Gifted and lovely, Ms. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.
If one has already read my earlier post, Harlem: Lost, Found and Nowhere, two things ought to be clear. To mark Black History Month, I'm participating in a book-signing and tea with my friend Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts at the elegant Harlem Flo boutique on Frederick Douglass Boulevard at 122nd Street. It's on Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at half past 4 o'clock. We urge all with an interest in Harlem history to join us for what promises to be a most wonderful occasion.
Equally important though, much of what I wrote last week about houses, churches and commercial buildings, was meant to place a stately Harlem house, built in 1890 and vacant for four years, in an historical, architectural and geographical context---the vanished milieu of the man who built it, industrialist John Dwight.
Darryl Pinckney, who wrote High Cotton.
No one I knew in my small circle of friends was surprised at the flurry of attention greeting him when Darryl Pinckney wrote High Cotton. His polished novel is all about someone, not unlike himself, and we imagined, not unlike ourselves either.
Esteemed British poet, James Fenton.
Growing up in Indianapolis, Indiana, home of the Walker Building and Factory, he was the fourth generation of his family to be college-educated. Darryl and I met because he attended and taught at Columbia University. From 1987 to 1989 I was studying historic preservation there. An articulate black artist, with a background of relative privilege, for some, young Mr. Pinckney’s African American authenticity was suspect. Indeed, in a world comfortably used to the notion of a pathology of black poverty and self-sustained ignorance, he seemed more improbable even than the Cosby Show.
We knew that he was real enough. Cerebral, terribly attractive, quietly arrayed, for several of us he was our own ‘Richard Corey’. But he was not that glittering figure so much as someone to be envied, with any of us wishing 'we were in his place'. Instead, Darryl Pinckney was a gentleman whom we admired, someone we fantasized would be a fitting sort of partner with whom to go through life.
Too soon he moved away to Berlin. Knowing him more intimately one might have been saddened. Yet no one I knew knew him well enough to have more than the usual, automatic and amorphous regret over what might have been. In those days of our youth, even as so many of us rapidly sickened to die, there seemed always to be plenty of new people to meet, to wonder at and long over. Pitiably, the most beautiful men we knew then are now dead. But the greatest intellect among them is not; Darryl Pinckney simply moved away.
He has returned and lives in Harlem, too. Still well spoken and off-handedly elegant, newly befriended Darryl, one finds, is rather like his celebrated novel. He is filled with fine qualities, subtlety and charm which earlier, unperceiving, I overlooked with careless ease. Complementing Darryl’s refined sensibility is James Fenton, an esteemed British poet and writer. Darryl once said that as a youngster he’d dreamed of England, history and beckoning happiness. It seems his dream came true. James has been Darryl's partner since 1989.
'Long Leys Farm'
That was also when Mr. Fenton undertook his greatest non-literary work of art, the quintessential English country house. In the manner of Gertrude Jekyll's lush 'Munstead Wood', 'Long Leys Farm' politely masquerades as a 'modest' cottage. Rather like Miss Jekyll too, Fenton has also made a complex and wonderland-like garden. It is neither quintessential, nor exemplary. It is a series of contrasted, connected, semi-enclosed spaces, where the visitor, with each successive step, is treated to an ever-changing panorama of newly-evolving experiences of color, texture, scent and surroundings. It is amazing! Well-rooted in a proud tradition, James' garden nonetheless is extraordinary enough to make anyone's pulse flutter.
James Fenton's 'Munstead Wood'-like garden at 'Long Leys Farm'.
One should like to imagine continued wedded bliss as more than enough to compensate for the loss of such a realm of enchantment. Particularly those of us who have little experience of such matters, we would like to believe that love endures in any environment. Fortunately this is not at issue. For if Fenton and Pinckney, with the sale of 'Long Leys', have lost paradise temporarily, acquiring and restoring Harlem's most superb surviving available house, where surrounded by art, flowers, antiques and books they will entertain friends by the fireside with gracious leisure, reviving and heightening the tradition of local artistic salons, their paradise surely will soon be regained.
John Dwight, Esquire's Harlem townhouse, so unlike its conventional neighbors.
A decorous structure with limited concentrations of elaborate ornament, the house James and Darryl purchased on West 123rd Street overlooks picturesque Mount Morris Park. In a cost-free nod to Harlem's historic black community in 1973 it was renamed Marcus Garvey Park. Completed in 1890, stylistically, theirs is a curiously confounding house. After the mid-1870’s, designers in the United States began to explore and reassess Early American examples of neo-Classical architecture. Also looking favorably on how freely their British colleagues mixed together Queen Anne, Georgian and both Northern and Italian Renaissance-derived design, the most innovative practitioners here followed suite. Only by way of adding an extra flourish of national pride and erudition, in most instances, as with Darryl's and James’ house, having adopted some Georgian or Federal precedent, more ornate and decorative Renaissance embellishments were liable to be introduced.
Boston's number 32 Hereford Street, was completed in 1884, according to plans by McKim, Mead & White for John Andrew. It is just one of a group of grand houses that influenced the design of Harlem's
Dwight-Fenton-Pinckney House.
McKim, Mead & White's dwelling for the Cochrane Family, was built at 257 Commonwealth Avenue in 1886.
John Dwights house at number 1 West 123rd Street, overlooking Mount Morris Park was built in 1890 and designed by Frank H. Smith.
In Boston, Newport, New York and beyond, McKim, Mead & White, Little & Browne and Ogden Codman were at the forefront of this amalgamated style. It is unknown why or how John Dwight, who built James' and Darryl's house, a founder of Church & Dwight Co., the makers of Arm & Hammer bicarbonate of soda, selected his architect.
1880: Frank Hill Smith.
Frank Hill Smith who trained in Boston, also studied at the Lowell Institute. As part of his early education he "drew from the antique at the Athenaeum." He traveled in Europe in the 1860s, studying at the atelier Suisse, in Paris with Léon Bonnat and other eminent French painters. Again in Boston by the 1870's, Smith formed a coterie of notable new painters including Thomas Robinson and William Morris Hunt. Inseparable, they went so far as to inaugurate the triumvirate club, to 'sass one another's pictures,' as Hunt termed it.
1871
1875
1879
Walt Whitman.
Smith sketched Walt Whitman in 1881, for whom he designed an unbuilt cottage. But I confess, I've yet to discover just when he went from painting to practicing architecture. Smith made a specialty of interior and decorative design. Perhaps, like Louis Comfort Tiffany or John La Farge, Smith thought of himself as an artist capable of multiple disciplines?
Highly proficient, it is well he should have remained uncommitted to a single division of the arts. In 1880 he was among the group engaged to decorate New York's new Union League Club. Had this high point of Aesthetic Movement tastes survived, doubtlessly it would be ranked today alongside the widely admired Seventh Regiment Armory. At the Union League Smith worked in collaboration with John La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Will H. Low.
Prestigious commissions hardly prevented Smith from lending his hand to lesser tasks. Around 1894 he painted an "elegant drop curtain" for the Fairhaven Town Hall auditorium in Massachusetts. Smith also painted ceiling frescoes in the Representatives Hall in the Massachusetts State House depicting patriots Samuel Adams, and John Hancock.
Designing John Dwight's city residence, Frank Hill Smith might have been expected to have considered several nearby early landmarks as inspiration. Oddly enough, neither Manhattan's oldest extant house, the singular and imposing Morris-Jumel Mansion, completed in 1765, nor John Mc Comb, Jr's, 'Grange', built for Alexander Hamilton in 1802, seems to have ever served as a model for later area houses. Other, less well known old dwellings still standing in the 1880's, such as the Watt house, might just as easily to have moved Smith with their nostalgic beauty too. Instead, the sources of his hybridized design, lay in Boston.
Abstractly of course, Boston's speculative vernacular, Federal and Greek Revival style houses, built in the 1820's and 30's around the Common and on Beacon Hill, supplied the Dwight house's prototype. Brick, with stone trimming and bowed bays, their basic similarity is obvious. But one might search every square and alley of old Boston without finding replicated ironwork and carved ornament as exquisite as that designed by Smith. Nor would any genuine 18th or early 19th Century house, have so deliberately exhibited Smith's 'artistic' asymmetry. No. To discover the buildings that motivated the Dwight house design, it is necessary to examine the work of Smith's better-remembered contemporaries. To do this, in New York, one must look downtown and in Smith's hometown, to search the Back Bay.
The lost Gibson Fahnestock house doorway, in New York.
On Hereford Street, number 32, completed in 1884 according to plans by McKim, Mead & White for John Andrew, is a typical Gilded Age amalgam of Renaissance and Federal Classicism. Each corner of the earlier house has a swelled bow, that was later reflected by the rounded tower-like bow of John Dwight's more demure townhouse. By way of distinction, Smith's bow is not at the corner. Ornate iron window grills also find an answer in Harlem. The Boston building's entrance is distinguished by a Palladian window, surmounted by a cast iron balcony salvaged from the Tuileries Palace. Balconies at the Dwight house are more in line with those gracing parlor floor windows at the Andrew residence.
The entry at McKim, Mead & White's dwelling for the Cochrane Family.
McKim, Mead & White's dwelling for the Cochrane Family, built at 257 Commonwealth Avenue in 1886, again combines Renaissance and Federal design and employs rich color contrast too, with very Victorian freedom. Its most significant contribution to Smith's Dwight house however, has to be regarded as the source for the Dwight House's entrance pediment, ultimately derived from Diocletianʼs Palace at Split, but widely adopted for Renaissance buildings as well.
The Cochrane's front door with a colored marble pediment and iron scroll-filled oculous, bears a strong resemblance to the Dwight house entrance.
Consulting such structures as the Scuola di San Marco in Venice, McKim, Mead & White also employed this distinctive feature on serveral of their New York commisions. Most notably, segmental pediments with anthemion finials and coffered soffits occur on the 1888 Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, and at their midtown Gibson Fahnestock house, from 1889.
McKim, Mead & White's side entrance into the Judson Memorial Church.
Cast bronze Ionic capitals.
A laurel wreath tied with furling ribbon, surrounds the oculus that lights the foyer.
The tympanum is inlayed with polychromed marble.
The carving is exceptional!
Boston's John Andrew house at number 32 Hereford Street, from 1884 is by McKim, Mead & White, was one forerunner of the Dwight house. The balcony above the entrance came from the Tuileries Palace.
The Tuileries balcony.
Scrolled Balconies at the Dwight house are less elaborate than those at the Andrew house in Boston.
Andrew house window grill.
There is nothing whatever that is run-of-the-mill in respect to the window grills and fence at the Dwight House. Both are second to none.
Harlem's very first neo-Renaissance style house, the true glories of the John Dwight residence, merely alluded to on the exterior, are its varied spaces, found within, which were exquisetly articulated and adorned with refinement...To be continued.
Thank you for sharing what you've found out about this fantastic mansion. I first stumbled upon the picture you show in a reprint of 'King's New York'. A Xeroxed copy of that page has become a much used bookmark. With your posts, I now have some great information on an admired house that couldn’t find out much about. Again, much thanks.
Posted by: Steve Hachey | 02/08/2012 at 10:25 AM
great! I hope you've seen part three, with one more to come...
Posted by: Michael Henry Adams, Style and Taste! | 02/08/2012 at 01:19 PM