Grand Buildings in New York City

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GRAND BUILDINGS IN NEW YORK CITY.

Some of the largest and best buildings in the world are to be commenced and carried on, this summer, in New York. There is to be a Roman Catholic Cathedral on Fifth avenue, (above the lower Reservoir,) that will take down any religious edifice yet in America.¹ It is to cover more ground, and have a greater height, than any.

There are other churches of various sects—all to be distinguished for their costly architecture, nobleness of appearance, and (so-called) taste of design. Also there are to be private dwellings—and probably, these will deserve more remark than the public ones. We believe that in less than fifty years from the present time New York city will contain more superb private residences than any other city in the world.

Already there is a great deal done in that direction. Fifth avenue, Madison avenue, and tens of streets around and above Union Park, have their palatial houses of white or brown marble, adorned with rich porches, the windows of plate glass, verandahs and iron balconies, and conservatories of flowers.

In Broadway grand edifices have become so much a matter of course that what would ten years ago have caused the greatest admiration and comment, is now altogether passe. Some of the most magnificent stores in the world are now on Broadway—with still greater to come. With all these, among the elder buildings, only the Astor House, in its massive and simple elegance, stands yet unsurpassed as a specimen of exquisite design and perfect proportion. It is thoroughly modern in its uses and appropriateness to its purpose, but classic and severe as a Greek temple.

The New Post Office, (when it comes,) will doubtless be an edifice of note. The buildings going up on the block opposite the Park, towards Beekman and Nassau streets, will also have grandeur—the grandeur of Americanism, originality, and appropriateness to their intended use. These, after all, are ahead of any other effects and requirements.

An immense depot for the Third avenue Railroad is to be built on that avenue, at Sixty-Fifth street—to cost over two hundred thousand dollars. To our mind, such buildings, if well planned, have as much nobleness in their associations as any church or scholastic pile.

Iron and glass are going to enter more largely into the composition of buildings. So far, iron, used in large edifices, is a perfect success—for instance the huge store on the northeast corner of Broome street and Broadway—also several other down town stores.

The Savings Bank in Bleecker street, just east of Broadway, is Grecian, of the most ornamental and florid order. It is a wonderful and lovely edifice. But the surroundings, (the Greek always had reference to these,) are enough to spoil it—let alone the discordance in the idea of a Greek temple, (very likely of Venus) for a modern Savings Bank!

Such considerations as these make us laugh at the architecture of the New York Custom House,² with its white sides and its mighty fluted pillars. In the original some twenty three or twenty five hundred years ago, when Socrates wandered through the streets of Athens talking with the young men, and stopping in porches and by-ways to question the sophists and make them condemn themselves out of their own mouths—when Pericles with his orations thundered and lightened all Greece—when the naked athletes contended in their games, wrestling, running, or throwing the quoit—when the verses of Homer were recited where they grew and where they belonged—then and there stood that original, the great temple of the ideal goddess, the learned, brave and chaste Minerva. It was of immense extent, and was mainly a simple roof, supported by columns. There were performed the rites—in that city, and among that people, they and the building belonged. And to that, the U.S. government has gone back and brought it down (a miniature of it,) to modern America, in Wall street, amid these people, these years, for a place to settle our finances and tariffs. How amusing!

We must not conclude this article without an allusion to the Crystal Palace, an edifice certainly unsurpassed any where for beauty and all the other requisites of a perfect edifice.³ At present, few persons pay any attention to architecture in its higher phases, its philosophy, its reference to all the other things; few have any profound idea of beauty in a building. We suppose it must be for that reason that the N.Y. Crystal Palace is not universally confessed to be what it certainly is—an original, esthetic, perfectly proportioned, American edifice—one of the few that put modern times not beneath old times, but on an equality with the best of them.

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