Q&A: Lockwood's Favorite Townhouse Style?

Question: Do you have a favorite townhouse architectural style?

Answer: People often ask me that question, and it’s a tougher one that you might realize. To me, it’s similar to asking a parent which one of their children they love the most.

I like all the townhouse architectural styles, but often for different reasons. Take the Federal style of the 1820s and early 1830s, which you find in Brooklyn Heights and in Greenwich Village and a few scattered downtown locations south of Houston Street. I admire the elegant simplicity of these red brick houses with their doorways set off by leaded glass sidelights and toplights, and their pitched roofs with dormer windows. Nos. 155, 157, and 159 Willow Street (shown at left) are exquisite examples in red brick, while No. 24 Middagh Street is a frame Federal style townhouse ca. 1824. I think that one reason I love these houses so much is that they have survived nearly two centuries in fast-growing, often-tumultuous New York. Only a relative handful survive today.

I really like the Italianate style of the 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s. These classically-inspired red brick or brownstone-front houses, which survive in most of Brooklyn’s brownstone neighborhoods: all over Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, to name some of the obvious locations.

These Italianate townhouses reflect New York’s rise as America’s richest, showiest, most powerful city. Just look at the richly embellished facades with their grandly scaled doorways and bold roofline cornices, or the parlor floors with their richly carved white marble fireplace mantels and flamboyant plaster ceiling moldings and rosettes.
Continued on the jump…

Profile [Charles Lockwood]
Buy Bricks & Brownstones [Amazon]

These houses were also the first New York City dwellings to have running water, real bathrooms, central heating, and efficient gas lighting. Those creature comforts obviously meant more to mid-nineteenth-century New Yorkers’ everyday comfort than the lavish architectural styles that many New Yorkers relish today.
Of course, Brooklyn has the best remaining Italianate style townhouses today. Why? Because these houses were built between (approximately) 14th Street and Central Park in Manhattan, and they have been demolished or altered virtually beyond recognition. Brooklyn, therefore, is where you find the finest 1850s and 1860s Italianate style townhouses.

The block of South Portland Avenue off Fort Greene Park really cannot be surpassed as a showplace for Italianate style brownstones. Both sides of the street are lined by virtually intact Italianate style townhouses. Of course, it definitely helps that South Portland Avenue ends at Fort Greene Park, which was designed by Olmsted & Vaux, and has the neoclassical Prison Ships Martyrs’ Monument designed by McKim, Mead & White.

Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, for the first half dozen or so blocks off Flatbush, is another architectural showplace: a remarkable mixture of Italianate and Neo-Grec style brownstones and several churches. Really, really special.

Of course, I like many of the late nineteenth century styles, too. By 1870 or so, the Italianate style was on its way out. That’s when Park Slope and Bedford Stuyvesant started to experience major development. Likewise for the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Harlem, and Hamilton Heights in Manhattan. Popular taste had swung away from following one omni-present style (the Italianate) toward a variety of styles. Builders, often following architects’ plans, constructed houses in the newly popular Queen Anne, Romanesque, and Renaissance Revival styles, frequently using a variety of different color and textured bricks and stone on a single facade. Eclecticism, not the long rows of uniform houses which had characterized the mid-nineteenth-century townhouses like South Portland Avenue, became the overriding goal. So, every block had row houses of different styles. Montgomery Park in Park Slope is a prime example.

Some individual houses even combined two or three styles at once. The architectural effect—if handled skillfully—could be quite handsome, even whimsical and picturesque. Sometimes, however, when a builder, not an architect, was throwing together several styles in an attempt to be up-to-date, the overall effect was less successful, even downright clumsy.

Just because a townhouse—or actually any building—is old usually makes it a much-loved landmark by today’s New Yorkers, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s great architecture. But that’s another subject for another time.