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.

[Photos by Suzanne Spellen]