Arch Diary
November 19, 2009
Walkabout: Montrose Morris - Full Circle
Clarence W. Seamans Mansion. St. Marks Avenue, Crown Heights North. 1903. Stable can be seen at left rear. (Brooklyn Public Library, taken in 1905.)
This is the fourth in a series about Montrose Morris, one of Brooklyn finest architects working at the turn of the 20th century. Previous articles can be found here.
Like most architects of the day, Montrose Morris embraced the new Classicism, as popularized by the Chicago Exposition of 1893. Gone were the dark brownstone and brick, and the free wheeling exuberance of the Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne styles. The light colored building materials, serious sturdiness and sheer impressiveness of Beaux Arts and neo-Classic architecture were a reflection of the age of robber barons and big money, and that’s what Morris’ clients in the late 1890’s and early 20th century wanted. In Park Slope, Morris took this new Classicism to heart, but tweaked it, and imbued some of these new commissions with the old Morris touch. The first of these new buildings, in 1894, was corner townhouse at 123 Eighth Ave, at Carroll St. The Classical details are especially fine on the front entrance and on the Carroll St. side of the building. On Prospect Park West, Classical details are combined with a Morris loggia at 17 PPW, while all of his PPW limestones have similar detailing in the stonework, Classical relief columns, arched entries and windows and pedimented dormers. As per usual, with Morris, many are in complementing pairs; 16, 17 PPW (1899), my favorites - 18, 19 PPW (1898), and a single, 22 PPW (1899). All of these houses have large windows facing the park, and all are examples of a restrained elegance in design.
In 1900, Montrose got a huge commission – the largest private house in Brooklyn, to date. Clarence W. Seamans was the head of Union Typewriter, at the beginning of the 20th century, the largest business machine company in the world. He was also a financier, sitting on the boards of Brooklyn’s Schermerhorn Bank and People’s Trust Bank. During the 1890’s he began buying up land in the fashionable St. Mark’s District, on St. Mark’s Avenue and directly behind this plot, on Bergen St. He held a competition to choose an architect for his new home, and chose the designs of Montrose Morris over the others.
November 17, 2009
Walkabout: Part 3, MM - Park Slope and Big Business
This is the third installment of Montrose Morris' story, the first subject in an ongoing series featuring the best of Brooklyn's late 19th century architects. The first two chapters are available here.
Montrose Morris was riding high at the turn of the century, commissions were rolling in, and business was good. He continued as a developer, cashing in on the new desire for respectable middle class apartment buildings, building and renting them out in the desirable neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Bedford and Park Slope. He experimented in style; two of his buildings, the Clermont in Bedford Stuyvesant, and 515 Clinton Ave have a distinctly French chateau flair. Socially, he was a man in high standing in Brooklyn society, and his name appears often in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as a member of many prominent clubs and associations. We read of him attending a lecture by Frederick Douglass at the Union League Club, where he was a founding member and long time treasurer. He was a member of the 23rd Regiment Veterans Association, the Mistletoe Lodge, the Montauk Club, the Invincible Club, the Amphion Musical Society, the Royal Arcanum, and the Lefferts Council. The Eagle often commented on the many social events at the Morris home on Hancock Street, including a concert with his fellow members of the Contemporary Club, where it was mentioned that Mrs. Morris possessed a fine singing voice.
The Morris’ social connections, along with the quality of the body of work he was amassing soon attracted the wealthy men looking to build in Park Slope. In 1892, he finished what many consider to be his finest private house. Henry Carlton Hulbert was a paper manufacturer, financier, and prominent board member of the New York Life Insurance Company, as well as the Pullman Car Company. He commissioned Morris to design a double house for himself and his daughter Susie, and her new husband. The house would be made of the finest of materials, and sit majestically on the Gold Coast of Park Slope, Ninth Avenue (now Prospect Park West), at the corner of First Street.
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November 12, 2009
Walkabout: MW Morris- the Commissions Cometh
This is the second installment of the life and career of Montrose Morris, the first subject in an ongoing series of biographies of the best of Brownstone Brooklyn's late 19th c. architects. This first post can be viewed here; all earlier Walkabout columns can be viewed here.
One of the many people who toured Montrose Morris’ model home on Hancock Street was developer Louis B. Seitz. In 1889, he commissioned Morris to build a new kind of building for the area, an upper class apartment building. Morris designed the Alhambra, arguably the best of his many apartment buildings. A terra cotta trimmed brick building taking up the entire block front of Nostrand Avenue, between Macon and Halsey, the Alhambra is classic Romanesque Revival Morris. Here, he echoes his group of houses on Hancock and goes even better, with loggias stretching across the upper stories, elaborate dormered towers, and terra cotta trim joining the disparate parts of the building. Inside, huge apartments offered the best of single family home living, with gracious appointments, and lavish detail. In spite of strikes by bricklayers, and other delays, the building was a huge success. Seitz was pleased to offer Morris two more upper class apartment building commissions in Bedford, all three buildings now protected as NYC landmarks, the Renaissance Apartments, also on Nostrand, and the “Dakota of Brooklyn”, the Imperial Apartments in nearby Grant’s Square, on Bedford and Pacific. (1893). He also designed the smaller Bedfordshire Apartments next door to the Imperial, in 1892.
His success in these ventures was paying off. Commissions were coming in right and left in the late 1880’s, through the 1990’s. More apartment buildings were designed, including the Roanoke (originally the San Carlo Hotel) in Fort Greene, the Arlington, on Montague St. in Brooklyn Heights, the Montrose, on State and Hoyt (demolished), and the Lenox and Montauk on St. Mark’s and Flatbush. Another major commission was the expansion of the St. George Hotel, also in Brooklyn Heights. Morris’s grand tower, festooned with flags, opened in 1890, and still stands today.
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November 10, 2009
Walkabout: The Architects - Montrose Morris, Part 1
This biography is the first in an ongoing series featuring the best of Brownstone Brooklyn's architects.
The late 19th century was a time of big money, big growth, and big ambitions in a big city. Enter a family man, society swell, bon vivant, good singer, canny businessman, and damn good architect. Stanford White? No – Montrose W. Morris, of Bedford, Brooklyn, one of the finest architects to paint the canvas of our Brooklyn landscape.
Montrose Morris was born in Hempstead, Long Island on March 20, 1861. His family moved to Brooklyn, and he was educated in Brooklyn public schools, and at the Peekskill Academy. It was a common practice of the time for would-be architects to apprentice themselves to successful practitioners, and learn the craft. Morris studied under Manhattan architect Charles W. Clinton, who with his partner, Hamilton Russell, were responsible for some of NY’s most iconic buildings, including the 7th Regiment Armory, on Park Ave, the Apthorp and Graham Court Apartments, and the Moorish style Masonic Temple, now famous as the New York City (Dance) Center. In 1883, after seven years with the Clinton firm, Morris opened up his own office on Exchange Place, which he maintained until his death in 1917. Lower Manhattan was home to the headquarters and warehouses of the growing numbers of successful industrialists, wealthy merchants, and financial and legal wizards whose business he was courting. The Brooklyn Bridge had just been completed, and many of the clients he sought were making the move to the quiet suburbs of Clinton Hill, Bedford and St. Mark’s. To woo these clients, in a brilliant strategic move, Morris bought about half the block of Hancock Street, between Marcy and Thompkins Avenues in Bedford, and on a 20 foot lot, designed and built a home that became both his residence and his showroom. The houses he designed on Hancock Street are among his best, and the area contains the largest concentration of his work still standing.
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November 5, 2009
Walkabout: Italianates, the Ornamental Imperative
A mid 19th century magazine, extolling the virtues of the Italianate brownstone, declared that, “the doorway is the most indispensable feature of the structure, and therefore calls loudly for adornment, and should generally be distinguished by more impressive decoration than any other feature”. Architects of the time must have been listening, and many went overboard, piling layers of ornament on the doorways of our buildings. Perhaps even more than the other decorative elements, the doorways of the Italianate brownstone define the style. In the most expensive homes, the doorway is a porch at the top of the stairs, formed by large columns with ornate capitals, holding heavy door hoods that are either rounded, or classic triangular pediments, with heavy carved keystones above the doors. These are flanked by enormous acanthus leaf brackets which face the street. Smaller acanthus brackets can often be found facing each other in the doorway, and for good measure, more acanthus brackets often frame the windows, and/or support the large window box shelves below the parlor floor windows. There are fine examples in Brooklyn Heights, as well as on Washington Park, in Fort Greene.
Most of the Italianates in Brooklyn do not have the columns, a feature for only the most expensive homes, but all have the acanthus brackets. Some of these brackets are beautiful in their expression of plant forms, and are in amazing condition. Some architects must have wanted to show off something different, and we can find fantastical combinations of leaves, flowers and decorative shapes. Some of these can be a bit disturbing at first glance, and to the modern eye, look like mutant plants run wild, or extruded foam, especially when the lines have been blurred by water damage, and badly painted over or “repaired”. The more creepily vegetal remind us that tastes certainly change over time, and that the desire to please a demanding public can often result in the overdone.
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November 3, 2009
Walkabout : The Italianate Style, part 1
For many people, the quintessential Brooklyn row house is the Italianate brownstone. The name conjures up the streetscape of rows of identical houses stretching down a block, with their tall stoops, majestic entryways, long windows encased in heavy window lintels, and deep sills. There is a perfect symmetry to their uniformity, a pleasing rhythm and solidity to these blocks, especially when paired with ancient trees, flower boxes overflowing with trailing vines and flowers, and heavy black cast iron railings and fences. This, for many, is classic Brownstone Brooklyn.
The Italianate style flourished from 1840 until around 1870. This coincides with the rapid growth of most of what we call Brownstone Brooklyn, and fine examples of these houses are found most frequently in the older neighborhoods fanning out from Fulton Landing and Brooklyn Heights. They appear, in lesser numbers, in later neighborhoods such as Crown Heights North, where they represent some of the earliest row houses in that neighborhood. There are very few, if any, in Crown Heights South or Prospect Lefferts Gardens, as development in those neighborhoods took place after the style had fallen out of favor. The inspiration for the Italianate brownstone was the 15th century Italian city palazzo, a style with classical detail, elegance and gravitas deemed eminently suitable for conveying prosperity and social position in a limited space. At the same time, the New England sandstone known as brownstone was gaining in popularity as an elegant and rich building material, and by the late 1840’s through the 1850’s, almost all of the new residential architecture, as well as churches and commercial buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn were faced in this stone, praised for its “unostentatious magnificence”. The enduring popularity of this material is evidenced by that fact that we still call all row houses, whether brick, brownstone, limestone, or a combination thereof, “brownstones”.
October 27, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: In the Throat of Terror
The word “gargoyle” is from the French word “gargouille”, which means “throat”. A real gargoyle is a waterspout, projecting from a gutter, which throws water out away from the wall and foundations of a building. Technically speaking, any other carved figure not a waterspout is a “grotesque”. Like many of the architectural features we take for granted today, these have their origins in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Ancient Egyptian architecture features the first grotesques, in the form of figures of gods with human bodies and animal heads, and gargoyle water spouts were found in the ruins of Pompeii. Of course, our most familiar association with gargoyles is with medieval architecture, and the most famous, and some of the best gargoyles are on the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris.
The fantastic and often terrifying creatures that lurk on our buildings here in Brooklyn are the many times great-grandchildren of those creatures of the middle Ages. Why would anyone put such terrifying creatures on a building, especially a church? Scholars have theorized that because so many medieval people were illiterate, the great cathedrals were a sermon in stone, instructions to a populace that didn’t need much proof beyond every day living, that they were living in the last days: with hard, short lives, endless war, plague and disease, and evil everywhere.
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October 20, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: The Road to Prospect Heights
Partially completed Brooklyn Museum, with Mount Prospect Resevoir in the foreground. 1914 (BrooklynPix.com)
The hills of central Brooklyn have long been battle grounds of one kind or another. At the start of the Revolutionary War, in 1776, the Battle of Brooklyn was fought along Brooklyn’s terminal moraine, the glacial hills that included the famous Battle Pass, now in Prospect Park, where the American forces were almost overwhelmed. Part of that battleground was also Mount Prospect, the second highest point in Brooklyn, near the present day intersection of Flatbush and Eastern Parkway, a hilly wooded area used as a lookout post by George Washington that would later give rise to the neighborhood of Prospect Heights. The entire area had been settled by Dutch farmers, including several branches of Bergen’s, since the 1630’s, and was mostly tenant farms and fields worked by slave labor. Located between the towns of Bedford and Brooklyn, the area was bisected by the Ferry Road to Flatbush, an expansion of an old Indian trail, which eventually became the Flatbush Road, east of present day Flatbush Ave. (Many of the original roads and streets in PH were moved in the 1850’s, resulting in some of the diagonal and off-grid placement of buildings that intrigue Prospect Heights residents today.) The Flatbush Road was a major thoroughfare, the main road between the town of Flatbush and the town of Brooklyn, and the ferries to Manhattan. In 1809, the Brooklyn, Jamaica, and Flatbush Turnpike Company incorporated, and toll booths were erected along their routes, including Flatbush. Part of the old Flatbush Road went through parts of what is now Prospect Park, land made uninhabitable by fevers and malarial diseases caused by stagnant ponds located in the thick undergrowth. When Brooklyn was incorporated as a city in 1834, the Prospect Heights area was the least populated of Brooklyn’s nine wards.
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October 13, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Historic Bedford, Brooklyn
Rem Lefferts House, demolished in 1909. Once stood on Fulton, near Arlington Place. Note brownstones in background. (Brooklyn Public Library)
In December of 1668, permission was given to one Thomas Lambertse to build the first public building in the new town of Bedford. Naturally, it was a tavern, “to accommodate strangers, travelers and other persons traveling this way with diet and lodging and horse meals”. Thirty years later, Lambertse sold a parcel of Bedford land to a farmer from Flatbush Township named Leffert Pieterse. The Lefferts family would continue to acquire land in central Brooklyn, eventually making themselves the largest landowners, largest slaveholders, and one of the wealthiest families in Brooklyn for many years to come. The village of Bedford, also called Bedford Corners, was at the center of their fiefdom, and for over one hundred years, several Lefferts family mansions and homesteads were centered in the area of Bedford Ave, Fulton Street and Arlington Place.
Bedford remained a quiet farming community until 1776, and the bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Long Island, aka the Battle of Brooklyn. 10,000 British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries, led by General William Howe, marched through Bedford, guided by unwilling Bedford residents William Howard and his son, and headed south to surprise General Washington’s 7,000 troops. A fierce and bloody battle ensued in the wooded hills now part of Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park. The ill prepared American forces sustained heavy losses, but thanks to a Maryland regiment providing cover, and a very foggy night, Washington and his surviving troops were able to escape across the Gowanus Creek, and eventually to Manhattan and out of NY to safety. The British occupied Brooklyn, and then Manhattan, for the rest of the war. The Lefferts homesteads, as well as the homes of other well off Bedford landowners, such as the Suydams, Vanderbilts, Blooms and Van Endens, were occupied as officer’s housing for the duration. The large Jacobus Lefferts house was officer’s headquarters, while the foot soldiers and Hessian mercenaries lived in excavated barracks, stretching from present day Franklin and Classon, down to Franklin and Bergen, as well as Sterling, St. Marks, Prospect Place and Park Place, now part of Crown Heights North. As development progressed in the late 19th century, artifacts and skeletal remains were found in the remains of these redoubts.
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October 6, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Romanesque Revival Architecture
Former Adams Mansion, CPH Gilbert, architect. 8th Ave at Carroll, Park Slope. Considered finest Rom. Rev. residence in Bklyn.
Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson is known as the father of the Romanesque Revival style of architecture, so much so that the term Richardson Romanesque is synonymous with the more correct term, Romanesque Revival. It is a rugged, muscular architecture, perfect for the power and might of the high Victorian age of the robber barons, captains of industry, and grand money makers – a highly confident architecture for a confident time in history. The architecture is characterized primarily by the use of brick and stone, with round Roman arches, embellished with squat columns, lines of windows, recessed entrances, towers with capped roofs, heavy massing, and often with the use of rusticated, that is rough hewn stone blocks. Richardson’s first Romanesque building, the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane was built in 1870, and his masterpiece was Boston’s Trinity Church, built in 1872-77. The style proved immensely popular throughout the country, and soon civic buildings, churches, and huge mansions followed, designed and improved upon by a number of architects, most famously Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In New York, specifically in Brooklyn, row houses soon followed the public buildings and the mansions, as the style easily lent itself to the constraints of a smaller façade, while still allowing for great variety in ornament and an abundance of detail. Important ornamental features of this style are carved Byzantine Leaf ornament, ornate stained glass windows and elaborate ornamental ironwork, all designed to soften the baronial nature of this architecture. At its grandest, this is an architectural style tailor made for the wealthy, at its simplest, an elegant and sedate style perfect for a rowhouse streetscape.
Many of Brooklyn’s finest architects were masters of the Romanesque Revival style, especially at its zenith in the mid 1880’s through early 1890’s. According to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Brooklyn has one of the largest concentrations of Romanesque Revival buildings in the United States. Names that are commonplace in our historic districts: Montrose Morris, CPH Gilbert, James Naughton, PJ Lauritzen, the Parfitt Brothers, William Tubby, Mercein Thomas, JC Cady, Magnus Dahlander and George P. Chappell, as well as many more, all designed masterpieces of Romanesque Revival architecture throughout Brownstone Brooklyn. Together they form a formidable and impressive body of work that helps define the uniqueness of our Brownstone neighborhoods. Here is but a small sampling of the Romanesque Revival style in Brooklyn.Take a look.
September 29, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: A Crown Heights Tale
The George B. and Susan Elkins Home, 1375 Dean Street, Crown Heights North. Unkown Architect, early 1850's. Photo is at least 10 years old. House is not in this good shape now. (Denise Brown)
In 1864, George B. Elkins stood on the wide porch of his Greek Revival/Italianate villa on a newly minted Dean Street, and looked across the rocky fields, scattered woodlands, and sparsely settled acreage that stretched before him. Like any good New Yorker, he knew what he was really looking at – MONEY! The street grid had been laid out, and a few wooden houses and suburban villas stood, but the area was still largely pastoral. His property, which had been bought by his wife, Susan, in 1859, stretched along Dean Street from Pacific almost to Kingston, and the previous owner had built one of the first homes around on this huge sold off parcel of the old Lefferts farm property. The Lefferts homestead itself was only a mile away, and that family had originally owned most of central Brooklyn. The Elkins family, including his four daughters, moved to the Dean St. house from Brooklyn Heights, and the house was probably already standing when they purchased the farm. We do know it was a farm, as George posted an ad in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1868, offering “two beautiful fresh cows for sale”.
George started out as a merchant, but by his move to Dean Street, he was selling real estate, and he was a born salesman. Between 1863 and 1875, he posted literally hundreds of ads in the Eagle, advertising properties and lots in this northwestern corner of the town of Bedford. His office was on the corner of Fulton and Clermont, but he did much of his business right on his front porch, showing potential customers the vistas that stretched before them, and the possibilities for the good life that were readily available to those with vision. He was very successful, and sold properties large and small, homes and development sites, cheap lots and mansion acreage. By 1870, he had branched out into contracting, and was hired to build part of Eastern Parkway, and later, much of nearby Brooklyn Avenue. He was a “gentleman pretty well known in the city”, according to the Eagle, and enjoyed many successful years in the real estate trade. During this time, the entire area was becoming known as the St. Marks District, and more and more was becoming home to New York's weathy who wished a quieter suburban life.
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September 22, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: All Things Luxurious
The Alhambra Apartments. Nostrand at Halsey. Bedford Stuyvesant. Montrose Morris, architect 1889 (Brooklyn Eagle)
Brooklyn, as a prosperous independent city, was growing in leaps and bounds in the mid 19th century. Manhattan started to develop its first luxury apartments, co-ops and residential hotels in the late 1870’s, but it would take a few more years for such ideas to adhere in Brooklyn. We had more undeveloped land, so there was plenty of land for the rich to build their mansions, even as row house development was creating new upper middle class neighborhoods. But eventually, the popularity of these neighborhoods, then, as now, meant that there were more people than there were private homes, and upper middle class apartment housing came to Brooklyn. In affluent Clinton Hill, the first apartment building, the Vendome, was built in 1887, designed by Halstead and Fowler. This Romanesque Revival castle on the corner of Gates and Grand originally held 17 families. The Clinton, built in 1897, on Clinton Ave, near De Kalb, is an even finer apartment building; its “E” configuration originally contained only 30 apartments, two per floor, per wing. Nearby, Langston and Dahlander’s Loire Valley Chateau-like building at 489 Clinton, near Fulton St. (1892), is considered by many to be the finest multiple dwelling in the Clinton Hill Historic District.
Over in the prosperous communities of Bedford and St. Marks, an enterprising developer, Louis F. Seitz, commissioned a talented, local architect named Montrose Morris to design three apartment buildings suitable for the upper classes. The first, the Alhambra, on Nostrand Ave, across the street from the new Girls High School, was built in 1889. It is a block long red brick and terra cotta Romanesque Revival masterpiece, with open loggias and balconies breaking up the strong lines of the Nostrand Ave façade, the entire building ornamented with terra cotta bands and friezes.
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September 15, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Faces I Remember
I collect faces. I’ve got some great ones: Vikings, African warriors, Indian Chiefs, handsome turbaned fellows, and chaps with bad teeth. I’ve got guys holding up buildings, and ethereal ladies looking serene and peaceful, as well as warrior women I wouldn’t advise you mess with. I’ve got a couple of creepy children and even a demon or two. Shakespeare is here, and so is Abe Lincoln. Courtiers and kings grace our buildings, as do ordinary looking Moms and Dads. Naturally, I’m referring to photographs of the many individuals whose countenances grace the buildings of Brooklyn.
Once you start noticing these images, you really do see them everywhere, because they ARE everywhere. Almost any building built between 1885 and 1940 is a candidate for portraiture, whether historical or imaginary. The architects of our borough had great imagination, access to some incredibly talented stoneworkers, and in many cases, a strong sense of humor. The examples are in stone or terra cotta, from reliefs to three dimensional busts. Take a look at some of the best, from all over Brownstone Brooklyn. I’ve got many, many, more, and find new ones every time I walk about in our amazing Brooklyn neighborhoods.
September 8, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Master of Schools, JW Naughton
In celebration of a new school year, a look at some of the best school buildings in the city of Brooklyn, and the man who designed them.
Brooklyn has been home to schools since the Dutch settled here in the 1600’s. The town of Williamsburgh opened the second school in the New Amsterdam colony in 1662, which was located on the corner of North 2nd St and Bushwick Ave, and the town was the site of the first Brooklyn public school, in 1826. The City of Brooklyn, having incorporated in 1855, operated its own Board of Education, and established the position of Superintendent of Buildings of the B of E for the City of Brooklyn. In 1879, James W. Naughton succeeded Samuel B. Leonard as Superintendent. For almost 20 years, Naughton designed ALL of the schools built in Brooklyn, numbered at over 100.
James W. Naughton was an immigrant success story. Born in Ireland, his family immigrated to Brooklyn when he was 8. He was educated in Brooklyn public and private schools, and at 15, he moved to Milwaukee to apprentice to architects J&A Douglas. In 1859, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin for two years, and then finished his architectural schooling at Cooper Union. He was very active in Brooklyn politics, and from 1874-76 he served as the Superintendent of Buildings for the City of Brooklyn, until taking the Department of Education post, which he held from 1879 until his death in 1898. Many of his most important schools still exist, and comprise some of the most beautiful and significant civic buildings in Brooklyn
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September 1, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Lux Living: Apartment Hotels
Hotel St. George, Brooklyn Heights. 1885, The Montrose Morris addition is on the right. (1890) (St. George Tower blogspot)
This is the 4th in a series about the history of multi-unit housing in Brooklyn.
As more and more people poured into New York in the last quarter of the 19th century, it soon became apparent that the city was running out of room for everyone, rich and poor alike. Of course, the rich had more options. Advances in transportation- the Brooklyn Bridge, ferries, railroads, horse trolley service, and the improvements of local streets and roads made Brooklyn an ideal suburb for many of the era’s successful industrialists, financiers, and movers and shakers. Brooklyn Heights had long been the first suburb, with larger and finer brownstone homes replacing most of the clapboards of the late 1700’s. Clinton Hill, Bedford, St. Mark’s, and Park Slope soon became home to millionaires who built large and lavish mansions and occupied wide and opulent row houses. Luxury apartment buildings and hotels were the next step in providing homes to the well off in Brooklyn.
Over in Manhattan, the first luxury apartment buildings started springing up in the 1870’s, with luxury co-ops, including the Gramercy Park Apartments, in 1883, the next step in living around one’s social peers. The apartment hotel was developed at this time to provide the privacy of a house with the amenities of a hotel for the discerning tenant. One entered into a lavish and ornate lobby, and was conveyed to suites by that new invention, the passenger elevator. The suites were large, many consisting of a reception room, parlors, a dining room, bedrooms, private baths, and servant’s rooms. There were no kitchens, but some suites had butler’s pantries to aid in the serving of meals. Residents had a choice of dining in the opulent private dining rooms downstairs, or having meals brought up with the aid of dumbwaiters, connected to the kitchens in the basement of the building. Dishes would be removed in the same way. Maid and laundry service could also be provided, with wash tubs and drying rooms also in the basement. New technologies made apartment hotels and luxury apartment buildings the laboratories for inventions we now take for granted: telephones and hotel switchboards were in use by the end of the 1870’s, as were central heating, hot running water and gas lighting. Electricity was in place by the 1890’s, while the central vacuum cleaner, with nozzles in the walls of each room, was invented as far back as 1859, with suction powered by electricity commonplace by the turn of the century.
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August 25, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Hardware: Jewels in the Crown
Hardware is the jewelry on a building. Hinges, locksets and doorknobs are functional, practical necessities to any building, and the architects of our brownstone neighborhoods, when given the opportunity, designed or commissioned works of great craftsmanship and artistry for many of our finest structures; for stately rows of houses, as well as mansions, commercial buildings and houses of worship. Technological advances in molding and plating techniques enabled hardware companies to shape brass and bronze into exquisitely carved interior and exterior doorknobs, push plates, hinges, drawer pulls and knobs. The advances in metal molding enabled hardware to leave the forge for the factory, making beautiful hardware affordable to the middle classes, not only the rich.
On the exteriors of our brownstone era homes, we find that imagination did not end with the more elaborate incised and carved hardware found inside the house. The original hinges, push plates, locksets and doorknobs still gracing many houses today show great style and artistry. In Park Slope, the houses of architect CPH Gilbert are masterpieces of ironwork. The ironwork on his mansion at the corner of Carroll and 8th Avenue would cost many thousands to reproduce today, and is an amazing artwork in itself. Gilbert’s designs, mostly done in the 1890’s, show the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, where the handmade, individually forged designs with a distinct Medieval influence harken back to the philosophies of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and its greatest member, William Morris. The door to one’s castle should be attired appropriately, and these doors are all magnificent.
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August 18, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Parlez-vous French Flat?
This is the third piece in a series about the development of multi-unit housing in Brooklyn. The French Flat was marketed to the growing middle classes.
In 1885, a writer commenting on the state of housing in Manhattan wrote: “NY is a city without homes. 2/3 of the population lives in tenements, and the remainder either occupy palatial but cheerless brownstone fronts, or board. The rich and poor are increasing, while the great middle class of thrifty and intelligent people are being crowded into the suburbs.” Because of improvements in mass transportation, including the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, railroad and trolley lines, the middle class was encouraged to move to the far reaches of Harlem, or Brooklyn, where single family ownership of a modest row house was still possible. But even in Brooklyn, there still was not enough housing for people who were well off enough to avoid the tenements, but not rich enough to buy a large single family house. The obvious answer was a multi-family building, better in every way than a tenement, and affordable to the wide range of incomes making up the middle class. The apartment, or flats building was born, but it was not an easy sell.
The word “apartment” had been in use in England and France since the 1700’s, where it only referred to a set of rooms, not necessarily shared with other people. The term “flats” originated in Edinburgh and London in the beginning of the 19th c. in reference to a group of rooms on one floor of a building. In NY, by the mid 19th c, the term referred to units in row houses that had been altered and subdivided, and by 1874, the phrase “French Flats” was officially entered into the DOB books, as a multiple-unit dwelling, and fell under the rules and laws that governed tenements. The biggest difference between a high end tenement and a low end flat was that each flat was equipped with sanitary facilities inside each unit. Many low end flats buildings are indistinguishable from tenement buildings from the outside, and often from the inside, too.
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August 11, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Ooooh, Baby, Baby
Every week our guest blogger Montrose Morris serves up a dose of Brooklyn architecture for our reading pleasure...If you’ve ever walked around Brooklyn neighborhoods with me, you’ll know I stop for babies. No, not the ones in the strollers, but the cherubs and baby faces that peer out from facades, columns and friezes. Yes, babies really are everywhere! The Victorians were a sentimental bunch. If you are a student of Victoriana, you know that children, babies, and cute baby animals were a staple of greeting cards, Valentines, embroidery patterns, advertising and other ephemera. It was part of the whole nurturing mother, feminine side of the Victorian psyche. We may find it cloyingly sappy now, but at the time, it was seen as the proper feminine complement to the masculine, robber baron, buttoned down, provider image of the Victorian Man. These products also reaped tidy fortunes for their designers and manufacturers, most of which were male. So it’s no wonder that cherubs and babies also leaped from the Christmas card onto hundreds of row house facades.
Cherubs and babies are a powerful symbol. A cherub is an angel, a heavenly being, a representative of the Divine, whose presence blesses one’s home. A blessed home is beautiful, peaceful, and prosperous. Babies also represent the continuing of the family, the blessings of children, and a fulfillment of family duty. Who wouldn’t want that reminder smiling down on us as we enter our homes? I often wonder how many of these babies are the real children of the developer, the architect, stone carver, or first homeowner. Some appear along with adult faces in panels stretching across the building. Are these family images, depicting the original owner, perhaps? We’ll probably never know. More than likely, I think they were chosen, as was most ornament, from a catalog, and tailored to the needs of the particular building or client. The range of baby and cherub images chosen is actually quite large. We have happy babies, crying babies, sad babies, blissful babies, and some strange looking ones, too. There are cherub figures that look as if they are blessing the building, cherubs practically spilling off the building, as well as my favorite, cherubs harnessing dragons. Many of these images are borrowed directly from Classical and Renaissance art, and many are extremely well sculpted and imagined images in terra cotta, brownstone and limestone. My examples are from many parts of Brownstone Brooklyn. Perhaps you’ll recognize the some of these original Park Slope, and other neighborhood, babies.
August 4, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Tenement Living
This is the second in a series of pieces about the development of multiple-unit housing in Brooklyn. Starting at the bottom of the economic ladder and moving up – tenements.
There have been tenement buildings in NY since the beginning of the city. The poor and lower working classes have long been sheltered, if you could call it that, in cramped and wretched rooms by the docks, slaughterhouses, and factories, and in areas allowed to go to seed by unscrupulous landlords and city officials. With immigration rising, beginning in the mid 19th century, the population of the Manhattan and Brooklyn continued to grow by leaps and bounds. In 1867, the first of three Tenement House Laws was passed in an attempt to improve conditions, which almost everyone agreed were horrible and inhumane. Legally, a tenement was defined as any building with 3 or more units, with shared sanitary facilities. This 1867 law only required that a legal tenement had a fire escape and at least one privy for every 20 tenants. This privy was outside, in the back of the building, and the law also forbade the keeping of sheep, goats, horses and cows on the premises. Most of these tenement buildings had 2 or 3 room units, and had received little light or air. Many of them were 3 and 4 story wooden buildings which deteriorated quickly, and were prone to catch fire. Real reform was still to come.
July 28, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Nature Boy
Human beings have always been in worshipful awe of nature, and for good reason, it’s a powerful force. Throughout time, man has tried to personalize nature by creating powerful beings that embody its power, nurturing, as well as destructive capabilities, and its caprices. So we’ve got Gaia, spirit of the earth, Mother Nature, and various gods and goddesses of thunder, harvest, the sea, animal life, and plant life and the forest. One of the oldest and most enduring of these embodiments of nature is the Green Man. He first appeared as architectural ornament in ancient Rome, and has always been depicted as a male face surrounded by, or made out of leaves. Sometimes branches or vines may shoot from the mouth, nose, eyes or ears, and often these tendrils spout flowers or fruit. The Green Man symbolizes renaissance or rebirth, through the cycle of growth each spring. He is a personification of the integral relationship of man and nature. Folklorists, who have devoted much research into this symbol, have devised three categories of Green Men: the Foliate Head completely covered in green leaves, the Disgorging Head, which spews vegetation from its mouth, and the Bloodsucker Head, which sprouts vegetation from all facial orifices. Very Wes Craven, and of course, we’ve got them all here in Brooklyn.
Although the Green Man is a pre-Christian and pagan symbol, it became very popular in European Medieval architecture, especially in churches, abbeys, and cathedrals, where examples can be seen dating back from the 11th century. Green Men appear often in the Italian Renaissance, on fountains, and other decorative work, often in bronze and other metals. In Victorian England and here in America, the Green man made a big comeback in architectural ornament used everywhere, starting in late 19th century Revival movements; Gothic and Renaissance Revival, as well as in the Arts and Crafts and Queen Anne styles. We find excellent examples in facades here in Brooklyn. He is depicted in terra cotta, brownstone and limestone. The stone carvers who created them gave our Green Men great personality in the features. We have benign and majestic Green Men, angry and demonic faces, Green Men with ascetic Celtic faces as well as African features, and all kinds of vegetation are used with great imagination. My examples are from Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Bed Stuy and Park Slope, but he can be found in other neighborhoods too. So give a nod to the Green Man as you pass him, your tomatoes and flowers will thank you.
July 21, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: Kinko Houses
English Terrace with Arts and Crafts and Tudor styling. Kinkos Houses. Mann and MacNeille, architects, 1907. Brooklyn Avenue, Crown Heights North
This is the first in a series of articles showcasing the different kinds of multiple unit housing developed to accommodate the growing number of people moving into Brooklyn between 1880 and 1930.
The turn of the 20th century saw great population growth in all corners of Brooklyn, which was now a part of greater New York City. The single family house no longer met everyone’s housing needs. Luxury apartment buildings and buildings with the new “French Flats” had been springing up in the better parts of town since the 1880’s, and better, more spacious tenement flats were being built for lower income renters by such social visionaries as Alfred Tredway White, and other flats, in general, were improving. Some enterprising builders were constructing two family houses that from the street looked exactly like their one family row house neighbors, and in 1907, a radical new type of house hit the market: the Kinko Duplex House.
Kinko houses were developed by the Kings and Westchester Land Company, and designed by the NY firm of Mann & MacNeille. Horace B. Mann and Perry R. MacNeille practiced between 1902 and 1931, were brothers-in-law, and very successful designers of upper class suburban houses, including several fine Tudor and Arts and Crafts homes in the landmarked Fieldston section of the Bronx. They are also known for schools and civic buildings, as well as being specialists in industrial housing. They designed several important company towns, such as Goodyear Heights in Ohio, and worked with Thomas Edison in engineering some of the first concrete houses for residential use. The Kinko houses were built in Crown Heights North, on St. Johns and Brooklyn Avenues, Sterling and Hampton Places, all in the area around St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church, between 1907 and 1912. Their most radical departure from tradition was to give each duplex unit its own front door and house number, stairway, porch and cellar. Both units consisted of a living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor, and a private stair leading to the second floor with four bedrooms, a hallway, and a bathroom. The lower unit had access to the back garden, the upper unit, which was reached by a private stairway to the third floor, had stairs leading from the 4th floor to a private roof garden. Originally, deliveries to the top unit were made by way of a dumb waiter installed in the cellar. The interior of these houses was the new Arts and Crafts style, featuring simple brick fireplaces with plain oak mantles, dining rooms with tall, wall to wall oak wainscoting with a plate rail and cabinets, A&C style sconces and other fixtures, oak flooring, and a new, efficiency kitchen and pantry for a servant-less household.
July 14, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: The Birds and the Beasts
Last week we looked at how 19th and early 20th century architects used the likenesses of lions, both natural and imaginary, as ornament in our Brooklyn buildings. This week, more images from the animal kingdom, and some of the symbolism that may be behind their use. If the lion is the King of Beasts, his closest rival to the throne would have to the eagle. The eagle is the symbol of America, and long before that, was a powerful symbol for Native American cultures, as well as European royal houses. It is natural, therefore, that we should find eagles on commercial buildings, such as banks, warehouses, office buildings and clubs. The finest example I have is the magnificent eagle carved in brownstone on the façade of the Union League Club, built for the Republican Party, at Grant Square, in Crown Heights North. The roof of the club also sports a bear, another symbol of strength, holding the shield of the Republic. Lesser birds were also popular, and many Queen Anne and Renaissance Revival homes throughout brownstone Brooklyn are adorned with sparrows, ravens, owls, and even herons.
Sometimes, the lines between reality and imagination blur, creating fantastic creatures that never actually existed, and those creatures are a wonderful delight to notice. Creatures I call “dragolions”: dragons with lion’s heads, and fantastic sea serpents, as well as true gryphons, with lion’s bodies and eagle’s heads. An Asian inspired dragon’s head appears on PS 138, also in Crown Heights, and a magnificent dragolion battles a serpent on the side of a house in Bed Stuy. Another animal with royal and ancient antecedents is the dolphin, which, from the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans has symbolized safety, charity, prosperity and traveling mercies. What more fitting symbol for a home, or hotel? Dolphins appear both large and small, usually depicted in the stylized manner of the Renaissance, looking more like catfish than literal dolphins, as depicted by Axel Hedman on a building of fine flats, overlooking Brower Park.
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July 8, 2009
Walkabout: The Lion, the Stone Carver, and Bklyn
Animal figures as ornament are older than architecture. From the cave paintings of early human history to now, animals both real and imaginary, play a part in the architecture of almost every culture on earth. Is it no wonder that our Victorian builders used them, often to great effect? The lion is probably the most popular animal portrayed in human history, and the lions we see today owe much to the artistic traditions of the European Middle Ages. Any culture that encountered the lion revered it for its strength, ferocity and nobility. A heraldic symbol of royalty, bravery, and family strength, the lion still rules in our brownstone neighborhoods. He is everywhere, on private houses, apartment buildings, banks, commercial and civic buildings. He gazes down at us from lintels, cornices and parapets, and roars, often holding wreaths in his jaws. One of the most noble and finely sculptured of these lions lives on McDonough St, in Bed Stuy, as the keystone of a building of fine flats. Among my other favorites are the stylized and copasetic lions that guard the Art Deco Kings County Savings Bank, on Eastern Parkway, in Crown Heights North. They are as different as can be, yet both artistically and stylistically powerful.
A popular depiction of the lion is with wings. Not technically a griffin, (or gryphon), because that mythical beast had the head of an eagle and body of a lion, these winged beasts show up mostly in reliefs on limestone Renaissance Revival buildings. Often incorporated into floral motifs derived from Italian Renaissance ornament, these figures actually have their origin in Roman fresco work, as seen in the ruins of Rome and Pompeii. My favorite full scaled winged lion sculptures can be found in a group of Queen Anne brownstones on 3rd St, in Park Slope, where pregnant looking winged lions guard the entryways of these homes. They are well carved, imaginative and impressive, and, paired with the other animal and portrait carvings incorporated into the brackets, are truly masterpieces of stonework created for residential buildings. The Flickr photos show an impressive pride of stone lion work, including an adorable kitten relief, also found in the Slope. Next week: Dragons, birds and bears!
June 30, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: The City Beautiful Movement
At the turn of the 20th century, reformers in American cities were aware that the great advances of industry and technology had both made tremendous wealth and advancement possible for many, along with the intensification of horrific poverty, and abominable living conditions for many more, as documented in NYC by Jacob Riis. Civil unrest, strikes and riots persisted, and city fathers were getting worried, because the rich were leaving the central cities. The City Beautiful Movement was rather grandiosely designed to combat these problems through architecture and city planning. The widely held social belief was that the poor were poor because they were morally and socially deficient, an attitude that lingers to this day. It was thought that building a beautiful city would inspire all of its inhabitants to moral and civic virtue, and social ills would dissolve into pride and loyalty to this beautiful new city, thereby inspiring the poor to better themselves. The City Beautiful would have parkland, where everyone could escape the streets to enjoy nature, this feature was especially important to one of the earliest proponents – Frederick Law Olmsted. The new classically inspired Beaux Arts architecture was also designed to show Europe that America had arrived, and was no longer a cultural backwash. And most importantly, the rich would then stop moving to the suburbs and stay in the central cities, and spend their money there. The Movement had its largest success in the civic areas of newer cities like Denver, but its most impressive and lasting success was the transformation of Washington DC, spearheaded by Daniel Burnham, the architect in chief of the Columbian Exposition. What we see today in central Washington, the Capitol area, the Mall, the lake and the monuments, is the White City, the City Beautiful, most fully realized. Tragically, the same social ills, supposedly banished, surround it, as well.
What about New York?
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June 23, 2009
Walkabout with Montrose: World's Fairs and White Cities
Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893 Grand Basin and Court of Honor (Illinois Institute of Technology)
In 1893, the money and influence of Chicago industrialists and meat packers beat out New York’s bankers and merchants, and the Columbian Exhibition, one of the most important World’s Fairs, was held in the Windy City. In addition to celebrating Columbus’ 400th anniversary of arriving on our hemisphere, the CE was a masterpiece of architectural, cultural and technological wonders. The Fair covered 600 acres, featured 200 new buildings, manmade canals and lagoons, and showcased the people, cultures, and products of the world. During its 6 months run, over 27 million people attended, which was equivalent to half the nation’s population at that time. The Columbian Exhibition gave us the Ferris Wheel, hamburgers, Cracker Jacks, Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, Shredded Wheat, Juicy Fruit Gum and Aunt Jemima Pancake mix. Mr. Hershey discovered chocolate at the fair, and America was introduced to Scott Joplin’s ragtime, the hula, and the wonders and power of electricity.
One of the most far reaching effects of the Columbian Exhibition was its appearance. Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, along with Frederick Law Olmstead, brought in many prominent architects of the age, including New Yorkers McKim, Mead and White, and they designed what came to be called “The White City”, following Beaux Arts principals of European classical architecture. The central part of the fair featured vast buildings set on wide avenues, with lakes and lagoons. All of the buildings were covered with white stucco or paint, and the city was lit with thousands of electric lights, creating a gleaming city, the source of the “alabaster cities” in the song “America the Beautiful”, as well as the Emerald City in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series, and later, Disneyland.
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Latest Restaurant Additions
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Le Barricou
added November 20, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Der Schwarze Kölner
added November 19, 2009 12:00 PM in Fort Greene -
Oak Wine Bar & Café
added November 18, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Mr. Wonton
added November 17, 2009 12:00 PM in Park Slope -
Casa Rosa
added November 16, 2009 12:00 PM in Carroll Gardens -
Cousin John's Café & Bakery
added November 13, 2009 12:00 PM in Park Slope -
Elote
added November 12, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Miracle Grill
added November 11, 2009 12:00 PM in Park Slope -
Phoebe's Cafe
added November 10, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Ruthie's
added November 9, 2009 12:00 PM in Clinton Hill, Downtown Brooklyn