Excerpt: Bricks & Brownstones by Rizzoli International Publications

only limited land routes for settlers moving West. In early-nineteenthcentury America, nearly all roads were narrow and rutted, muddy when it rained, and virtually impassable in winter. Twenty miles a day was good progress when shipping goods by wagon. Even though the turnpikes of the period did provide a few adequate roads and reasonably fast travel, the tolls were so high that commerce generally followed the slow inland waterways instead. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, the trouble-free water link between the Great Lakes and Hudson River made New York the terminus for the shipment of crops and goods from the Midwest, and as the entrepôt of manufactured goods moving in the opposite direction. Whereas it took $120 and three weeks to ship a ton of wheat, itself worth $40, from Buffalo to New York City by land, on the Erie Canal the shipping cost dropped to $6 a ton for grain and the time to eight days. At the Erie Canal’s dedication ceremony, New York’s Common Council addressed the City and New York State in the form of prophecy: “there will be no limits to your lucrative extensions of trade and commerce. The Valley of the Mississippi will soon pour its treasures in this great emporium, through the channels now formed and forming.”

The Building Boom of the 1820s and 1830s This flourishing domestic and foreign trade brought prosperity and enormous population growth to New York. The city’s population increased from 124,000 in 1820 to 203,000 in 1830, and reached 313,000 in 1840, and 516,000 in 1850! To accommodate this growing population, the city raced northward on Manhattan in a continual building boom, interrupted only by occasional depressions or wartime economic uncertainty. After a modest recession in 1817-1818, the construction boom started in earnest about 1820. New Yorkers were fascinated by their city’s awesome growth. One gentleman’s journal noted that in 1824 “more than 1600 new houses were erected, nearly all of them of brick or stone.” In 1830 Philip Hone, mayor of the city from 1825 to 1826 and a well-to-do merchant whose 2,000,000-word journal gives a fascinating view of New York in the 1830s and 1840s, observed that “our country at large, and particularly this city, is at this time prosperous beyond all former example … real estate, up and down town, equally high; houses in great demand, at advanced rents.” Nos. 155, 157, and 159 Willow Street (ca. 1829), Brooklyn Heights. These three Federal style dwelling houses have escaped the modernizations and demolitions that have destroyed so many nineteenth-century buildings in New York. These houses’ simply ornamented facades and the well-kept gardens on tree-lined and relatively traffic-free Willow Street recall the long-vanished dignity of early-nineteenth-century New York’s houses and streets. Brooklyn Heights Historic District.

New Yorkers soon realized that the only unchanging aspect of their bustling city was change itself. In 1839 Philip Hone wrote in his journal that “the pulling down of houses and stores in the lower parts [of Broadway] is awful. Brickbats, rafters, and slates are showering down in every direction. There is no safety on the sidewalks.” Hone concluded that “the spirit of pulling down and building up is abroad. The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.” New York’s ceaseless northward growth and rebuilding of existing areas soon obliterated all traces of its Dutch past as New Amsterdam.

Top: Second-floor bedroom, Charles, used as a sitting room. Front Parlor, Charles Street. The simple yet elegant forms of the early nineteenthcentury interior ornament provide harmony with the classic twentiethcentury furniture.

Right: Bedroom Door, Charles Street, looking toward hallway, with typical Federal details.

Above top: Depau Row, Greenwich Village, proposal by Samuel Dunbar, late 1820s. The spectacular monumental blockfront designed by Dunbar Francis Depau and completed 1829-1830, heralded a treatment of row houses as a uniform streetscape in the English terrace tradition. Note the five-baywide mansion at the center of the block, flanked by more typical yet still grand three-bay-wide row houses on either side. Above bottom: Le Roy Place (late 1820s), north and south sides of Bleecker Street, between Mercer and Greene streets, in 1831. Le Roy Place was the first planned monumental blockfront or terrace in New York. Opposite: No. 153 Bleecker Street (ca. 1830), at Thompson Street, northeast corner, photographed about 1870. With its columned doorway porch, tall windows with shutters, and parlor window balcony and stoop railings, this house and others on the blockfront projected an air of wealth and leisure. These houses were replaced by tenements in the early twentieth century.

Opposite: Doorways, front parlor, Merchant’s House Museum. The right door is false to provide symmetry. Behind it lies the rear side of the plaster lathe boards of the entry hall. The gas chandelier was installed later in the nineteenth century. Above: Plaster details, Merchant’s House Museum. Note the fine egg-and-dart molding. Right: Corner detail, front parlor, Merchant’s House Museum.

Left: Mantel, West 12th Street, Greenwich Village. A typical and handsome white marble rounded Italianate mantel, with center scrolled bracket and foliate carvings. These mantels were mass produced in large numbers to satisfy the demand for newly fashionable architectural styles. The mirror is a later Eastlake item, though an overmantel mirror in the Italianate style, since lost, would originally have been installed above the mantel. Opposite: Park Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Impressive double doors open into vestibule then into an entry hallway.

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Overleaf: Park Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Swinging doors into the front parlor. Above: Park Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The parlor doors are mahogany with walnut inlay. Left: Park Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Newel Post.

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Overleaf: Park Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, front parlor mantel detail in fine white marble. Above: Rear parlor plaster ceiling molding, Park Place, Prospects Heights, Brooklyn. Left: Mantel detail, rear parlor, Park Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The grandest Italianate mantels featured carved female figures in white marble.

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The Eagle’s critique summarized a slew of sometimes contradictory trends. The emergence in full of the modern professional architect brought a new emphasis on individual, “artistic” residential creations for wealthy clients, each potentially setting a particular fashion to be imitated. But the large-scale development of new neighborhoods continued to lend itself to the mass production of rows. Industrialization and standardization of building materials allowed for easy duplication and thus monotony, but also, through modularity of components, made certain forms of variety easier and more inexpensive to attain. A variety of styles appeared in the two decades following the Panic of 1873, including Neo-Grec, Queen Anne, and Romanesque Revival. None gained absolute dominance in the era’s speculative construction; they coexisted as much as competed, often in the same façade, as fashions trickled down and the market for residences expanded to new populations and new frontiers of urbanization across the city. The stylistic terms themselves were used loosely by real estate promoters and reporters, for whom, in fact, the most common catchword for any style was the evergreen “modern.” In 1882, the Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide surveyed the city’s residential building scene, with a long view of the city’s history across the “architectural gulf” between the present and “any previous period of building activity.” The author suggested that the Greek Revival had signified the city’s striving to metropolitan maturation following the completion of the Erie Canal, and was followed by a period of decline symbolized by the application of thin brownstone veneers to brick-built houses, solely for the appearance of expense. But now, the author observed, “What we see about us are gropings after a new type.” In place of the “academic Gothic” and “Renaissance”—and the “vernacular brown stone” of the pre-1873 era—“We can now count ‘Colonial,’ Queen Anne, Florentine Renaissance, English Renaissance, Dutch Renaissance, Hispano-Moorish, Neo-Grec and ‘Old New York,’ not to mention Japanese and even Celtic motives in decoration and detail.” The multiplicity of styles in the late nineteenth century drew on the wider availability of information about both trends within architecture, and the art-historical heritage of the world, through national and international architectural publications and the spread of photography. This, together with the consolidation of the architectural profession, facilitated the provision of houses that could be advertised, at least, as “built by an individual for an individual.” Once, when a “20foot three-story” house was advertised, the Record and Guide wrote, “we knew exactly what to expect”—houses “built on the assumption that men were all alike, income only excepted.” But now, “it cannot be said that there is a type of New York house.”

Eclecticism as a Style Since the 1830s, American architects had evoked historical architectural styles for their stirring picturesque forms and associative power. The sheer number of far-away times and places that an architect could evoke had proliferated—in the 1860s, for example, the celebrated

895 Union Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (1889). In a severe break from the brownstone era, New York row houses built from the 1870s through the Panic of 1893 show remarkable eclectic variation. Though certain styles—including NeoGrec, Romanesque, and, here, the Queen Anne—flourished, none predominated, both from house to house and often on the same house. Park Slope Historic District.

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Queen Anne row, 889-903 Union Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn (1889). This row, located on north side of Union Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is one of the most sophisticated Queen Anne blocks in the city. Park Slope Historic District.

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