If a foreign tourist, ignorant of his whereabouts, were to
sail about sunset up our spacious bay and view for the first time
the eccentric sky-line of lower New York, he would rub his eyes
and wonder if they were not playing him a trick, for distance and
twilight lend the chaotic masses around the Battery a certain
wild grace suggestive of Titan strongholds or prehistoric abodes
of Wotan, rather than the business part of a practical modern
city.
“But,” as John Drew used to say in The Masked
Ball, “what a difference in the morning!” when a
visit to his banker takes the new arrival down to Wall Street,
and our uncompromising American daylight dispels his
illusions.
Years ago spiritual Arthur Gilman mourned over the
decay of architecture in New York and pointed out that
Stewart’s shop, at Tenth Street, bore about the same
relation to Ictinus’ noble art as an iron cooking
stove! It is well death removed the Boston critic before
our city entered into its present Brobdingnagian phase. If
he considered that Stewart’s and the Fifth Avenue Hotel
failed in artistic beauty, what would have been his opinion of
the graceless piles that crowd our island to-day, beside which
those older buildings seem almost classical in their
simplicity?
One hardly dares to think what impression a student familiar
with the symmetry of Old World structures must receive on
arriving for the first time, let us say, at the Bowling Green,
for the truth would then dawn upon him that what appeared from a
distance to be the ground level of the island was in reality the
roof line of average four-story buildings, from among which the
keeps and campaniles that had so pleased him (when viewed from
the Narrows) rise like gigantic weeds gone to seed in a field of
grass.
It is the heterogeneous character of the buildings down town
that renders our streets so hideous. Far from seeking
harmony, builders seem to be trying to “go” each
other “one story better”; if they can belittle a
neighbor in the process it is clear gain, and so much
advertisement. Certain blocks on lower Broadway are gems in
this way! Any one who has glanced at an auctioneer’s
shelves when a “job lot” of books is being sold, will
doubtless have noticed their resemblance to the sidewalks of our
down town streets. Dainty little duodecimo buildings are
squeezed in between towering in-folios, and richly bound and
tooled octavos chum with cheap editions. Our careless City
Fathers have not even given themselves the trouble of pushing
their stone and brick volumes into the same line, but allow them
to straggle along the shelf—I beg pardon, the
sidewalk—according to their own sweet will.
The resemblance of most new business buildings to flashy books
increases the more one studies them; they have the proportions of
school atlases, and, like them, are adorned only on their backs
(read fronts). The modern builder, like the frugal binder,
leaves the sides of his creations unadorned, and expends his
ingenuity in decorating the narrow strip which he naively
imagines will be the only part seen, calmly ignoring the fact
that on glancing up or down a street the sides of houses are what
we see first. It is almost impossible to get mathematically
opposite a building, yet that is the only point from which these
new constructions are not grotesque.
It seems as though the rudiments of common sense would suggest
that under existing circumstances the less decoration put on a
façade the greater would be the harmony of the
whole. But trifles like harmony and fitness are splendidly
ignored by the architects of to-day, who, be it remarked in
passing, have slipped into another curious habit for which I
should greatly like to see an explanation offered. As long
as the ground floors and the tops of their creations are
elaborate, the designer evidently thinks the intervening twelve
or fifteen stories can shift for themselves. One clumsy
mass on the Bowling Green is an excellent example of this
weakness. Its ground floor is a playful reproduction of the
tombs of Egypt. About the second story the architect must
have become discouraged—or perhaps the owner’s funds
gave out—for the next dozen floors are treated in the
severest “tenement house” manner; then, as his
building terminates well up in the sky, a top floor or two are,
for no apparent reason, elaborately adorned. Indeed, this
desire for a brilliant finish pervades the neighborhood.
The Johnson Building on Broad Street (to choose one out of the
many) is sober and discreet in design for a dozen stories, but
bursts at its top into a Byzantine colonnade. Why? one asks
in wonder.
Another new-comer, corner of Wall and Nassau Streets, is a
commonplace structure, with a fairly good cornice, on top of
which—an afterthought, probably—a miniature State
Capitol has been added, with dome and colonnade complete.
The result recalls dear, absent-minded Miss Matty (in Mrs.
Gaskell’s charming story), when she put her best cap on top
of an old one and sat smiling at her visitors from under the
double headdress!
Nowhere in the world—not even in Moscow, that city of
domes—can one see such a collection of pagodas, cupolas,
kiosks, and turrets as grace the roofs of our office
buildings! Architects evidently look upon such adornments
as compensations! The more hideous the structure, the finer
its dome! Having perpetrated a blot upon the city that
cries to heaven in its enormity, the repentant owner adds a
pagoda or two, much in the same spirit, doubtless, as prompts an
Italian peasant to hang a votive heart on some friendly shrine
when a crime lies heavy on his conscience.
What would be thought of a book-collector who took to standing
inkstands or pepperboxes on the tops of his tallest volumes by
way of adornment? Yet domes on business buildings are every
bit as appropriate. A choice collection of those
monstrosities graces Park Row, one much-gilded offender varying
the monotony by looking like a yellow stopper in a
high-shouldered bottle! How modern architects with the
exquisite City Hall before them could have wandered so far afield
in their search for the original must always remain a
mystery.
When a tall, thin building happens to stand on a corner, the
likeness to an atlas is replaced by a grotesque resemblance to a
waffle iron, of which one structure just finished on Rector
Street skilfully reproduces’ the lines. The rows of
little windows were evidently arranged to imitate the
indentations on that humble utensil, and the elevated road at the
back seems in this case to do duty as the handle. Mrs. Van
Rensselaer tells us in her delightful Goede Vrouw of
Mana-ha-ta that waffle irons used to be a favorite wedding
present among the Dutch settlers of this island, and were adorned
with monograms and other devices, so perhaps it is atavism that
makes us so fond of this form in building! As, however, no
careful Hausfrau would have stood her iron on its edge,
architects should hesitate before placing their buildings in that
position, as the impression of instability is the same in each
case.
After leaving the vicinity of the City Hall, the tall slabs
that like magnified milestones mark the progress of Architecture
up Broadway become a shade less objectionable, although one meets
some strange freaks in so-called decoration by the way.
Why, for instance, were those Titan columns grouped around the
entrance to the American Surety Company’s building?
They do not support anything (the “business” of
columns in architecture) except some rather feeble statuary, and
do seriously block the entrance. Were they added with the
idea of fitness? That can hardly be, for a portico is as
inappropriate to such a building as it would be to a parlor car,
and almost as inconvenient.
Farther up town our attention is arrested by another misplaced
adornment. What purpose can that tomb with a railing round
it serve on top of the New York Life Insurance building? It
looks like a monument in Greenwood, surmounted by a rat-trap, but
no one is interred there, and vermin can hardly be troublesome at
that altitude.
How did this craze for decoration originate? The
inhabitants of Florence and Athens did not consider it
necessary. There must, I feel sure, be a reason for its use
in this city; American land-lords rarely spend money without a
purpose; perhaps they find that rococo detail draws business and
inspires confidence!
I should like to ask the architects of New York one question:
Have they not been taught that in their art, as in every other,
pretences are vulgar, that things should be what they seem?
Then why do they continue to hide steel and fire-brick cages
under a veneer of granite six inches thick, causing them to pose
as solid stone buildings? If there is a demand for tall,
light structures, why not build them simply (as bridges are
constructed), and not add a poultice of bogus columns and zinc
cornices that serve no purpose and deceive no one?
Union Square possesses blocks out of which the Jackson and
Decker buildings spring with a noble disregard of all rules and a
delicious incongruity that reminds one of Falstaff’s corps
of ill-drilled soldiers. Madison Square, however, is
facile princeps, with its annex to the Hoffman House, a
building which would make the fortune of any dime museum that
could fence it in and show it for a fee! Long contemplation
of this structure from my study window has printed every comic
detail on my brain. It starts off at the ground level to be
an imitation of the Doge’s Palace (a neat and appropriate
idea in itself for a Broadway shop). At the second story,
following the usual New York method, it reverts to a design
suggestive of a county jail (the Palace and the Prison), with
here and there a balcony hung out, emblematical, doubtless, of
the inmates’ wash and bedding. At the ninth floor the
repentant architect adds two more stories in memory of the
Doge’s residence. Have you ever seen an accordion
(concertina, I believe, is the correct name) hanging in a shop
window? The Twenty-fifth Street Doge’s Palace reminds
me of that humble instrument. The wooden part, where the
keys and round holes are, stands on the sidewalk. Then come
an indefinite number of pleats, and finally the other wooden end
well up among the clouds. So striking is this resemblance
that at times one expects to hear the long-drawn moans peculiar
to the concertina issuing from those portals. Alas! even
the most original designs have their drawbacks! After the
proprietor of the Venetian accordion had got his instrument well
drawn out and balanced on its end, he perceived that it dwarfed
the adjacent buildings, so cast about in his mind for a scheme to
add height and dignity to the rest of the block. One day
the astonished neighborhood saw what appeared to be a
“roomy suburban villa” of iron rising on the roof of
the old Hoffman House. The results suggests a small man
who, being obliged to walk with a giant, had put on a hat several
times too large in order to equalize their heights!
How astonished Pericles and his circle of architects and
sculptors would be could they stand on the corner of Broadway and
Twenty-eighth Street and see the miniature Parthenon that graces
the roof of a pile innocent of other Greek ornament? They
would also recognize their old friends, the ladies of the
Erechtheum, doing duty on the Reveillon Building across the way,
pretending to hold up a cornice, which, being in proportion to
the building, is several hundred times too big for them to
carry. They can’t be seen from the
sidewalk,—the street is too narrow for that,—but such
trifles don’t deter builders from decorating when the fit
is on them. Perhaps this one got his caryatides at a
bargain, and had to work them in somewhere; so it is not fair to
be hard on him.
If ever we take to ballooning, all these elaborate tops may
add materially to our pleasure. At the present moment the
birds, and angels, it is to be hoped, appreciate the
effort. I, perhaps, of all the inhabitants of the city,
have seen those ladies face to face, when I have gone on a
semi-monthly visit to my roof to look for leaks!
“It’s all very well to carp and cavil,” many
readers will say, “but ‘Idler’ forgets that our
modern architects have had to contend with difficulties that the
designers of other ages never faced, demands for space and light
forcing the nineteenth-century builders to produce structures
which they know are neither graceful nor in
proportion!”
If my readers will give themselves the trouble to glance at
several office buildings in the city, they will realize that the
problem is not without a solution. In almost every case
where the architect has refrained from useless decoration and
stuck to simple lines, the result, if not beautiful, has at least
been inoffensive. It is where inappropriate elaboration is
added that taste is offended. Such structures as the Singer
building, corner of Liberty Street and Broadway, and the home of
Life, in Thirty-first Street, prove that beauty and grace
of façade can be adapted to modern business wants.
Feeling as many New Yorkers do about this defacing of what
might have been the most beautiful of modern cities, it is
galling to be called upon to admire where it is already an effort
to tolerate.
A sprightly gentleman, writing recently in a scientific
weekly, goes into ecstasies of admiration over the advantages and
beauty of a steel mastodon on Park Row, a building that has the
proportions of a carpenter’s plane stood on end, decorated
here and there with balconies and a colonnade perched on brackets
up toward its fifteenth story. He complacently gives us its
weight and height as compared with the pyramids, and numerous
other details as to floor space and ventilation, and hints in
conclusion that only old fogies and dullards, unable to keep pace
with the times, fail to appreciate the charm of such structures
in a city. One of the “points” this writer
makes is the quality of air enjoyed by tenants, amusingly
oblivious of the fact that at least three façades of each
tall building will see the day only so long as the proprietors of
adjacent land are too poor or too busy to construct similar
colossi!
When all the buildings in a block are the same height, seven
eighths of the rooms in each will be without light or
ventilation. It’s rather poor taste to brag of
advantages that are enjoyed only through the generosity of
one’s neighbors.
Business demands may force us to bow before the necessity of
these horrors, but it certainly is “rubbing it in” to
ask our applause. When the Eiffel Tower was in course of
construction, the artists and literary lights of Paris raised a
tempest of protest. One wonders why so little of the kind
has been done here. It is perhaps rather late in the day to
suggest reform, yet if more New Yorkers would interest themselves
in the work, much might still be done to modify and improve our
metropolis.
One hears with satisfaction that a group of architects have
lately met and discussed plans for the embellishment of our
neglected city. There is a certain poetical justice in the
proposition coming from those who have worked so much of the
harm. Remorse has before now been known to produce good
results. The United States treasury yearly receives large
sums of “conscience money.”
