The Francis C. Sessions House, Columbus, OH

The Francis C. Session House, Columbus, OH. 1840, alt. 1862

From: Columbus Illustrated

From: Illustrated History of Columbus

The Sessions house, built for a banker on E Town Street, certainly started life as a Greek Revival house, given its 1840 construction date. But it appears that it was transformed into a fine Italianate residence in an 1862 remodel. The house was torn down in 1924 to make room for the current Beaux Arts Columbus museum. The house was a symmetrical plan villa, with a projecting central bay with a shallow gable. While the central bay was decidedly flat, the side bays were articulated with elaborate brick work which formed a thick set of quoins at the corners and recessed frames for the central sections of each bay. Whether these were part of the original house is unknown, although it would be very atypical for a Greek Revival house to have such fripperies. On the first floor, the sides featured rectangular windows framed by delicate fringed porches (with almost invisible balustrades atop), perhaps of iron (that wisteria really makes it unclear), while above, the windows had small wooden awnings with a fringe. The central bay had a recessed entrance with, again, a porch with triple arches and a rather weird set of three arches in the central span. Above was an iron balcony with fancy urns at the corners in front of a wide arched window with a bracketed wooden awning forming a Palladian form. Above, the cornice has a strong resemblance to the Baldwin house which survives up the street, with elongated brackets the break into strong s curves. These enclosed a pair of windows with concave corners, another reminiscence of the Baldwin house. The whole was topped with an octagonal cupola, with pierced s curve brackets, paired windows (also seeming to have concave corners), and a lacy iron cresting. All the bells and whistles abounded, with a conservatory and a whole other cube built on back. A shame it didn't survive, but it was replaced by an exceptionally fine museum building.

The Stephen H. Farnam House, Oneida, NY

The Stephen Farnam House, Oneida, NY. 1862 Photo: Doug Kerr

Photo: Carol

The Stephen Farnam house is well documented and perhaps one of the most impressive homes on Oneida's Main Street. The builder (1862), Stephen Farnam was a hardware store owner, bank president, and axe manufacturer. Subsequent owners included a suffragette and a botanist. The house seems to currently be a Dark Shadows themed bed-and-breakfast called Collinwood Inn, a fine use for a house like this. It seems the alleged haunting of the house has helped it as a business. As an architectural specimen, though, the house doesn't need any ghosts to make it worth exploring. The house follows the irregular plan, one of the fancier designs, though unlike other examples, the tower juts forth to be almost flush with the left hand projecting pavilion, which has a very shallow roof slope. The house has brick walls and excellent Oneida woodwork. The windows are mostly rectangular, though it looks like they were all segmental arched once, with simple open triangular pediments and keystones with Eastlake incised carving. The simple paneled cornice features s scroll brackets.

It's the dominance of the shouldered, pointed arch that makes this house interesting, as if the builder fetishized that shape and fit in in to give the composition unity. A shouldered arch is an arch where the curve of the arch is interrupted by a vertical projection; in this case that projection is pointed. It's a fascinating shape since it combines curves and straight angles together. The porch has rectangular openings but features the shouldered arch running inside these openings with jigsaw cut-outs, similar to the porch down the street at the Shoecraft house. The same shape unifies the triple arched windows at the top of the tower and is repeated again in the base of the tower cornice. Commendable in this house as well is the retention of both the concave roofs on the porch, bay windows, and tower along with the delicate crestings. Hopefully the house will have a nice long life.

The Freeman Annabelle House, New Orleans, LA

The Freeman Annabelle House, New Orleans, LA. 1847

This home, at the opposite end of Esplanade (1014) is known as the Freeman Annabelle house, though little seems to be known about the original occupants. As I mentioned, this is a classic New Orleans Italianate/Greek Revival hybrid, and indeed is a basic vernacular type in the city. This type, which I'll call the Porch Facade type, consists of a typical side hall plan and has a two story Greek revival porch, usually with Corinthian or Ionic columns, a deep Greek Revival cornice with brackets, and Greek style window surrounds. This house is a good introduction to this type, featuring flat windows with eared, molded surrounds, a segmental arched door with pilasters, Corinthian double columned porches which cover both levels of the facade, and a tall Greek Revival entablature with pairs of long s and c scroll brackets interrupting runs of smaller brackets. The facade is plastered with brick painted the same color on the sides. An interesting feature on this house, as can be seen below, is the lacy rococo cresting on the left side that hangs down from the cornice forming a fringe on the roof and running around the large projecting bay with a second story ironwork porch. Incongruously, the ironwork on the front of the house is Gothic in form, showing the mixture of cast iron styles displayed on the same house. Often there will be classical, rococo, romantic (very vegetal), and gothic thrown together to form one eclectic composition. The house is now condos.

The James Bishop House, New Brunswick, NJ

The James Bishop House, New Brunswick, NJ. 1852 Photos: Wikimedia

Black and White photos: HABS

The James Bishop house is a uniquely eclectic Italianate home in New Brunswick, NJ, a city which has been robbed of most of its history because of a vast and poorly considered plan of urban renewal. Thus, the Bishop house is a lucky survivor thanks to Rutgers University, which uses it as classroom space currently. It was built in 1852 by architect Isaiah Rolfe for James Bishop, an important congressman from New Jersey,in a fascinating mixture of Italianate and Gothic Revival elements.The house is broadly an example of the side tower plan with a projecting pavilion and tower anchoring a central section (which is truncated here) although to the right there is a wing with a porch that terminates in an octagonal Gothic tower. The whole is stuccoed and finished in a very spare style typical of the 1850s.

Italianate elements of the design include Venetian windows on the first floor of the front of the house and a variety of paired tombstone windows on the upper floors. The triple arched Palladian window in the tower is also very Italianate. The tent roof on the tower is an uncommon but not unprecedented element. Here it is pierced by eyebrow dormer windows. The blind arches in the tower as well can be seen in other examples.

Gothic elements are limited mostly to the decoration. The toothed string-course moldings and the setback in the facade on the pavilion contribute to the castellated feeling the house aims for. The front door is Romanesque in style, with small columns surrounding it, a design found in Romanesque church portals. Particularly important is the function of crenelations. Not only does the octagonal tower have a crenelated parapet, but the brackets one might expect are expressed as a crenelated pattern in the facade. Even the simple porch with its octagonal Gothic columns is crenelated as are the bay windows. A final zany element is the chimneys, the three of which have different patterns and must have been copied from a published image of Medieval design.

The interiors, which have been mostly preserved, are extravagant. A few images seen below show an impressive divides staircase, a library with Italianate shelves and a bizarre inlaid floor, and expensive marble mantlepieces. Although Gothic did not frequently cross over with Italianate design, nonetheless the Bishop house is an important early example of the eclectic experimentation found in early Italianates.

The rear.

A Third Type of Indian Italianate

The Dr. P. W. Ellsworth House, Hartford, CT. 1850s?

Plan by Henry Austin for an unbuilt house.

This Indian Italianate I have depicted in the first image is the Dr. P. W. Ellsworth house that once stood on Main Street and Grove Street in Hartford, CT. Unfortunately, the house is poorly documented, and this is the only picture I could find of it. The house is in a unique style for this sub group. It has two bowed bays with four windows on each and follows the symmetrical plan. It's bowed bay style resembles some houses designed by Henry Austin on Orange Street and Chapel Street in New Haven. The house looks like it has stucco scored to look like stone or actual stone. The second floor windows on the sides have a curving balcony that runs along them with lacy ironwork and an exuberant fringe. the fringe is repeated above the unbracketed cornice in the cresting. The lack of molding around the windows is consistent with the Bristol house style. The crowning glory of the house is the two story porch. On the first stage there are candelabra columns, a trefoil ogee arch, and long sinuous brackets, all characteristics of a chhattri porch. The second stage is simpler, with plain candelabra columns and an iron balustrade. The whole is topped by a fantastic ogee dome with a tall finial. Above the central bay on the roof is a large stepped wooden piece for cresting.

The second image shows a plan by Henry Austin, kept at Yale University. This plan is utterly fantastic and crazy; it seems to have never been built. Perhaps it was just too much for New England. The plan shows a fully realized Indian facade. There are two projecting side bays with windows that have strong Bristol house like lambrequins and tracery. There are balconies on the second floor with equally complex windows. The bays are topped by very Indian looking projecting brackets and a wide eave. The central bay is a tour de force and seems to recall the entrance to the Taj Mahal. It is recessed behind the bays. There is a two story arch that creates a deep recess. The arch frame is paneled and topped by a huge cresting and small finials that resemble tiny minarets. The recess has paneling covering the wall surface (the play of volumes, panels, projections, and recesses is quite masterful) a circular window and a horseshoe arched window with a balcony. The door follows, paradoxically, the Greek Revival sidelight style, but the door and windows have lambrequins and tracery that mark it as distinctively Indian.

Both the Ellsworth house and the plan are bold, and they represent the taking of Indian Italianate to its logical conclusion of looking truly Indian, a feat that Eidlitz' Iranistan was able to achieve. The examples that survive are relatively tame by comparison. It is in these types that we can see Indian Italianate at its most exuberant and most out of control. It's not surprising that this house and plan found few imitators.

The Thomas-Jencks-Gladding House, Baltimore, MD

The Thomas-Jencks-Gladding House, Baltimore, MD. 1849-51

The impressive staircase. The dome is Tiffany. Photo: Meredith Kahn

It's fitting to end this look at Baltimore's Anglo-Italianate architecture with perhaps the city's most impressive house, the Thomas-Jencks-Gladding house at 1 Mount Vernon Place. One of the earliest houses constructed in the neighborhood, it anchors the area around the monument and provides, along with the Peabody Institute across the street, an impressive gateway from the monument to the downtown. The house was designed by Niernsee and Neilson, a firm we have encountered before, and was built in 1849-1851 for John Hanson Thomas, a politician. It was one of Rudolph Niernsee's very first designs. Later it was sold to the Jencks in 1892 who altered much of the interior and added a bay window on the east facade for the dining room. Despite these alterations, however, the house retains a great deal of mid-19th century design inside. Both the Thomases and the Jencks were part of Baltimore's high society, and the house served as an impressive showplace for the family to their notable list of guests. Abandoned in 1953 after the last of the Jencks died, the house was restored by Henry Gladding in 1962, an early example of preservation for a Victorian structure. Usually in the 1960s, people couldn't get rid of Victorian architecture fast enough. Perhaps the classicism of the design made Gladding want to preserve it. The house is currently called the Hackerman house and houses the Walter's Art Museum's Asian art collection.

The house is particularly noteworthy for its transitional blend of Greek Revival and Italianate elements. It follows the five bay plan and features on each side the recessed central bay common to other Baltimore five bay homes. The east side is only three bays wide, making it appear more like a symmetrical plan house. The house is faced with brick, which is probably correctly painted white to resemble stucco. Some of the elements could go either way stylistically, like the double Corinthian columned portico. The composition of the door with its transom and sidelights separated by pilasters is definitely Greek Revivial in form. So are the cast iron palmettes above the cornice. The house is Italianate in its elaborate hood moldings and bracketed cornice. Starting from the ground floor, the house sits on a rusticated stone basement. The windows are very tall and are connected in pairs by cast iron balconies. The hood moldings on these and the second floor windows are bracketed with a small frieze and dentils above. The moldings lack a strong cornice, which is replaced by Greek style vegetal carving. A strong, simple cornice separates the first and second floors in a highly Renaissance fashion we have seen before in Baltimore.

The second and third floors are not separated and feature on the second floor tallish windows with their signature hood moldings and small third floor windows directly under the cornice's architrave. The second floor windows have small iron grilles inset into the frame. The cornice features an architrave and alternating brackets and panels in the frieze, making it a panel cornice. The central bay is slightly different. Besides the presence of the Greek Revival door, the windows on the upper floors are tripartite to emphasize the central bay's greater width. The portico is also notable as one ascends it from the sides rather than directly from the front, a feature, which as I suggested before, lends the house a certain grandiose quality. The following images from HABS show some of the exterior details. You should definitely check out this site where the author exhaustively posted dozens of pictures of the house's mid-19th century interior architectural details.

This view shows the house with shutters, which may have been the original condition of the windows.

Thus, for now, we end this exploration of Baltimore's Anglo-Italianate architecture. The city is full of examples, some of which I will post later, but these give you a good idea of the city's characteristics. The adherence to English and Renaissance models so prominent in Baltimore's Italianate is not as staid as it sounds. The second floor bay windows, the play with the cornice, the recessed facades, all constitute the city's own interpretation of English design. Although the buildings have the elegant air of London terraces, the uniqueness of designs and the avoidance of monotony make these examples truly American and a unique collection of Italianate designs.