America To-day, Observations and Reflections. Archer William
painted all over the ends of houses, that deface the railway approaches to Paris; nor is it so flagrant and aggressive as the illuminated advertisements of whisky and California wines that vulgarise the august spectacle of the Thames by night. It is true that the proprietors of "Castoria" have occupied nearly every blank wall that is visible from Brooklyn Bridge; but their advertisements are so far from garish that I should scarcely have noticed them had not Mr. Steevens called my attention to them. Sky-signs, as Mr. Steevens admits, are unknown in New York; so are the flashing out-and-in electric advertisements which make night hideous in London. One or two large steady-burning advertisements irradiate Madison Square of an evening; but being steady they are comparatively inoffensive. Twenty years ago, when I crossed the continent from San Francisco, I noticed with disgust the advertisements stencilled on every second rock in the canyons of Nevada, and defacing every coign of vantage around Niagara. Whether this abuse continues I know not; but I know that the pill placards and sauce puffs which blossom in our English meadows along every main line of railway are quite as offensive. Far be it from me to deny that advertising is carried to deplorable excesses in America; but in picking this out as a differentia, Mr. Steevens shows that his intentness of observation in New York has for the moment dimmed his mental vision of London. It is a case, I fancy, in which the expectation was father to the thought.
Similarly, Mr. Steevens notes, "No chiropodist worthy of the name but keeps at his door a modelled human foot the size of a cab-horse; and other trades go and do likewise." The "cab-horse" is a monumental exaggeration; but it is true that some chiropodists use as a sign a foot of colossal proportions—the size of a small sheep, let us say, if we must adopt a zoological standard. So far good; but the implication that the streets of New York swarm, like a scene in a harlequinade, with similarly Brobdingnagian signs is quite unfounded. Thus it is, I think, that travellers are apt to seize on isolated eccentricities or extravagances (have we no monstrous signs in England?) and treat them as typical. Mr. Steevens came to America prepared to find everything gigantic, and the chiropodist's foot so agreeably fulfilled his expectation that he thought it unnecessary to look any further—"ex pede Herculem."[C]
The architecture of New York, according to Mr. Steevens, is "the outward expression of the freest, fiercest individualism. … Seeing it, you can well understand the admiration of an American for something ordered and proportioned—for the Rue de Rivoli or Regent Street." I heard this admiration emphatically expressed the other day by one of the foremost and most justly famous of American authors; but, unlike Mr. Steevens, I could not understand it. "What!" I said, "you would Haussmannise New York! You would reduce the glorious variety of Fifth Avenue to the deadly uniformity of the Avenue de l'Opéra, where each block of buildings reproduces its neighbour, as though they had all been stamped by one gigantic die!" Such an architectural ideal is inconceivable to me. It is all very well for a few short streets, for a square or two, for a quadrant like that of Regent Street, or a crescent or circus like those of Bath or Edinburgh. But to apply it throughout a whole quarter of a city, or even throughout the endless vistas of a great American street, would be simply maddening. Better the most heaven-storming or sky-scraping audacity of individualism than any attempt to transform New York into a Fourierist phalanstery or a model prison. I do not doubt that there will one day be some legal restriction on Towers of Babel, and that the hygienic disadvantages of the microbe-breeding "well" or air-shaft will be more fully recognised than they are at present. A time may come, too, when the ideal of an unforced harmony in architectural groupings may replace the now dominant instinct of aggressive diversity. But whatever developments the future may have in store, I must own my gratitude to the "fierce individualism" of the present for a new realisation of the possibilities of architectural beauty in modern life. At almost every turn in New York, one comes across some building that gives one a little shock of pleasure. Sometimes, indeed, it is the pleasure of recognising an old friend in a new place—a patch of Venice or a chunk of Florence transported bodily to the New World. The exquisite tower of the Madison Square Garden, for instance, is modelled on that of the Giralda, at Seville; while the new University Club, on Fifth Avenue, is simply a Florentine fortress-palace of somewhat disproportionate height. But along with a good deal of sheer reproduction of European models, one finds a great deal of ingenious and inventive adaptation, to say nothing of a very delicate taste in the treatment of detail. New York abounds, it is true, with monuments of more than one bygone and detestable period of architectural fashion; but they are as distinctly survivals from a dead past as is the wooden shanty which occupies one of the best sites on Fifth Avenue, in the very shadow of the new Delmonico's. I wish tasteless, conventional, and machine-made architecture were as much of a "back-number" in England as it is here. A practised observer could confidently date any prominent building in New York, to within a year or two, by its architectural merit; and the greater the merit the later the year.
In short, architecture is here a living art. Go where you will in these up-town regions, you can see imagination and cultured intelligence in the act, as it were, of impressing beauty of proportion and detail upon brick and terra-cotta, granite and marble. And domestic or middle-class architecture is not neglected. The American "master builders" do not confine themselves to towers and palaces, but give infinite thought and loving care to "homes for human beings." The average old-fashioned New York house, so far as I have seen it, is externally unattractive (the characteristic material, a sort of coffee-coloured stone, being truly hideous), and internally dark, cramped, and stuffy. But modern houses, even of no special pretensions, are generally delightful, with their polished wood floors and fittings, and their airy suites of rooms. The American architect has a great advantage over his English colleague in the fact that in furnace-heated houses only the bedrooms require to be shut off with doors. The halls and public rooms can be grouped so that, when the curtains hung in their wide doorways are drawn back, two, three, or four rooms are open to the eye at once, and charming effects of space and light-and-shade can be obtained. Of this advantage the modern house-planner makes excellent use, and I have seen more than one quite modest family house which, without any sacrifice of comfort, gives one a sense of almost palatial spaciousness. An architectural exhibition which I saw the other day proved that equal or even greater care and attention is being bestowed upon the country house, in which a characteristically American style is being developed, mainly founded, I take it, upon the suave and graceful classicism of Colonial architecture. The wide "piazza" is its most noteworthy feature, and the opportunity it offers for beautiful cloister-work is being utilised to the full. Furthermore, the large attendance at the exhibition showed what a keen interest the public takes in the art—a symptom of high vitality.
In Philadelphia, too, where I spent some time last week, there is a good deal of exquisite architecture to be seen. The old Philadelphia dwelling house, "simplex munditiis," with its plain red-brick front and white marble steps, has a peculiar charm for me; but it, of course, is not a product of the present movement. I do not know the date of some lovely white marble palazzetti scattered about the Rittenhouse Square region; but the Art Club on Broad Street, and the Houston Club for Students of the University of Pennsylvania, are both quite recent buildings, and both very beautiful. I could mention several other buildings that are, as they say here, "pretty good" (a phrase of high commendation); but I had better get safely out of New York before I enlarge on the merits of Philadelphia. There is only one city the New Yorker despises more than Philadelphia, and that is Brooklyn. The New York schoolboy speaks of Philadelphia as "the place the chestnuts go to when they die;" and to the most popular wit in New York at this moment (an Americanised Englishman, by the way) is attributed the saying, "Mr. So-and-so has three daughters—two alive, and one in Philadelphia." Six different people have related this gibe to me; it is only less admired than the same gentleman's observation as he alighted from an electric car at the further end of the Suspension Bridge, when he heaved a deep sigh, and remarked, "In the midst of life we are in Brooklyn." Another favourite anecdote in New York is that of the Philadelphian who went to a doctor and complained of insomnia. The doctor gave him a great deal of sage advice as to diet, exercise, and so forth, concluding, "If after that you haven't better nights, let me see you again." "But you mistake, doctor," the patient replied; "I sleep all right at night—it's in the daytime I can't sleep!"
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