G. E. Harney, and McKim, Mead, & White, Architects.
of genius, but weak in his parts of speech, are the effects which the demand for aboriginality actually had upon the race of builders, whether they were content with that title, or without any sufficient provocation described themselves as architects. They undoubtedly attained difference, and their works did not remind the travelled observer of any of the masterpieces of Europe. It is quite conceivable and not at all discreditable that the wild work of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should have led architects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Washington Square, and to sigh for a return of the times when the common street architecture of New York was sober and respectable, even if it was conventional and stupid.
This justifiable preference for Bowling Green and Washington Square and St. John’s Park over Broadway and Madison Square and Murray Hill, for an architecture confessedly colonial over an architecture aggressively provincial, is no doubt the explanation why so many of our younger architects made haste to fall in behind the Queen Anne standard. What we really have a right to blame them for is for not so far analyzing their own emotions as to discover that the qualities they admired in the older work, or admired by comparison with the newer, were not dependent upon the actual details in which they found them. To be “content to dwell in decencies forever” was not considered the mark of a lofty character even by a poet of the time of Queen Anne. If virtue were, indeed, “too painful an endeavor,” and if there were no choice except between the state of dwelling in decencies and the state of dwelling in indecencies forever, we could but admit that they had chosen the better part. But they were not, in fact, confined to a choice between these alternatives. The Gothic revival in England, after twenty years, had succeeded in establishing something much more like a real vernacular architecture than had been known in England before since the building of the cathedrals—an architecture which, although starting from formulas and traditions, had attained to principles, and was true, earnest, and
ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET.
C. C. Haight, Architect.
alive. It was quite inevitable that it should be crude in proportion as it was alive, according to the frankness with which it recognized that we live in times unknown to the ancients, and endeavored to respond with changes in its organism to changes wrought in its environment by new requirements and new knowledge, with forms necessarily rude, inchoate, embryonic, as beseems the formative period of letters and of arts as of life, in contrast with the ultimate refinement which is the mark of a completed development. But that these crudities would be refined was also inevitable; that they were in process of refinement was apparent. Another generation of artists as earnest as those who began the Gothic revival might have brought this rough and swelling bud to a splendid blossom. But in an evil hour, and under a strange spell, the young architects of the United States followed the young architects of England in preferring the refinements of a fixed and developed architecture to the rudenesses of a living and growing architecture. Because they did not see their way at once to “supply every deficiency and symmetrize every disproportion,” they did not leave this for their successors, but abandoned the attempt at an expression of the things they were doing for the elegant expression in antique architecture of meanings that have grown meaningless to modern men.
They have had their way in New York for seven or eight years, during a period unprecedented in building activity, and out of all comparison in the profusion with which money has been lavished upon building and decoration. What have they gained for architectural art? They have, indeed, subjected many miles of sandstone to the refining influence of egg-and-dart mouldings (the designer of a house in Fifth Avenue has so much faith in the efficacy of that ornament that he has belted his street front with three rows of it, one above the other), and triglyphs (faithfully to have contemplated which softens the manners, nor suffers to be rude) have been brought within the reach of the humblest in the decoration of tenement-houses. They have built so much and so expensively that they have produced in minds—like some of their own—which do not reflect much upon these things the impression that if luxury and art be not synonymous, they are at least inseparably connected, with the latter in the capacity of handmaiden. But will any educated architect assert that the characteristic monuments of the last five or six years—greatly superior in quantity, and superior by a great multiple in cost—are equal in architectural value to the work of the decade preceding? Suppose that Mr. Norman Shaw had not bedevilled the weaker of his brethren, and that this unprecedented building activity and this unparalleled spending of money that have fallen under the control of architects had been directed along the lines laid down by the Gothic revivalists, and had extended, consolidated, and refined the work begun and carried on here by such architects as Mr. Upjohn, Mr. Eidlitz, Mr. Withers, Mr. Cady, Mr. Potter, and Mr. Wight, will any educated architect maintain that the result of such a process would not have been nobler monuments than any to which we can point as characteristic products of the later movement?