Walkabout: Architecture Colonial Revival
Trends always start somewhere, and in the mid 19th century, the best way to start a trend that would encompass the entire country, was to introduce it at a huge celebration or fair. Before the 1893 World’s Columbia Exhibition in Chicago re-introduced the Classic designs of Greece and Rome, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition re-introduced Americans…
Trends always start somewhere, and in the mid 19th century, the best way to start a trend that would encompass the entire country, was to introduce it at a huge celebration or fair.
Before the 1893 World’s Columbia Exhibition in Chicago re-introduced the Classic designs of Greece and Rome, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition re-introduced Americans to the architectural designs and lifestyles of the Founding Fathers.
America was one hundred years old, and in celebration, much attention was suddenly given to the homes and way of living in that period we call Federal or Colonial. For lovers of history and architecture, this was a good thing.
People began noticing that more and more of America’s architectural past was being lost to the eternal American penchant for something new.
Many of our earliest buildings, in the countryside, towns and cities were disappearing, either being torn down for newer buildings, or allowed to fall fallow from abandonment and disuse. Because of this new interest in our patriotic past, buildings were saved, a valuable sentiment in an age of rampant growth.
The well-know New York architect Charles McKim, along with colleagues Mead, White and Bigelow set out to conduct a seminal survey of important Colonial houses in New England in 1877.
From their sketches and photographs came the ideas for what we now call the Shingle Style, a subset of Queen Anne design that incorporates New England motifs: shingled walls and roofs, steep rooflines, Palladian windows and other Colonial ornament.
By the 1890’s and early 1900’s, America was looking for alternatives to the very ornate and fussy Queen Ann Victorians, and the simple houses of the Colonial period fit the bill.
More than the Classical monuments of the Beaux Arts and Renaissance Revival movements, which were fussy in their own way, the clean lines and simple shapes of the Colonial period resonated with an America that was getting more patriotic, in response, some say to the waves of immigrants pouring into our cities.
In our town and suburbs, Colonial Revival houses were springing up everywhere. They copied Georgian styles simple houses with a center doorway, often with columns, maybe fanlights, symmetrical windows, often with shutters, and dormers.
The houses were built in clapboard clad wood frames, as well as brick. Another popular Colonial Revival style was the Dutch Colonial, with a gambrel roof, the Cape Cod Colonial, the Saltbox, and in the South and West, the Spanish Colonial.
From 1900 to the 1950’s, the Colonial Revival house was the most popular home built in the United States. It’s so iconic, they are everywhere. There was a brief interlude where the Craftsman home and the Foursquare, itself a morphing of the Colonial and the Craftsman, were equally popular, depending on location, but the Colonials soon gained their popularity back well into the 20th century.
Here in Brooklyn, especially Brownstone Brooklyn, in those neighborhoods that developed last, we too, have our versions of Colonial Revival homes. One architectural firm in particular excelled in building them.
Slee and Bryson homes can be found in Park Slope, Clinton Hill, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Crown Heights North and South, and in Victorian Flatbush. There are apartment buildings by them in Park Slope, Prospect Heights and Brooklyn Heights, as well.
John Slee and Robert Bryson founded their firm in 1905, and mostly designed in Brooklyn, designing some of the finest Colonial Revival and Neo-Tudor houses in the borough.
Their finest examples are the Albermarle-Kenmore Terrace Historic District, in Flatbush, as well as 828-838 St. Mark’s Avenue in Crown Heights North, and 1329-1337 Carroll Street in Crown Heights South and on Midwood I in Lefferts Manor.
In all of those examples, which are all quite different, while still being in the same style, the design elements that characterize the style are apparent.
When all things Colonial became very popular, of course people took it to the extreme. Many well heeled people in the early 1900’s took to decorating with spinning wheels prominently placed next to fireplaces, and other anachronistic antiques proudly displayed.
Even well into the 1950’s and 60’s Colonial style still evokes visions of bad decorating, with plaid couches, wagon wheel furniture and lighting, faux lanterns and pewter flagons displayed, perhaps near a fake flintlock rifle on the mantlepiece.
All in all, though, the style endures. Most of these houses, in cities, towns and suburbs, were well built, with wood burning fireplaces, hardwood floors, and all of the modern conveniences of the day. We’ve probably all been in a Colonial Revival at one point in our lives, and maybe even grew up in one. They may be the quintessential American houses.
See my Flickr page for just a very few examples of Brownstone Brooklyn’s Colonial Revival architecture. There are so many more to be photographed.
[Photos by Suzanne Spellen]
Well the British Arts & Crafts movement was a very romantic movement as well, more evoking ideas, ideals, and feelings than producing historic replicas. And it certainly fell short of creating domestic works of art that the average British family could afford. Only the affluent could afford hand-made textiles and furniture even 110 years ago.
BHS, good point!
Unlike drugs, booze, and debt, Americans like to consume history in moderation.
The ironic thing is, they were knocking down old dutch farm houses to build these row houses in PLG and Flatbush.
Colonial revival was insanely popular for interior decorating during the first part of the 20th century, not just for a few years but for a generation. Light-color painted woodwork Windsor chairs, blue-white-yellow color schemes, four-poster beds, gate-leg tables, inglenooks by the fire. Many people considered the styles we think of today as appropriate for pre-1950s house interiors such as art deco, art nouveau, streamline, modern, as impractical trends and stuck to the solid, nostalgic comfort of colonial revival. In some ways this was the american answer to Arts and Crafts (in addition to Craftsman) in the sense that it was a reaction to Victorian tastes, and a simple, back-to-basics style at heart.
Montrose, Bravo! -a brilliant distillation of the essentials of the Colonial Revival.
When done well, this is an amazingly beautiful style of architecture, especially residential architecture, although I have seen a few Colonial Revival banks that are pretty nifty as well.
I think that a search for “roots” on the part of the WASP establishment back then was really at the core of the movement that lead eventually to preserving the actual past in old cities such as New Orleans, Charleston, and Williamsburg, Va.
The most brilliant examples of this style IMO are found in Virginia and Washington DC. But we have some mighty fine examples here in Brooklyn as you illustrate so well.
The maple and bushwicks are my favs. Remember seeing lots of spinning wheels in homes in morristown.