44. The Golden Christmas; a Chronicle of St. John's, Berkeley: Charleston, Walker & Richards, 1852.
PETERSON & HUMPHREY'S CARPET HOUSE.
THE PALACES OF TRADE.
It were well if not only William B. Astor, Stephen Whitney, the heirs of Peter Stuyvesant (of blessed memory), and others who own real estate in this city, and likewise all mayors, common councilmen, and others in authority, were endued with more taste, with a higher regard to the general interest, and a juster sense of the matters that pertain to a good administration, so that it might be said in after times that the beneficence of the Creator (who in things natural has done more for ours than for any other city), had been seconded by the pious wisdom of the creature, and Manhattan pointed to as in all respects the metropolis of the world. Why not? If the very stones in the streets of London, Paris, and Vienna, were turned to pure gold, they would not purchase for those cities advantages that should be compared with such as we already possessed by our beautiful island—a giant mosaic, set in emerald, studding the bosom of Nature.
Whatever may be said by our excellent neighbor, the minister of the dingy-looking red brick meeting-house round the corner, it is not less a work of piety to create any work of beauty—a beautiful house, or shop, or poem, for example—than to teach a class in the Sunday school,—which doctrine may be incidentally fortified from Jonathan Edwards's Theory of True Virtue, and more directly from the best philosophies of later years. It is ordered that the dignity of human nature shall in a great degree be dependent upon a sympathetic association with what is admirable. It was Hazlitt, we believe,—certainly it was some one who appreciatingly recognized the highest earthly ministry,—who said it was impossible to entertain an angry feeling in the presence of a lovely woman's portrait,—which, done fitly, is the highest accomplishment of art. Whatever is beautiful or sublime has the same purifying and ennobling tendency. The beggars do shrewdly who sit in front of Stewart's. The same person who would give a shilling there, would as likely as not steal a penny from the hat of the blind man round the corner, where those detestable red bricks so outrage every principle known to a builder fit to handle the trowel. There is nothing more offensive than this custom of making of different materials the various fronts of the same edifice. It may be allowable to construct the rear of a house, or a side that is to be built against speedily, of a cheaper stone; but to make the face upon one street of marble, and the face around the corner of brick, as in the case of Stewart's store, and the Society Library, is an outrage as ridiculous as it would be to make alternate gores of a woman's skirt of Petersham and Brussels lace. Bricks are very respectable; we say nothing in their dispraise; but to any man of taste, an edifice is much more beautiful built entirely of bricks than it is with but one of two exposed parts of marble; and let us say to the affluent merchant to whom New-York is indebted for the structure just mentioned, that until he paints his bricks on Reade-street, so that they correspond as nearly as may be with his fronts on Chambers-street and Broadway, his store will indicate but a shabby gentility, an unnatural association of tow cloth and satin, copper and silver, poverty and riches, which should blush in the face of the most inferior exhibition of consistency. With the abolition of this strong contrast, the observer who goes down Broadway will contemplate with delight the classical air of this most imposing Palace of Trade that has yet been erected in the cities of the United States. How easily Broadway, for the money that its piles of brick and stone will have cost in ten years, might be made the most splendid street in Christendom, by a mere observance of the principles of taste and unity!
PRINCIPAL HALL OF PETERSON & HUMPHREY'S CARPET HOUSE.