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Morningside, ca. 1885. Newburgh, New York.
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People and Places
The Gothic Revival Library was taken from Morningside, a house designed by the architect Frederick Clarke Withers (1828–1901) in 1859 for banker Frederick Deming (1787–1860) and his family in Newburgh, New York, where it still stands. A pamphlet entitled "Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City" (1845) lists Deming as "the president of Union Bank [who] has long been rich by virtue of the laws of inheritance." His worth is given at $300,000—an extraordinarily large sum for the time. In 1859, when the house was built for $16,000, Deming was seventy-two. After his death in 1860, his family continued to live there until 1868, when the property was sold. Although Morningside had been abandoned when the Museum was given permission to remove this room in 1977, the house has since been restored.
Englishman Frederick Clarke Withers arrived in the booming Hudson River shipping town of Newburgh in 1852. He had trained in the London office of the Gothic Revival specialist Thomas Henry Wyatt and had now been hired as an architectural assistant to Andrew Jackson Downing, the great American horticulturalist, landscape designer, and theoretician of the style. Soon after Withers arrived, however, Downing was killed in a steamboat accident on the Hudson. Withers then collaborated with architect Calvert Vaux, who had come from England to work with Downing on several projects, including the design of the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. When Vaux left Newburgh to help Frederick Law Olmstead plan New York's Central Park, Withers set up a solo practice. He began by concentrating on private homes but later in his career became known for his High Victorian Gothic churches and institutional buildings, including the Jefferson Market Courthouse (1877) on lower Sixth Avenue in New York.
Learn about Frederick Clarke Withers
Learn about Andrew Jackson Downing
Learn about Alexander Jackson Davis
Learn about Calvert Vaux
Learn about the Early Design of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Learn about Jefferson Market Courthouse
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| Frederick Clarke Withers (1828–1901), ca. 1861. Courtesy American Architectural Archive. |
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Frederick Clarke Withers
Frederick Clarke Withers (1828–1901) received his education in England, where he worked in London with the Gothic Revival specialists Thomas Henry Wyatt and David Brandon. He joined A. J. Downing's Newburgh, New York, practice in 1852 and continued working there with Calvert Vaux after Downing's sudden death that year. Vaux left the practice in 1857 after publishing designs done jointly with Withers in his Villas and Cottages. Withers worked independently, remaining an advocate and a practitioner of the Gothic Revival style until his death.
Withers designed several important Gothic Revival houses, including that of Frederick Deming (1859). He came to be known as a designer of Gothic-style churches, such as Saint Paul's Episcopal Church (1864, unfinished) in Newburgh and Saint Luke's Episcopal Church (1869) in Beacon, New York. Withers published a collection of his designs in Church Architecture (1873), securing a prominent position as a church designer. He continued to design in the Gothic style, utilizing a modified and more modern form for secular buildings, such as the Jefferson Market Courthouse in New York City (1877).
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| Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852), 1864. Courtesy The Century Association. |
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Andrew Jackson Downing
The architectural theorist Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) was a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival style in the United States and a proponent of the formation of a clear aesthetic canon in American architecture and design. Born and raised in Newburgh, New York, he was a prolific writer on architecture, landscape, and interior design. His early essays were the first contributions by an American on these topics and his Cottage Residences (1842) was the first American book on rural architecture. A supporter of the development of "appropriate" and useful aesthetics, Downing called for an aesthetic particular to the American landscape. His Architecture of Country Houses (1850) included extensive designs for houses and interiors, many by architect Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–1892). In 1850 he formed a partnership with Calvert Vaux and opened what was to be a thriving practice in Newburgh. Frederick Clarke Withers (1828–1901) joined the firm during its second year. Downing died in a steamboat accident on the Hudson River in 1852, but his ideas continued to exert an influence through his books, the ongoing publication of his magazine The Horticulturalist, and Vaux's Villas and Cottages (1857).
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| Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–1892), ca. 1845. Courtesy Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. |
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Alexander Jackson Davis
Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–1892) was one of the nineteenth century's most prominent architectural figures. Born in New York City to a bookseller and publisher father, Davis spent most of his childhood in New Jersey and central New York State. He began working in 1818 as a typesetter in Virginia then returned to New York to take up drawing and architecture. He formed a partnership with prominent architect Ithiel Town, designing largely in the Greek Revival style, with some influence of Gothic and other styles. In 1835, after six years with Town, Davis struck out on his own.
Davis drew upon a number of styles in his work but is best known for his Gothic Revival designs. A proponent of the Picturesque Movement, with its predilection for irregularity and contrast and for integrating rural homes into the landscape, Davis created unusual and asymmetrical villas, such as his masterpiece, Lyndhurst (1865), in Tarrytown, New York. He collaborated with Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) in popularizing the Picturesque and became its most prominent proponent at mid-century.
Davis designed not only buildings but furniture and interiors as well. He worked closely with the Paulding and Merritt families on the interior decoration and furniture designs for Lyndhurst. This involvement was highly unusual in a period in which architects did not commonly design the interiors of houses. Davis remained active as an architect until the 1870s, though his influence waned as a younger generation of architects began to design for the growing urban landscape.
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| Calvert Vaux (1824–1895). Courtesy New York Historical Society. |
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Calvert Vaux
Calvert Vaux (1824–1895) was born and educated in London and went to the United States in 1850 to work with A. J. Downing. The two formed an architectural office in Newburgh, New York, and worked on projects from New England to Washington, D.C. After Downing's sudden death in 1852, Vaux continued to work in Newburgh with Frederick Clarke Withers. In 1857 he published Villas and Cottages, a collection of the Downing-Vaux partnerships' plans, his own designs, and those done with Withers. That year he moved to New York City, where he remained until his death.
Vaux was involved with some of the most important large-scale public building projects of his day as well as with numerous smaller projects and private buildings. He worked with Downing on designs for the Capitol and Smithsonian grounds in Washington, D.C., and with Frederick Law Olmstead on the plans for Manhattan's Central Park, Riverside Park, and Morningside Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Vaux collaborated with Jacob Wrey Mould in designing The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1874–80) and the American Museum of Natural History (1874–77).
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| The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, ca. 1880. |
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Early Design of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first building designed specifically to house The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public in 1880. It was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould (1825–1886), an English architect who came to New York in 1852. The Museum had been incorporated in 1870 and located temporarily in houses on Fifth Avenue and, later, Fourteenth Street. About the same time, plans were made to include an art museum in the new "Central Park" that had been set aside by the state legislature in 1853 for public use. In 1859, under the influence of the treasurer of the park, Andrew Green, the park's regulations were modified to allow for the construction of "museums, collections of natural history, observatories or works of art," and by 1870 these plans were beginning to take shape at the hands of Vaux and Mould. Both had been deeply involved with construction in Central Park since its inception and had worked closely with Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), the chief architect of the park, who, with Vaux, had made the plans chosen for implementation. The building Vaux and Mould designed on the east side of Central Park became the new home for the Museum and its expanding collection.
Vaux and Mould were deeply influenced by the Gothic Revival and were committed to the principles outlined by the architectural theorist John Ruskin. The resulting style, known as High Victorian Gothic, drew heavily upon Italian Romanesque and Gothic (particularly Venetian) styles. It was known for its verticality and bold features, its use of multicolored masonry (sometimes called "permanent polychromy"), and its pointed-and-banded arch. These elements can be clearly seen in their design of the Museum, the west facade of which is still visible from the Robert Lehman Wing. Hints of the structure and its interior design are visible in the medieval tapestry hall, where Vaux's ceiling beams and molded cornices remain, though stripped of ornament, together with the original floor, with its bold polychrome pattern of white and black marble surrounded by narrow borders of red slate.
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| Jefferson Market Courthouse, New York, New York, 1877. Sixth Avenue facade. Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey. |
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Jefferson Market Courthouse
The Jefferson Market Courthouse, designed by Frederick Clarke Withers and completed in 1877, was part of a complex of buildings that occupied a triangular plot on Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street in New York City. Although today Withers's best-known work, the project at the time was immersed in controversy and dogged with accusations that it was both a waste of public funds and too ostentatious for the area—partly because the buildings were constructed on the edge of what was then one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the courthouse was praised by the New York Times as an "elegant architectural structure" and a "jewel in a swine's snout." In a national poll of architects taken in 1885 it was voted one of the ten most beautiful buildings in the United States.
The site originally comprised four distinct units: the courthouse, a prison, a fire tower (structurally attached to the courthouse), and a market, added in 1883. Withers intentionally isolated the compartments from one another, as the functions of court, prison, and fire observatory were deemed separate. The courthouse and its tower—all that remains on the site today—is a majestic structure in the High Victorian Gothic style, with pinnacles and gables, distinctive stone carvings, stained-glass windows, and a patterned slate roof. The High Victorian Gothic style is a form of the Gothic Revival that gained prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. The architectural and aesthetic theorist John Ruskin (1819–1900), one of its main proponents, advocated the use of elements of the Italian Romanesque and the Venetian Gothic styles. The Gothic Revival style propagated earlier by A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852) and others drew more heavily upon English examples. One of the most distinctive features of High Victorian Gothic architecture is its use of polychromy, as seen in the geometric designs and stripes of black laid in the red brick in the courthouse.
The prison and market that once stood with the courthouse were demolished in 1927 and replaced by a Women's House of Detention—the first of its kind in the city—which was torn down in 1973. After the district court system was overhauled in 1945, the Jefferson Market Courthouse fell vacant; later, it temporarily housed the United States Census Bureau and then the Police Academy annex. In time, it was determined that the building was ill-suited for government purposes and was scheduled to be sold at auction in 1959. Although the city had no preservation laws at the time, community members rallied to withdraw the building from sale and to provide funds for its conversion to a much-needed branch of the New York Public Library. In 1960 funds were approved for its transformation, and the renovated library opened to the public on November 27, 1967. The Jefferson Market Library has been declared a registered landmark by the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission and is recognized as an outstanding example of adaptive reuse. The space behind the courthouse now features a park and garden laid out in the spirit of Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of Central Park.
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