Читать книгу Antiquity in Gotham - Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis - Страница 21

While Greek mania was sweeping across the municipalities of early nineteenth-century America, the use of classical forms for judicial architecture was not a foregone conclusion. Located on the site of the now landfilled Collect Pond, a massive Egyptian temple-like building, which seemed more appropriate on the banks of the Nile than those of the Hudson, served as New York’s Halls of Justice and Detention, better known to history as the Tombs. At the start of the nineteenth century, New York City’s courts lacked a suitable meeting place, and the city’s prisons, spread across several buildings in lower Manhattan, were considered an abomination by contemporaries. As early as 1824, the New York State Legislature authorized the creation of a new prison, but it was not until 1834 that Mayor C. W. Laurence recommended the construction of a modern prison to replace the decaying buildings in his annual report to the Common Council.⁵⁸ A committee, formed by the Board of Assistant Aldermen, studied the matter and presented its findings to the mayor on November 24, 1834. The report advocated the creation of a centralized prison and state-of-the-art policing facility modeled on the Pennsylvania or Philadelphia System,⁵⁹ with a detention house, courts, and other necessary spaces.⁶⁰

The committee, formed to select the building’s design and plan,⁶¹ took its assignment seriously and sought out expert opinions, including that of Samuel Wood, the warden of the Eastern Penitentiary (1829). Wood strongly praised the Philadelphia-based, English-born architect John Haviland, who had designed the Gothic-style Eastern Penitentiary, for his deep knowledge of prison architecture and his ability to deliver a good plan.⁶² Because of his work on this prison and the Egyptian-style New Jersey State Penitentiary (1833–1836) at Trenton, John Haviland was regarded as one of America’s premier architects for the construction of penitentiaries.

Haviland was invited to New York to advise the committee on the requirements of the proposed prison building. In January 1835, members of the committee traveled to Trenton and Philadelphia to study his buildings. The committee was thoroughly impressed by Haviland’s practical design of the New Jersey State Penitentiary, whose design allowed the warden to corral and return inmates to their single cells quickly. The cells of the New Jersey State Prison sat behind an architectural block composed of offices. This architectural block was masked by a tetrastyle Egyptian-style portico set back between two tall Egyptian-style pylons, which gave the building an imposing street presence, as befit such a structure.⁶³ The reforming humanitarians and prison designers of the 1830s viewed Egyptian architecture as having a moral appeal and an ability to embody their ideals.⁶⁴ Egyptian structures were also considered to have the quality of endurance and to express hope for both this life and the next.⁶⁵ Furthermore, the committee believed that the Egyptian façade of the Trenton prison was impressive and suitable because the architecture was both economical and serious.⁶⁶

As early as 1830, Haviland mused that he should publish a journal with designs for jails, court houses, banks, and other buildings.⁶⁷ He proposed using Egyptian columns and architectural details from the Description of Egypt, of which he owned a copy, for these buildings,⁶⁸ indicating that the various temples and architectural ruins in this publication were the source for the Egyptian architecture and motifs he employed. Egyptian architecture was not widely used for prison architecture in European countries. Therefore, Americans, as the scholar Richard Carrott rightly notes, must have seen Egyptian architecture as “symboliz[ing] … values beyond mere man-manipulated ones—those of incorruptible righteousness of law and order.”⁶⁹ This usage reflects a distinctly American reception of ancient forms.

A design competition was held in 1835. Of twenty-five architects who submitted designs, five architects were awarded premiums on the basis of the percentage of their winning entries that would be included in the final design.⁷⁰ Haviland received $200, Alexander Jackson Davis and Charles Friedrich Reichardt each received $100, and Louis Dwight and Calvin Pollard each received $50.⁷¹ Published on April 20, 1835, Document 60 announced the winners and clearly articulated the committee’s opinions of the chosen style, noting:

The style of architecture … is the Egyptian, and the design is from one of the most approved examples contained in Napoleon’s Egypt. It combines great beauty with simplicity and economy, and its massive proportions and general characteristics render it peculiarly appropriate and fit to the objects and intended uses of the establishment.⁷²

The committee was particularly impressed with the “beautiful Egyptian design, with its magnificent portico by Mr. John Haviland of Philadelphia.”⁷³ Haviland was hired to combine the designs, handpicking the best features of each submission into a masterful whole that was more than the sum of its parts. Several of Alexander Jackson Davis’s surviving drawings show that his design fused Greek and Egyptian architecture.⁷⁴ While Haviland presumably adopted elements from the other four entries as per his remit, the final design must have reflected his overall vision (Figure 25).⁷⁵

Work probably began in 1835, and the building (c. 200 × 253 feet) was constructed out of Hallowell granite and—appropriately and economically—some of the stone from the old colonial-era Bridewell prison.⁷⁶ It was completed in May 1838, and some modifications were made in 1885. It served as a one-stop policing center and prison facility; it included a sessions court, grand jury rooms, district attorney’s offices, a house of detention, and debtors’ quarters. It was organized around a horizontal H-plan, with its main façade along Centre Street; the cell block was located at the rear, along Elm Street, and the sessions court was in the middle, between two courtyards.⁷⁷ This plan allowed for natural light and aided the circulation of air. It also provided a suitable organization for a complex building, which needed offices and holding cells to be arranged thoughtfully and precisely.

FIGURE 25. The Tombs, Manhattan, 1860. This lithograph inaccurately depicts the portico with five columns.

Source: Author’s collection.

For the Centre Street façade, Haviland crafted disparate Egyptian elements into a unified, original whole. The central feature of the Centre Street façade was a monumental portico supported by four Egyptian-style columns with large capitals of carved papyrus leaves. The shafts of the columns resemble bundled papyrus reeds, and triangular leaves were carved on the lower quarter of each column. A winged solar disc, an obvious Egyptian symbol, was located over the portico and each window. Above alternating triglyphs and metopes, a cavetto cornice, a distinctly Egyptian architectural element, ran along the building’s roof line. At each end of the building facing the side streets were two small projecting Egyptianizing pavilions.

In his 1837 guidebook to New York, John Disturnell notes that the Tombs’ floors were decorated in a “mosaic of an Egyptian character.”⁷⁸ The columns in the entrance hall also bore “the character or [sic] an order taken from the colonnade of the temple of Medynet Abou,” or Medinet Habu, an archaeological site in Egypt famous for its Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III.⁷⁹ He also notes that “Egyptian caviatides [sic] decorated the antes opposite these columns, which were highly spoken of by the French artists in Napoleon’s great work on Egypt.”⁸⁰

Although the design is a pastiche of Egyptian forms unconnected to a specific structure, the Halls of Justice soon earned the epithet of “The Tombs,” which brought a seriousness to the place and reflected the somber fate of those jailed within and, in theory, the swift and fair nature of the justice to be delivered. By the late nineteenth century, urban legend held that the nickname and form of the Tombs derived from the depiction of an ancient tomb in “Stevens’ Travels.” However, John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petraea, and the Holy Land was not published until 1837, and the designs for the complex had been submitted by 1835,⁸¹ making the chronology untenable. The origin of the nickname remains a mystery.

Like the Murray Hill reservoir, critics and the public liked the new complex. The New York Evening Post reported on April 1, 1837, that the Halls of Justice

promises to be one of the handsomest of our public buildings. It is in the Egyptian style, a style well suited, by its massiveness, severity, and appearance of prodigious strength, to edifices of this kind. The thick walls used in that description of architecture, their pyramidal inclination, and the breadth and solidity of the ornament make the building appear as if destined to resist the tide and earthquakes, and the efforts of human strength.⁸²

In 1852, it was still considered by the Daily National Intelligencer to be “not only an honor to the city and the American nation, but a perfectly unique specimen of its style.”⁸³

Despite the almost unanimous praise for the stylish Egyptian architecture, the building had problems almost immediately. Because of the Tombs’ location on the old Collect Pond, the foundation was unstable, and four-inch cracks appeared shortly after construction finished. There was also a pervading dampness, and sewage routinely backed up through the drains.⁸⁴ It was soon woefully overcrowded.⁸⁵ In 1875, Pomeroy’s Democrat proclaimed, “The Tombs is not a fit place in which to incarcerate the vilest wretch that lives.”⁸⁶

Despite the universal agreement that the Tombs was no longer fit for purpose, the decision to demolish the structure met some resistance. The New-York Tribune noted that “many people think [the Tombs] ought to be preserved for the city as a relive [sic], because it is regarded as the finest example of Egyptian architecture in this country.”⁸⁷ The Oregonian noted in 1897, “artists, architects and travelers have been most favorably impressed with the beauty of this building, sombre and grim as it is.”⁸⁸ The façade in particular was acknowledged as architecturally significant. While the Tombs reflected a historically important moment in the United States’ architectural history, this did not prevent its demolition, which began in 1897.

The Egyptian façade was a veneer, but a symbolically important and well-appointed one that mattered. A twentieth-century criticism often directed toward many buildings built in historical and classical revival styles was that the façade of a building did not articulate its function. This concern did not bother architects such as Haviland or those who commissioned the Halls of Justice. For them, the architecture’s symbolism was as important as its functionality. The Tombs reflected moral imperatives, prison reform, and New York City’s arrival as a major city with a functioning legal system.

Although the Tombs was in operation until 1897, Egyptian forms soon stopped being used for architecture associated with any aspect of the legal system. In New York City, the classical reigned supreme as early as 1860. The over-budget Tweed Courthouse (1861–1881) had a classical façade,⁸⁹ as did the Appellate Court (1900), just east of Madison Square Park.⁹⁰ Richmond County Courthouse (1913–1919), on Staten Island, used both classical and Renaissance architecture (Figure 26),⁹¹ which was typical of Neo-Antique architecture. This courthouse replaced the 1837 third county courthouse, which was built in a Greek Revival style.⁹²

Conclusions

Gulian Verplanck would have been delighted had he walked the streets of New York just a few decades after his exhortation to the genius of architecture to visit New York City. She had arrived and duly inspired architects, mayors, and aldermen to construct buildings directly modeled on those of antiquity—but not filtered through European interpretations, as the erection of the US Custom House and the Tombs affirmed. Strict archaeological accuracy was never the aim of the architects who employed Greek, Roman, or Egyptian forms; rather, it was the creation of imposing, grand, and functional buildings whose designs were informed by archaeology and archaeological publications. These buildings were proof that New York was a major metropolis and a peer of any leading European city. The framework of the Neo-Antique demonstrates that antiquity offered multiple models, not only democratic Greece and then imperial Rome. Egypt was also important, but it had a more focused remit, being used for structures that were technologically advanced, somber, and authoritative, like the Tombs, or, as we will see in Chapter 7, that had funerary associations. Egyptianizing buildings were never as popular as classical forms, perhaps because Egypt had non-Christian and non-Western associations and because Egyptian architectural forms were more difficult to modify.⁹³ The Founding Fathers and the American education system at this moment in time also favored the historical primacy of the classics,⁹⁴ and so classical architecture held a special place. At the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, architects combined Grecian and, increasingly, Roman forms to make original, American structures, such as the Manhattan Municipal Building, reflecting how potent these forms could be. The Beaux-Arts tradition, which often combined Roman and Renaissance forms, demonstrated that European architecture would be an important factor for American architecture and its interpretation of ancient, especially Roman, forms. By the time Foley Square was constructed, the temple façade with symbolic sculpture had become the architectural form and norm for courts in the United States;⁹⁵ this specific appropriation would culminate in the Neo-Antique architecture of the United States Supreme Court (1935). If public architecture set the tone for New York City’s built environment, and since that tone was antique and largely classical, then it is not surprising that the buildings that housed the city’s economic drivers—the banks, warehouses, exchanges, and, of course, skyscrapers—would also look to ancient architecture to declare and emphasize the importance of trade and commerce to New York City, the topic of Chapter 3.

FIGURE 26. Richmond County Courthouse, Staten Island, 2010.

Source: Jim Henderson (CC0 1.0).