DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET.
R. H. Robertson, Architect.
We might ask Mr. Harney, for example, who has been one of the noteworthy contributors to the works of both periods, whether in falling to “grace” he has not fallen from something more important. One can readily understand that Mr. Harney, in contemplating the effect of his completed work in the respectable warehouse at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, should have been disappointed in the effect of much of the detail he had designed for his building, should have found some of it rude, some of it disproportionate
HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET.
Bruce Price, Architect.
to its function and position, and none of it exquisite in modelling. It is also intelligible that he may have been dissatisfied with some parts even of his still more successful house at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, which, always a grateful object, has lately acquired an air of additional distinction from the eager architectural competition which has set in alongside of it, and the results of which give an air of unquestionable animation—the animation of excited controversy—to Fifty-seventh Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. This dissatisfaction, if the architect underwent it, was a wholesome discontent which we should have expected to see allayed by more thoroughly studied detail in Mr. Harney’s succeeding work. But it seems to have been a morbid sensitiveness to the defects of his work which led Mr. Harney to abandon altogether, and in despair, the practice of architectural design, and, when he had another commercial building to do, to erect in Wall Street an entirely ineffectual structure, of which the architecture that one carries away with him consists in a crow-stepped gable, an irrelevant entablature appliqué which crosses the building half-way up, and windows covered with flat arches, the key-stones of which are “shored up” by the mullions; and, when he had another city house to do, to depute the design of it to some unknown carpenter who died before he was born, and to reproduce accurately in Madison Avenue a Vandam or Charlton Street house built out of due time, with a familiar “old New York” doorway, in the jambs of which quoins intercept sheaves of mouldings. This confession that a carpenter of 1825 was a better-trained designer than an educated architect of 1880 is very possibly creditable to the personal modesty of the latter; but Mr. Harney’s own earlier works sufficiently testify that it does not do him justice.
Mr. Cady, one of the most important and distinguished of the contributors to the Gothic revival in New York, has also of late years become a convert to the new movement, and seems from our point of view to have thrown himself away with even less sufficient cause than that which impelled Mr. Harney to his rash act. For we have distinctly admitted that Mr. Harney had reason to be dissatisfied with his Gothic detail, while we cannot make that admission in behalf of Mr. Cady. Mr. Cady’s newer work is shown in a house of red-brick and brown sandstone, which he contributed to the architectural competition just noticed. This edifice shows a desire to live at peace in the midst of very quarrelsome neighbors. Mr. Cady, indeed, could scarcely design a vulgar and vociferous work if he tried. At any rate, he has never tried, and does not in the least need to be put under the bonds of a style in order to insure his keeping the peace. One wonders what Mr. Cady believes himself to have gained in abandoning the style of his brilliant Art Building in Brooklyn for the style of his not very noticeable house in Fifty-seventh Street.