The Brewster-Burke House, Rochester, NY and the William H. Glenny House, Buffalo, NY

The Brewster-Burke House, Rochester, NY. 1849 Photo: Bill Badzo

Photo: Wikimedia

These two houses in upstate New York, miles away from Henry Austin and New Haven, are shockingly similar to the Willis Bristol house and are examples of the Indian Italianate that Austin introduced. In the case of the first house pictured, the Brewster-Burke house in Rochester, the architect is thought to be Merwin Austin, the brother of Henry Austin. Thus, family connections allowed Indian Italianate to spread to upstate New York to Rochester, a city with many ties to Connecticut. It is likely that Merwin saw what Henry was doing with the Bristol house and decided to emulate the design for Henry R. Brewster, a real estate speculator, banker, and grocer, in 1849, four years after the Bristol house was built. It was constructed in the Corn Hill neighborhood in Rochester, an affluent district which, although somewhat damaged by time, is one of the earliest success stories in preservation history. The second house, the William H. Glenny house I am less sure about. The image comes from A Picture Book of Earlier Buffalo (1912) but not much more is said about the house. Given it's proximity to Rochester, it is possible that Merwin Austin or perhaps a follower might have copied the design of the Brewster or Willis house likely around the same time in the early 1850s. Glenny was a prominent merchant. 

Both houses are much alike. They are both symmetrical plan houses that have a very similar massing finished with scored stucco. The cornices have paired brackets but no entablature, as in the Bristol house. They each borrow different things from the Bristol house's design and add their own elements. The Brewster-Burke house has a chhattri porch with a scalloped ogee arch and quatrefoils cut out in the spandrels. The brackets are oversized and are an s and c scroll shape with interesting spirals cut out. Candelabra columns are also included, but these are far more angular and have deep fluting that make them look like grass bundles. The windows have lintels with simple triangles. A monitor caps the roof and a long wing to the side has a porch that mimics the central porch. The house ends in a structure with three pointed Gothic arches, that served as a summer kitchen and carriage house according to the plans, demonstrating the stylistic link some theorists of the period found between Indian and Gothic architecture. Throughout the house has ironwork balconies on the windows, while the main porch has a fantastic wooden balcony with exotic finials on the posts. The side seems to have had a porch that was as fantastic as the main porch with carved ornament, but this has disappeared along with an exceptional fence, pictured below from HABS. The house was threatened many times with demolition but has been saved mostly intact, despite some losses. 

The Glenny house in Buffalo has been demolished, though I do not know when. Unfortunately, the porch in the image is completely obscured by foliage, but I imagine it is a chhattri porch similar to the other examples of this type that looks like it might have a goofy tent roof. The house appears to be stucco and have a monitor. What this house does that the Brewster-Burke house does not is emulate the exterior lambrequins and tracery of the Bristol house, a quirky but lovely quality. It seems much less expansive than the Brewster-Burke house, lacking side porches and additions. Both these houses are great examples of the westward diffusion of architectural styles from the eastern US and they represent fascinating examples of Indian Italianate. The following pictures from various sources illustrate the Brewster-Burke house, which remains a National Register landmark.

The back of the Brewster-Burke house. Photo: Wikimedia

Photo: Bill Badzo

The following photos are selected from HABS which has many more images.

Henry Austin and the Indian Italianate: The Willis Bristol House, New Haven, CT

The Willis Bristol House, New Haven, CT. 1845

This week we will be looking at one of my favorite sub-genres of Italianate, the Indian Italianate! It's just plain goofy in concept, but it truly embodies all that is great in Victorian architecture: experimentation, curiosity, and the love of the strange and exotic.

As I said at the beginning, Italianate architecture can take a variety of styles of ornament. One of the strangest of these styles is Indian ornament, an odd little design type which, though never widespread or popular, produced some fascinating buildings. The architect who seems responsible for merging Indian and Italianate was Henry Austin, New Haven's premier 19th century architect. In a monograph of his work Henry Austin: In Every Variety of Architectural Style (39), it is argued that he was influenced by an illustration of capitals at Ellora in India published by Henry Repton in Designs for the Pavilion at Brighton (1808) and through this worked picked up a fascination with Indian architecture that was to influence his designs. John Foulston's work as well in England and his book The Public Buildings Erected in the West of England included some Indian designs and drawings of Indian columns. The Brighton Pavilion, pictured below, was designed by John Nash between 1815 and 1822. The design, which goes to the extreme of Victorian exuberance and exoticism, was heavily criticized in its day as being frivolous and carnivalesque.

Photo: Wikimedia

In Victorian architectural theory, "non-historical", by which they meant non-Western, styles were not suitable like Gothic, Classical, and Renaissance design for use in serious buildings. Instead, they were appropriate for kiosks, garden structures, bandstands, and other 'frivolous' or 'holiday' uses. Moorish design, also a non-Western style, was employed by Jews in the hunt for a non-Christian, non-Pagan, style for religious buildings. Indian buildings and eastern scenes appeared on the period's decorative arts, such as transferware plates manufactured in England. Indian was thus a marginalized style with no serious associations for the Victorian mind, used on minor ornaments and exotic religious buildings. Austin in designing homes on main streets in New Haven, a rather puritan city, was going out on quite the limb, theory-wise. At the same time as the Bristol house was being designed, Leopold Eidlitz, an architect with Jewish connections, was designing in Bridgeport, CT a house named 'Iranistan' for P. T. Barnum in 1848, pictured below.

Iranistan was more straightforwardly Indian than Austin's designs which retained more Italianate features. It figures that to the Victorian mind an outrageous and eccentric figure like Barnum would choose such a strange and silly style for his home. Austin's work was not a carnival stage like Barnum's house, which was admired much in its day; rather he tried to expand the average upper-class New Englander's taste to conceive of Indian design as appropriate to their own homes. Perhaps Austin argued what some contemporaries thought that Indian and Persian architecture was the origin of the 'serious' Gothic style. Indeed, pointed arches did characterize Moorish architecture and some believed it had been transferred to the west through Asian sources.

The earliest of Austin's designs in this style is the Willis Bristol house, built in 1845, which has all the hallmarks of the design. The house is on Chapel Street near Wooster Square in New Haven, a development area where Austin designed a slew of homes and was built for a bank president and shoe manufacturer. The house itself is a symmetrical plan villa with a stuccoed exterior and wooden details. Italianate features include the wide eaves and brackets and the overall design and massing. The treatments of particular elements, however, are all Indian. Characteristics of this ornament style as seen in this house are:

• So called 'candelabra columns'. As seen on the Bristol house porch, these columns are based on Indian precedents. They include vegetal elements in a series of thick, bulbous protrusions at the base, a slender central element, and a large stylized capital. These are the most long lasting element of Austin's design and these columns often appear on Italianate houses in Connecticut without other Indian features.
• A noticeable porch with a round or ogee arch including foils or semi-circular cut outs around the arch (this is called a multifoil arch or scalloped arch). The porches often include large, oversized brackets and sometimes they are especially large on the house. These porches might have been inspired by the Indian chhattri, an open domed pavilion, so I follow O'Gormann in calling them chhattri porches.
• Fringes as a decorative element. In the Bristol house you can see it on the porch balustrade. In other houses it appears near the cornice. Sometimes the fringe has balls at the end of each drop.
• Exterior lambrequins. These are large cut out pieces of wood applied to a rectangular window to alter its shape. In Indian ornament, these often have a scalloped ogee arch, as you can see on the Bristol house.
• Horseshoe arches. You can see these on the door which has cut glass panels. It is an arch that has projecting sections on the sides. 
• Arabesques. Arabesques are stylized geometric patterns based on Islamic art which can be seen on the porch spandrels. 

These are the basic elements of the design. Most Indian Italianates do not include all of them. The most popular elements were the candelabra columns, which can be found throughout Connecticut, and the scalloped arches and porch design, which are also sometimes found. The Willis Bristol house includes every bell and whistle you could want on your Indian Italianate, and remains the cornerstone of this design sub-group. The ironwork, the beautiful tracery in the windows, the cut glass on the windows, and the oriels on the sides are all notable features. The house has a small monitor on the roof, which can be seen in the original designs. The fringe on the top of the cornice seems to have been lost. The following pictures show some of the details, interiors, and designs; it is one of the best documented houses I have seen.

Interiors from HABS:

Plans from Yale University:

The Silas M. Clark House, Indiana, PA

The Silas M. Clark House, Indiana, PA. 1868-70 Photo: Wikimedia

This is almost a textbook irregular plan house from the 1860s. The Silas M. Clark house in Indiana, PA, a town of many historic homes, was built between 1868 and 1870. Clark was a teacher, lawyer, and politician whose home was given to the public by his son in 1918 to be a soldiers' memorial hall. It currently serves as a memorial hall. This house has a refreshing exuberance to it. There is the elaborate detailing expected of a house in this period. There are hood moldings over every window, a fancy feature to the house. The thick moldings look like cast iron, a feature of the period, and have leafy brackets and keystones. Their presence over the round windows is particularly striking. The windows themselves vary between round headed and segmental arched; their disposition on the facade is exactly as one would expect. The bay window duplicates the elaboration of the hood moldings, and the porch has trefoil flat topped arches with panels in the spandrels. The door has a small bracketed hood over it rather than a porch; there are carvings in the spandrels around the door. It seems to me that the house is missing some balustrades, probably over the door and the bay window. The cornice is of the paneled type. I really like how the cornice works with long brackets, smaller dentil like brackets, and panels. The facade is further enlivened with quoins in the brickwork, which give some facade texture without being too apparent. The tower is the crowning piece, with triple arched windows that unusually have hood moldings over them. The pediments on the tower cornice are another very fancy feature. The whole is topped by a finial that has been restored, since it was destroyed in the 1920s. This house is one in which every piece works harmoniously, ever part jibes together stylistically, and nothing is overpowered or out of place.

Photo: Edward

Photo: Edward

The Francis Sellers House, Pittsburgh, PA

The Francis Sellers House, Pittsburgh, PA. 1858 Photo: Wikimedia

Side facade. Photo: sportsedit15224

The Francis Sellers house was once on an impressive 10 acre estate in the Shadyside historic neighborhood. Built in 1858, as Pittsburgh's Landmark Architecture says "It shows the casual attitude to stylistic purity that the Victorians had." (404) The house follows a modified form of the irregular plan, in which there is no tower and the apart from the projecting section, the whole flush facade is slightly recessed. The house has some Gothic detailing with a cornice with odd chevrons coming from the edges; the large dormer and the steeper roof pitch are also characteristic of Gothic. Originally there were Gothic Revival bargeboards on the gables. The house's windows and porches, however, are Italianate. All the windows are round headed, some of which are double. One the front, the area where the tower would occur is noted by tombstone windows. I have often noticed that when a tower is lacking on an irregular plan, a distinctive window usually marks the spot. The porch is surprisingly enclosed, with pilasters with pierced Gothic designs and segmental arched closed boards between the pilasters.

The side of the house is of particular interest to me, shown in the second image. On this side the composition starts splintering with different elements almost glued at random on the facade. An oriel window with Gothic tracery in the round windows is set over double tombstone windows that open onto a bracketed balcony. A long port cochere that matches the main porch has an Italianate classical box window above it, with three arched windows and a pediment. The windows are filled with Aesthetic Movement stained glass, added in the 1880s. The back of the house has a variant porch which has a steamboat Gothic spiderweb design. Although I like every one of the elements individually, especially the box window, I think the design is a little strange; literally every window and door on this side projects in some way from the facade. I'm sure that there is a staircase in this area because of the stained glass and the varying height in the second story windows, and staircases always make a mess of the facade. I feel that a little discretion in the deployment of such eye catching elements might have improved the design. Still it is an interesting early house that is a crucible of styles.

Two Faces: The John Dorrance House, Bristol, PA

The John Dorrace House, Bristol, PA. 1862-3 Photo: Wikimedia

The back of the house. Photo: Wikimedia

The John Dorrance house is Bristol has two faces. From the street it looks like a normal, even sober, Italianate symmetrical plan villa, but from the back it displays a cascade of porches and a bizarre tower following the central tower plan. This house is one of my favorites because of the way it plays with surprise, its eccentricity, and its strange but beautiful detail. Built in 1862-3 for a mill owner, it remained in the family until 1921, when the Knights of Columbus bought the house. Currently a private home, it has many of its original features. It is also one of Bristol's only examples of Italianate architecture.

The front facade is symmetrical with a central gable and brick and sandstone facing. The house emulates grand Italianate mansions in its spare detail. The window surrounds are plain moldings, and the door is also a traditional classical design, similar to some we have seen in Providence, with pilasters and entablature over an arched door. Above the door is the triple arched Palladian window, which is a particularly Italianate shape. The lack of a front porch is strange, since this family seemed to love indulging in porches. Belt courses separate each floor, and the corners of the first and second floor have quoins. The lack of quoins on the third floor suggests that the molding served as an architrave for the frieze into which the windows are set, but it is strange that it does not follow the angle of the gable. The paired square, rather than arched windows, in the frieze is another eccentricity that is rarely seen. The sides follow the main facade and have triple Greek Revival style windows.

The back, which faces the river, is an impressive sight. Because the house is built into a slope, the basement is a full exposed story from the back. The entire facade is covered by porches; on the first and second floors, the porches have arches, but on the basement there are simply posts and a flat lintel.   The porch is appropriately painted to harmonize with the sandstone trim. The porches are divided into two separate groups because the central bay has a three story arched window that runs the full height of the tower where a circular staircase is located that connects all the floors. The arch of the window is repeated in the arch of the roof of the porch. Because it accommodates an elliptical stair, the tower is also elliptical with three arched windows on each side. My friend on seeing this house remarked how much it looks like a 19th century steamboat and he's right, especially given its setting on the water. I love this house because it embodies all the zaniness and Italianate can do, strange porches, innovative shapes, surprise, and complex design.

Amos N. Beckwith House, Providence, RI

The Amos N. Beckwith House, Providence, RI. 1861

Here is a good example of a non-sober Italianate in Providence that dared to break with the symmetrical cube shape and materials that characterized other Providence homes. This house is also expansive, receding back further and further. Much of it might be later additions. The house was built in 1861 for Amos Beckwith by Alpheus Morse, Providence's premier Italianate architect. There were enlargements in 1867, and in 1880 some Colonial Revival details were added. When built, it was in the countryside, but now it is in a tightly packed neighborhood of lovely late 19th century homes. The house follows the irregular plan with some variations. The projecting pavilion in this house does not project as far as the tower does, so the house has a rather aggressive forward thrust. I also believe that a porch has been filled in adjoining the tower. It is constructed of wood as well, rather than the usual brick and brownstone.

This house is mostly about the tower. The wall treatment is actually very simple with windows that have simple moldings and surrounds. The cornice is also rather plain with small brackets. The tower however is highly ornamented, with each stage separated by some kind of molding. The first two stories where the tower intersects the house are covered with recessed panels, an unusual feature. The porch is paneled as well with Corinthian columns and a filleted corner arch. At the cornice line of the house, the panels are augmented by large balconies that projet on brackets ornamented with wreaths and ribbons. The third stage has segmental arched windows set into a rectangular frame, and the fourth stage has the triple arched windows so characteristic of the Italianate tower.

The sides of the house are bizarrely long. It's as if the Beckwiths couldn't get enough space in the house and kept crazily adding on. The house features all types of bay windows, box windows, even Colonial Revival Palladians on the sides. One very interesting feature of the house are the dormers on the sides. What's unique is that the dormer windows intersect the cornice and they are supported on large brackets, a design scheme I haven't really seen much. As a final note, I really like the coloring of this house, although people find it drab. This is Downing scheme at work here: the earthy tones, the dark trim, the picked out detail. The house seems much more period appropriate for its proper painting scheme. The Beckwith house is one of Providence's zaniest Italianates, to be sure.

The Thomas F. Hoppin House, Providence, RI

The Thomas Hoppin House, Providence, RI. 1852-5 Photo: Tom Bastin

The east facade. Photo: Wikimedia

The west facade. Photo: HABS

Just when you thought Providence would only offer another cube, here is a truly interesting composition! The Hoppin house is built across the street from the Bowen house, but couldn't be more different in design, at least from the sides. Hoppin was a dramatic artist, according to Guide to Providence Architecture, who had just returned from a European tour. He hired Alpheus Morse as an architect because of his speed of design. It is likely that Hoppin and Morse's experiences in Europe influenced the sophistication of the design. The house is currently the home of Annenberg Institute for School Reform, a rather gloomy sounding fate for an artist's house. It is an Anglo-Italianate design that is meant to be enjoyed from all of its sides, each of which differs. The front (south) facade is a normal symmetrical plan, however the sides are both examples of a very European scaled pavilion plan with extended side wings and a recessed center. On the west facade, facing Benefit Street, there is an enclosed porch between two slightly projecting pavilions. The east facade has more dramatically projecting pavilions and an open porch. This side is next to the carriage house pictured below by HABS, which served as the entrance for those arriving by horse.

The window treatments are similar on all three facades with backeted cornices on the first floor, simple cornices on the second, and eared moldings on the third. All the windows are rectangular. As in other Providence homes, like the Lippitt house, there is a belt course between first and second floors, and quoins on the first floor. The bricklaying like the Lippitt house suggests corner pilasters. The cornice is simple and expected with brackets and dentils (no large frieze of course). The central bay of the south facade above the front door has a series of triple windows, the second floor's surmounted by a round pediment that gives it a Palladian air. The front porch is very classical in design with Corinthian pilasters and a full entablature. Although it is enclosed now, it probably was open in the past, as the older HABS image shows. The porches on the side facades are simpler with a belt course and three arches with moldings. A fancy flourish occurs on the east facade. On the second floor in the recessed section there are no windows. Instead in the center is a large brownstone niche with a classical statue, no doubt a touch of grandiosity suggested by European precedents with exterior statuary. It's a piece of high style design that must have seemed impressive in sober Providence. The house is brick, but it is painted to simulate stucco in a very Downing style palette, making the house look like a stuccoed brownstone, which seems very period appropriate and accentuates the elements of the design. The surrounding balustrade survives on the property with dramatic pillars at the carriage entrance.