future paper, to speak of some of the old mansions, and stately dwellings which adorned that aristocratic quarter; for the present we merely hint at their existence, in order to show how rapidly since the first inroads were made, the whole character of that part of the city has changed. Aristocracy, startled and disgusted with the near approach of plebeian trade which already threatened to lay its insolent hands upon her mantle, and to come tramping into her silken parlors with its heavy boots and rough attire, fled by dignified degrees up Broadway, lingered for a time in Greenwich-street, Park Place, and Barclay-street, until at length finding the enemy still persistent, she took a great leap into the wilderness above Bleecker-street. Alas for the poor lady, every day drives her higher and higher; Twenty-eighth-street is now familiar with her presence, and she is already casting her longing eyes still further on. Old New-York was built entirely of brick. The first Dutchmen imported bricks from Holland, with something of the same sagacity with which we import iron from Wales. None of these bricks adorn the present city, nor have any existed on the island within our memory.* The City Hall was commenced in Sept. 1803 and built on three sides of white marble, the fourth was of brown freestone. It is stated, and we have never seen the story contradicted, that freestone was used on the north side, because the sage builders were firmly persuaded that no one would ever see it, since it was so far up town, that the city could never extend above it; but such stupidity and blindness is too serious a matter to be laughed at; it is therefore a very poor piece of wit, if it is intended as such, and a very outrageous slander on the intelligence of our most worthy ancestors, if it be not true. We therefore hope that some persevering historian will set this matter right as soon as possible. However, be the reason what it may, this must have been nearly the first instance of an extensive use of the brown freestone in the city. It has now, as all our town readers know, come to be the favorite building material for shops, churches, and residences; we shall see hereafter that in some parts of the city, and in a few instances, other materials are preferred, but they are exceptions, and the prevailing tint of New-York is fixed, whether for better or worse, there may be conflicting opinions, as a waim brown which takes the sunshine with a quiet elegance, and would take the shadow, if our architects would give it the chance by a bolder treatment, with all desirable clearness and nobility of effect. Moreover, the freestone, admirably suited as it is for large and massive buildings, such as stores and churches, is of so fine a quality and so delicate a tone, that no fine work is thrown away upon it, and we rejoice to see that in many of the new stores recently erected, the work which has been bestowed upon them is of very fine quality, and shows a daily advance in our architectural ability, if not to originate, at least to copy well. The freestone used in building NewYork city is not all the product of one quarry. That of the best quality is brought from Little Falls, in New Jersey, on the Passaic River, a short distance from Patterson. It is light in color, and delicately shaded, and takes shadow with greater distinctness than the darker varicties. There is no finer specimen of this freestone than that used in Trinity Church, in Broadway, to which we shall allude at some length in our article on the Churches of New York. Much of the brown stone used in the city comes from quarries in Connecticut, but the color of this variety is much darker than that from Little Falls, and we think less desirable. It has always been a maxim with good architects, that stones used in building should be laid upon their natural beds; that is, that the stone should always be placed with its grain in the same position in which it lays in the quarry. Yet we find in almost every building which is in the course of erection, where the rough brick walls are being faced or veneered with plates of ashlar freestone, four or five inches thick, that this principle is almost entirely neg *We have seen them however in our younger days, when at school in Tarrytown, where still stands the ancient Reformed Dutch Meeting-House, like an old man whose trunk is all that remains to him of his body, but whose hair, teeth, color, and perhaps a leg and arm or two, are either borrowed from his dead neighbors, or added by the skill of some cunning workman, for all that remains of this building, rendered sacred and immortal as it is by being embalmed in the amber of Irving, is the foundation and some of the principal timbers. All the rest is new. The Holland bricks, of a warm yellow tint, and rather friable texture, are replaced by walls of rough granite, and some Vandal has abused the good old grandmotherly building, by putting out her reputable and becoming eyes or windows, albeit they were square and small-paned, and replacing them with others which the farmers and their daughters thereabouts have agreed to call gothic. The same mischiefmaker who did the old dame this harm, has robbed her of her ancient pinafore or porch, which perhaps was becoming a little faded and seedy, and rigged her up instead with an abominable, ill-fangled affair, which is posi tively disreputable; but not content with this, he has stuck on her venerable head a little pert cap, or belfry, which gives the old lady a truly ludicrous appearance, that makes us laugh. in spite of ourselves. We have no time nor place to say more on this unhappy topic; but may we not ask of the historian of Sleepy Hollow, that in some future edition of his works he will devote at least one chapter to holding up the abuser of this most respectable mother in Israel to public detestation. slabs shall be firmly and faithfully secured to the wall which they hide, and that this wall shall be a structure whose workmanship shall be solid and scientific; and the second is, that in every course of slabs there shall be either solid blocks of stone, forming a part of the wall, and extending from front to back, placed in sufficient numbers to serve as binders, or that iron shall be substituted for such blocks; these precautions, however, will be of little avail, if the stone is not properly laid, a fact which should be carefully consid ered on the part of the architect, the builder, and the employer, but which we fear will continue to suffer neglect, so long as it is a method which demands a greater outlay of money in the commencement. White marble is also coming into extensive use in the city, especially in some of the new streets. This marble comes from quarries in Tuckahoe, Westchester County; but we are told that a new and a very fine one has just been opened near Sing Sing, which is of a superior quality to any hitherto offered to the public. We rejoice to see these new materials employed in building; the aspect of the city is greatly beautified by their judicious adoption, and especially when as seems now to be the tendency, uniformity of building prevails in certain quarters. Thus Broadway is evidently making up its mind to assume the rich brown garb of Quakerism, although even on Sundays, it rejects the quiet simplicity of the manners of that amiable sect. Dey-street, also, of which we shall speak more at length hereafter, has adopted the same garb, and Liberty-street, having been wooed and won by the advancing spirit of progress and reform, has arrayed herself in white marble, as the most becoming material in which to consecrate her nuptials. This street, moreover, is an excellent example of the benefits of matrimony, even when the parties are merely bricks and mortar; for the citizen who remembers this thoroughfare before its alterations-and we, with our first beard, find no difficulty in recalling that Broad-street in Dutch times. time-would hardly recognize in the handsome, fresh, and almost palatial Libertystreet of 1853, the dusky, tumble-down, and seedy lane, which bore that title in the spring of 1852. We appeal to the oldest Dutch resident, and even to the surliest resistant to the rebuilding of the street itself, in defence of our comparison of the city's growth with that of Aladdin's Palace. Which of them was most like a mushroom?* Our artist, Döpler, has admirably represented the confusion into which the wholesale repairs and alterations going on in this street have plunged it. One after another the old tenements have disappeared, the bricks painted and unpainted have gone the way of all clay, the narrow windows have been looked out of for the last time, and the small doors have followed the high steps to oblivion, and that "undiscovered bourne" to which all the rubbish of this great city is carried. Hardly, however, had they disappeared, before the foundations of new buildings were laid, until at length the whole street, from Broadway to Greenwich, is completely metamorphosed. Contrast this view of Liberty-street, unfinished as it is represented, with the engraving of Broad-street, which is here shown, and who that compares the rapid growth of our city, with the slower development of London and Paris, but will admit that the American has some reason for indulging in his national pastime of bragging? Broad-street, which in our cut presents a quantity of Let us do justice even to the city fathers. The improvements completed or now in progress, in John-street, Liberty-street and Dey-street, could never have been effected nor even contemplated, without widening these thoroughfares, and we are indebted to the venerable Corporation for allowing these schemes to be carried out. We commenced this note with sobriety, and with the magnanimous determination "to give the devil his due," but our gravity is disturbed by the reflection, that we can find only this modicum of good, to balance the abundance of evil; and we are tempted to exclaim, with Prince Henry, on reading the bill for Falstaff's supper, "Oh, monstrous! but one halfpenny worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!" What would he have said if he had seen the bill for an Aldermanic series of Tea Room Entertainments? little Dutch stores, with their crow-step gables, and inharmonious irregularities, is now a fine, wide, business street,-one of the finest indeed which the city boasts,and lined with large but plain brick blocks. Plain as they are, and poorly as their architecture compares with that of many stores in Broadway, and some of the river streets, yet either one of them would have taken away the appetite of the honest Dutchman who built this monstrosity* in 1689, and sold the delicacies of the period to the sleepy vrows and their oleaginous lords. One peculiarity of the New-York stores which distinguishes them from their London and Paris rivals, is the fact that they generally occupy the whole of the building for purposes connected with their business, and are not confined to the first stories. Thus in London the most splendid stores, or those which make the finest show, merely occupy, as far as the customer is concerned, the first floor, and in most cases they are wholly confined to that portion of the building. In some cases, like that of Howell and James, the "Stewarts" of London, the shop is merely three ordinary dwelling-houses, given up to the sale of goods, and having no architectural pretensions whatever. In most other instances the first floor of the building is decorated with what is technically styled a "shop front" which is merely a highly ornamented framework for the large plate glass windows, in some examples gaudy and ill-proportioned, in others as in the case of the famous "Swan and Edgar's," in Regent-street (which excels any of our shop windows in the size of its plate glass panes), elegant and characteristic. But these shop fronts are merely appendages to the buildings to which they belong, and have no architectural relation to them. Moreover they are in no case built of expensive materials, but are either constructed of papier mach, stucco, terra-cotta, or plaster decorated with color, and serving merely a temporary purpose. There is no warehouse in London, nor in any other European city, approaching some of the large and splendid establishments in Broadway, nor is there any shop in the world to rival the palatial magnificence of that on the corner of Broadway and Chambers-street, a building of white marble, extending from street to street, and of which we shall render a more particular account hereafter. Nor can the history of merchandise produce a finer example of outward elegance and interior completeness, than will be found in the silk warehouse in Broadway near Pinestreet. This building is constructed of white marble, and is thirty-seven and a half feet wide, one hundred and forty-seven feet deep, and four stories high, while next spring will probably see it carried up to six stories, to accommodate the increasing business of the establishment, and to make it equal in height to its new neighbor, the Metropolitan Bank, which adorns with its elegance the corner of Broadway and Pine-street, and to which we shall refer hereafter. The admirable feature of this silk warehouse is the solidity with which it is constructed. The floor of each story is supported by the side walls alone, and is without pillars or partition throughout its whole extent, yet there is not the slightest jar or tremble perceptible. Every department of the business is managed with a beautiful thoroughness, which is becoming more and more a part of our national character. There is another excellence in the outward architecture of this store, and that consists in the shadow which the architect has obtained by the elaborate cornice and deeply recessed windows, an effect which is wholly wanting in most of our new buildings, and the entire absence of which is almost the only This old store, one of the earliest specimens of Dutch architecture, erected in New-York, and almost the last link which connected us with the sleepy days of old Peter Stuyvesant, lingered till within twenty years, like a bedridden great-grandmother among her stirring and bustling descendants, who at last, weary of her presence, and rendered desperate by her unflinching determination "never to say die," tore her limb from limb and scattered her bones far and wide. We never waste a tear over the death of an old Fogy, especially a Dutch one, which when a perfect specimen of its kind, and unalloyed by any admixture of progressive grace, as it not seldom is, must be admitted to surpass in desolation all the other varieties of conservatism extant. drawback to the enjoyment of the great marble palace of Stewart. The fault most prominent in the store which we are noticing is its disproportionate height, a fault which will be still further increased if the alterations contemplated are carried out. This might have been remedied by making the horizontal lines of the building more prominent than the perpendicular. This effect could have been produced by carrying heavy balconies across the front, and in this way the quantity of shadow on the face of the building would have been increased; as it is, the principal lines of the building, the piers which separate the windows, the mullions which divide them, and the perpendicular divisions of the cornice, all tend by their direction to add to the effect of height, and to decrease the apparent breadth of the building. Mr. Joseph C. Wells was the architect of this complete and admirably constructed store, and the proprietors intrusted to his care the designing of every detail of ornament and furniture. Another fine structure is the building numbered 200 and 202 Broadway, built of brown freestone in a style of quiet elegance. We find the same fault with the appearance of too great height given to the store by the prominence of the perpendicular lines which we have done with the one last under consideration. The importance given to the mouldings and bracketed cornice over the third story somewhat relieves this defect, but the member is put in the wrong place. It should have crowned a lower story, since the stories of a building should increase in lightness as they rise, and of two members the heaviest and richest in effect should be the lower. Thus in this building, the first story should have been crowned with an elaborate and effective cornice, supported by solid and important piers. This would have given a character of stability and strength to the structure, which in common with many of the recent erections in Broadway, it very much needs. The second story should have been less important than the first, but more important than the third-on the contrary the third story is more important than either the first or second, and of equal value with the fifth. The consequence of this oversight is that the building, though well built and costly, is entirely without beauty, and without even the pictorial effect often attained by well arranged ugliness. This want of pictorial effect, resulting from monotony of detail and almost entire absence of bold, they are adopted especially as expense seems rather to be sought than shunned. and as in reality the effect produced is out of all proportion to the cost requisite to obtain it. It requires knowledge and it requires taste; but the beauty of our city depends in great measure upon attention to this point, and knowledge and taste ought to be procured at all cost. Knowledge can be bought, taste cannot. but it can be fostered, and free scope can be given to it when found. Too many buildings in New-York show immense wealth to have been expended in their construction, with a lavish hand unguided by correct taste. In one you see the same heavy, inelegant window cornice, repeated throughout the front and sides of a monster six stories high.* In another you will find a noble and enormous building, over whose white surface, front In the particular instance to which we allude, these window cornices are of cast iron, painted and sanded in imitation of brown freestone, an abomination to which we shall devote some space in another place but which we are happy to see is not very greatly on the increase. |