Chapter 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?

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

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.

Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; but it can also be attained, by architects who are really in quest of it, in other styles quite as well, which admit a much wider range of expression, while the student is forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre repertory of Queen Anne any other quality than quietude can be expressed. Its successes in domestic architecture are mainly the successes of unnoticeableness, which is really the character not only of the dwellings just mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, and of a house, which has the great advantage of double the usual frontage, by Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s reproduction; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street by these latter architects, which looks less like a work of architectural art than a magnified piece of furniture “with the Chippendale feeling,” can scarcely be called successful, while the house they designed for Mr. Astor in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street front in brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called Queen Anne, in spite of the three rows of egg-and-dart moulding, already remarked, which crown its rock-faced basement. The highest praise to which these typical Queen Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thoroughly studied detail, such as the treatment of the oriel in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is that they look like eligible mansions for highly respectable families content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also the highest praise that can be bestowed upon their prototypes of the Georgian era. We can repeat the admission that it is far better they should look like that than like the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons, without thereby admitting that the prim and prosaic expression of respectability never so eminent can be scored as a triumph in domestic architecture. The domestic architecture of Venice, or Rouen, or Nuremberg has something more to say to us than that. And a touch of such spirit and picturesqueness as Mr. Bruce Price has given us in a brick house in Fifty-sixth Street (p. 22), or as Mr. Hunt has given us not only in the elaborately ornate house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, but in some dwellings in upper Madison Avenue, is more to be desired than a mere omission to outrage decorum.

R. M. Hunt, Architect.]

Such as the successes of Queen Anne in domestic architecture are, they are its only successes, although it is only fair to say that much interesting work has been done in it, if not strictly of it, in suburban houses and sea-side cottages, which do not come within our present scope. A “feature” suffices for the architecture of a narrow street front, and a feature may be compiled out of the repertory of Queen Anne by a designer who thinks that result a reward of his pains. The oriel, for example, in effect comprises the architecture of the house just mentioned as designed by Mr. Haight. But even in a house which is only a feature the classic detail is not always adjusted without a visible incongruity to the constructions, out of which classic detail cannot spontaneously grow as it grew out of classic constructions. The doorway, for example, of the house designed by Mr. Robertson, which is virtually repeated in the window over it, is a moulded round arch standing upon pilasters of its own width, and thus apparently making of the jamb and arch a complete and detached construction. That is to say, the pilasters seem to carry the arch. The architect of the New York Post-office has done the same thing in a much ruder way. But the elegance of Mr. Robertson’s detail cannot rid even the spectator who does not stop to analyze the source of the feeling of an uneasy sensation that what is thus elegantly expressed is not the fact. An arch does, in fact, exercise a lateral as well as a vertical pressure; and if the arch and its vertical supports formed a detached construction, as they here appear to do, the arch would be unstable. Insensible as the classical Romans were to considerations of artistic expression, they were not so insensible as this. They recognized the existence of a lateral pressure by marking the impost of the arches with a continuous moulding, thus allying the arch with its lateral abutment as well as with its vertical support; and here the architect of the Post-office, wiser, or, if thought be not predicable of his architecture, more fortunate than Mr. Robertson, has been content to imitate them.

The buildings in which these solecisms appear, we repeat, are the successes of Queen Anne. For structures more complicated most of its practitioners have shrunk from invoking it. Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, indeed, took the ground, when they designed the Union League Club House, that a “feature” supplied a sufficient idea for that edifice; and that a portico of four large Roman Corinthian columns in front, subdued to an equal number of brick pilasters on the side, would meet the architectural requirements of the case, if they let their consciousness play freely over the remaining surfaces without reference to this central thought. But the result has scarcely justified this belief, and the spectator finds that the building, in spite of the unifying influence of a large and simple roof, in addition to the feature in question, does not make a total impression, but is scattering and confused; while its parts, taken singly, are feeble in spite of their extravagant scale. This, indeed, is not even a sacrifice to the conventions, but a specimen of what can be achieved in a style of gentle dulness gone rampant. If tame Queen Anne is a somewhat ineffectual thing, what shall be said of wild Queen Anne? There is nothing wild about two other public buildings in which architects have ventured upon Queen Anne--one a hospital, in Park Avenue, by Mr. Haight, and one an “institution” of some other kind, in Lexington Avenue, by Mr. Fernbach. Both of these, indeed, are tame, and whatever the differences of detail may be, both have much the same expression, so that one carries away from either, as from one of the commonplace faces which we are always confounding, an impression which may be that of the other--in either case of a centre with projecting wings separately roofed, and the whole wall overlaid with a shallow trellis of brick-work, too shallow to be serviceable as buttresses, and serviceable only as the badge of the alleged “style.” It seems hard upon an owner that he should be required to pay money for rectangular applications of brick which can scarcely strengthen his building appreciably, and can hardly be held to beautify it, by way merely of labelling it, “This is Queen Anne.” And this resemblance, be it noted, which is not so much a specific resemblance as the expression of an amiable characterlessness common to both, is not all to be imputed to the architects, except upon the ground of their choice of a style. The works of both of them have character, and not at all the same character, when they are working in a style which is a real form-language in which meanings can be expressed, and not a mere little phrase-book containing elegant extracts wherewith to garnish aimless discourse. Mr. Fernbach,[C] as is testified by such works as the “Staats-Zeitung” building and the German Savings-Bank in New York, and the building of the Mutual Insurance Company in Philadelphia, is one of the most accomplished practitioners in this country of academic Renaissance. Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is a highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not their fault if Queen Anne, when spread over an extensive façade, spreads thin.

Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the temerity to attempt a Queen Anne church, and the success of his essay is not such as to invite imitation. The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue, with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, which are of a rugged rusticity, with the needful openings left square-headed and unmodelled; but these walls are crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow shingles, under a broad gable, and its openings united under a thin ogee canopy of painted pine. There is here and there a little classic detail, which, if it pleases the designer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the interior that is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what the German critics call the “playful use” of forms devised for one construction and one material in another material and with no visible construction; and the result of this pleasantry is what a German professor, celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “an important joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, the treatment passes a joke, for the mahogany nave arches, with their little protruding key-woods, and their supporting posts incased in boxed pedestals, are actually doing the work of carrying the clere-story--unless, indeed, there is a concealed system of iron-work--although their function is so far sacrificed to their form that they are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne contains no forms that can be even tortured into the construction of an open ceiling, the architect has omitted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere loft, sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as in the fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is entirely playful, so that the interior of the church seems to be a collection of pleasantries. In a dining-room, for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes seems to be ruled out by the previous question as to the admissibility in the sacred edifice of levity even of the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for the appliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeed for the designers of “cozy” churches in general, that there is no official censorship of church architecture as there is of church music, and that no rubric makes it the duty of every minister, with such assistance as he can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to suppress all light and unseemly architecture by which vain and ungodly persons profane the service of the sanctuary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the spirit in which we have been asking other architects, what he has gained by abandoning such an effort as he made some ten years before in the Phillips Memorial Church to develop a composition out of his subject in favor of these scraps of quotations, and of quotations neither fresh nor very pregnant! He might answer that the church in which we admire at least the effort was a somewhat untamed and obstreperous fabric, and that the present edifice is much more chastened and subdued. It is tame, no doubt, and Mr. Robertson’s talent, when he works in Queen Anne, is subdued--

“subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand;”

but, upon the whole, it is difficult to see how the architect, comparing the earlier with the later work, could fail to feel that the attempt to express something, however crude and so far unsuccessful the attempt might have been, was a more manly and artistic employment than this elegant trifling, in which the highest attainable success has an element of puerility. In truth, it is gratifying to remark that the argument by which we have supposed the architect to have solaced himself for the result of his ecclesiastical labors in Queen Anne does not seem to have convinced himself, and that a later work still, a sandstone church farther down the same avenue, is a much more serious piece of design, being an attempt to develop the architecture out of the structure itself. It would be especially unjust to misapply to Mr. Robertson’s Queen Anne church the saying that the style is the man, for the church last mentioned shows that Mr. Robertson is a man of talents, when he gives his talents a chance.

Thus far we have been speaking of the respectable and conservative element in the new departure, of the Extreme Right, so to speak, and generally of works which were seriously designed, and so are entitled to be seriously considered. It is not so pleasant to turn to the Extreme Left, a frantic and vociferous mob, who welcome the “new departure” as the disestablishment of all standards, whether of authority or of reason, and as an emancipation from all restraints, even those of public decency, and who avail themselves of the remission of them from academic restraints to those imposed by their own sense of propriety by promptly showing that they haven’t any. The tame decorum of one phase of the new departure is supplemented by the violent indecorum of another. Sometimes the same designers march now with one wing and now with the other of the divergent host. Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, for example, have consoled themselves for what now almost seems to have been the enforced sedateness of the houses we have noticed, by a mad orgy of bad architecture in East Fifty-fifth Street. The scene of this excess almost immediately adjoins the dignified and respectable dwelling designed by Mr. Haight, and almost frights that edifice from its propriety, and the designers seem to have been led into it by the baleful example of older persons who ought to have known better, and who committed the maddest freaks in the artistic quarter of the London suburb of Chelsea while in a condition of total irresponsibility alike to any convictions and to any conventions of architectural art. The present indecorum has been committed in the design of two dwellings which consist of a ferociously rugged basement and parapeted cornice in granite, with two or three irregularly disposed tin dormers emerging above, and with a flat and shallow screen of brick wall inserted between them, as between the upper and the nether millstone, and having its thinness emphasized at all the angles by shallow incisions forming a series of brick weather-strips, as it were, a square reticulation of which traverses the plane surfaces also. It is quite conceivable that rugged simplicity may have suggested itself to a designer as a desirable character for a city house, but it seems scarcely possible that squareness and flatness and thinness should have appeared desirable, and quite impossible that beauty should have seemed to dwell in a building the top and bottom of which were characterized by rugged simplicity, and the middle by squareness and flatness and thinness. The details, whether in brick or granite or tin, are as preposterous as the conception of a building with its parts thus swearing at each other. The round-headed doorway is surmounted with the imitation in granite of a metal flap secured to the rest of the block from which it is cut by similitudes in granite of iron bolt-heads. In the basement respectable blocks of granite are subjected to the indignity of being decorated with streaming ribbons in low-relief. In truth, the only detail of the work which one can contemplate even with tolerance is a grill in the basement doorway which is the simplest possible trellis of iron rods.

Indecorous and incoherent as this edifice unquestionably is, it has yet the air of a gentleman taking his pleasure, albeit in a perverse and vicious fashion, when compared, for example, with the dwellings in red brick

and brown stone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street. In these there is no composition whatever, and the effect is so scattering, and the whole is so fortuitous an aggregation of unrelated parts, that it is impossible to describe the houses or to remember them when one’s back is turned. Their fragments only recur to memory, as the blurred images of a hideous dream. So one recalls the Batavian grace of the bulbous gables; the oriel-windows, so set as to seem in imminent danger of toppling out; the egg-and-dart moulding, niggled up and down jambs of brick-work connected by flat openings with protruding key-stones; the whiplashes cut in sandstone blocks; the decorative detail fished from the slums of the Rococo. These are not subjects for architectural criticism; they call for the intervention of an architectural police. They are cases of disorderly conduct done in brick and brown stone. Hazardous as the superlative degree generally is, it is not much of a hazard to say that they are the most thoroughly discreditable buildings ever erected in New York, and it is to be noted that they are thoroughly characteristic of the period. Such a nightmare might, perhaps, have entered the brain of some speculative builder during the wildest vulgarity of the brown-stone period, but he would not have had the effrontery to build it, being deterred by the consideration that nobody would face public ridicule by consenting to live in it. Some speculator is, however, convinced that there is now a market for a house which stands upon the street corner, and screeches for people to come and look at it, when there is nothing in it worth looking at; and we must take shame to ourselves from the reflection that the speculator may be right in counting upon this extreme vulgarization of the public taste, and that, at any rate, there is no police to prevent the emission of the screech upon the public highway.

This is the result of a demand for “something new” upon a mind incapable of producing anything good. The screech is the utterance of the Sweet Singer of Michigan, exhorted not to mind about grammar, but “to fix her verses to the gauge of the round globe.” It is an extreme instance, to be sure; but there are others only less discreditable, and only to be dealt with in the way of what is called “slashing” criticism, which