Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/581

 1869.] Our Street Architecture. 471 that, for the sake of appearance at least, three or four fronts should combine to form a frontispiece, in which proportion could be preserved, and, if possible unity of style. But, so loth are some persons to relinquish their cherished whims, that they would sacrifice pro- priety of taste, and common sense itself, to the carrying out of the pet idea. Such people there is no way of control- ling : they are lords of their own do- main ; and it is not in the spirit of our free and liberal government to compel them to hearken to reason, and not per- petrate a crime against the character of our street architecture. We have more than once seen a florid Gothic front of eighteen or twenty feet in length, and from seventy to eighty feet high, with crocketed pinnacles and traceried embattlements, and all the other accessories of hoods, corbels, &c, filched from some mammoth cathedral, and crammed into this long, slim front, which slips up, in gawky showiness, to the astonished clouds ! And this frip- peried attenuity is rendered still more absurd, by the glaring contrast it makes with the fronts it out-tops. The archi- tect is surely to be pitied, who is com- pelled to yield to the unreasoning client, that insists on such an elevation. Money will carry out such follies ; and, were one professional man to refuse being made instrumental in the perpetration of this public wrong, there would, un- fortunately, be found others, less con- scientious, whose motto would seem to be, " Obey orders." We are of the hopeful opinion, bow- ever, that property owners are not alto- gether callous to criticism ; neither are they deaf ( .s a class) to the appeals of taste ; and that they possess as much of the pride of locality^ as others do, we believe ; so that such a state of affairs is far from hopeless ; but rather to be considered well within the range of attainable things ; and that it lies in the power of the public press to place the question always in its true light before the ey r es of those, who possess this inherent right to build tastefully or otherwise, so that editors owe a duty to the community in this matter, which, as good citizens, they should not repudiate. There is one unfavorable feature in the street architecture of all cities ; and that is, the buildings being so invariably governed by the drill-sergeant idea — 'dress up on the front." In other words, there are no broken surfaces. For instance, the Ledger building in this city the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, and numberless other instances, throughout the country, present one tiresome straight line of front, which, if broken into masses with projections of only three feet, or say two even, could be made to present a most interesting facade. The stores might be injured, in a business point of view, by such treatment ; and perhaps, therefore, it would be as well to confine it to the superstructure. What a fine appearance some of those long fronts offer under a skilful archi- tect ; and what a relief to the way-farer, whose eye is sorely tired with the mon- otony^ of brick surfaces of interminable length, broken only, if at all, by the change of material, in the whole lengths of streets, ad infinitum. It is true, that sometimes a Church appears, like a blessed suggestive friend, to relieve the dulness of continuity, which so oppresses us ; but, alas ! the dollar demon of commerce has too often witched this oasis away r, and filled its venerated place with a block like unto the rest of the desert of sameness. To exemplify our meaning — let an artist undertake to give perspective views of our streets, and what a patch- work thing he must necessarily make of it ! How utterly devoid of variety of shade tints those relieving beauties of a picture. How higgledy-piggledy the styles, and how unmeaning the whole col- lection. Here a Greco-Italian squeezes, to the right and left, its plainer neigh- bors of less pretentions ; and, anon, a