ENTRANCE TO NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL.
access to a stately and sumptuous corridor, seems itself extraneous to the building, having little congruity either with the straightforward and structural treatment of the main building, or with the bulbous picturesqueness of the gables. The care with which its detail is studied is evident, and also the elegance of the detail in its kind and in its place; but it does not seem to be in its place anywhere out-of-doors, and still less as applied to the entrance of a business block to which it is merely applied, and from which it is not developed. Its extreme delicacy, indeed, almost gives the impression that it is meant to be a still small voice of scholarly protest on the part of an “Eastern” architect against a “boisterous and rough-hewn” Westernness. A still smaller voice of protest seems to be emitted by the design of the Endicott Arcade, the voice of one crying, very softly, in the wilderness. So ostentatiously discreet is the detail of this building, indeed, so minute the scale of it, and so studious the avoidance of anything like stress and the effort for understatement, that the very quietness of its remonstrance gives it the effect of vociferation.
“He who in quest of quiet ‘Silence’ hoots,
Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.”
It seems to be an explicit expostulation, for example, with the architect of the Guaranty Loan Building in Minneapolis, which has many striking details not without ingenuity, and certainly not without “enterprise,” but as certainly without the refinement that comes of a studied and affectionate elaboration, insomuch that this also may be admitted to be W——n, and to invite the full force of Dryden’s criticism. The building in the exterior of which this mild remonstrance is made has an interior feature that is noteworthy for other qualities than the avoidance of indiscretion and overstatement—the “arcade,” so called, from which it takes its name—a broad corridor, sumptuous in material and treatment to the “palatial” point, one’s admiration for which is not destroyed, though it is abated, by a consideration of its irrelevancy to a business block. The building of the New York Life in Minneapolis, by the same architects as the building of the same corporation in St. Paul, is more readily recognizable by a New-Yorker as their work. It is a much more commonplace and a much more utilitarian composition—a basement of four stories, of which two are in masonry, carrying a central division also of four and an attic of two, the superstructure
NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.