NEWSLETTER
Spring
2002
CONTENTS:
METROPOLITAN CHAPTER BENEFIT SLATED FOR JUNE 5
SILVA IS FEATURED ARTIST AT BENEFIT
CAMPAIGN FOR A CLOCK STRUCK A LANDMARK FROM AUCTION
DU PONT GRAND STYLE HIGHLIGHTS TOUR
SUPPORT GIVEN TO HISTORIC MURRAY HILL
SUMMER SCHOOL DEADLINE FEBRUARY 28
METROPOLITAN CHAPTER BENEFIT SLATED FOR JUNE 5
by Shawn P. Brennan
A benefit for the Metropolitan Chapter will be held on June 5 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at Berry-Hill Galleries, 11 East 70 Street, New York City. Located in a 1910 townhouse designed by John Duncan for Consuelo Vanderbilt Smith, Berry-Hill Galleries is one of the pre-eminent firms specializing in American art and sculpture from the eighteenth through the twentieth century.
The catered reception will be held in conjunction with a private viewing of the Galleries’ groundbreaking exhibition, Francis A. Silva: A Retrospective, the first show dedicated solely to the work of this American luminist painter (see article below). The benefit is being organized by a committee co-chaired by Judith S. Barr and Cynthia Van Allen Shaffner.
Proceeds from the evening will help support the Metropolitan Chapter’s various activities geared to increasing the awareness of our rich Victorian heritage and preserving it for future generations. From its annual free lecture series to active support of historic preservation to Victorian Society summer school scholarships, the organization is committed to maintaining and expanding the level of programs it offers the community.
Tickets to the event are limited and start at $75 per person. Metropolitan Chapter members will receive an invitation to the event by mail. If you are not a member but are interested in attending, please call (212) 886-3742. Come on June 5 and enjoy rediscovering a great nineteenth-century American artist while supporting the Metropolitan Chapter’s efforts to reveal and protect the treasures of our Victorian past.
SILVA IS FEATURED ARTIST AT BENEFIT
by Linda S. Ferber
The rediscovery of an important American Victorian painter, Francis A. Silva (1835-1886), will be the focus of the Metropolitan Chapter’s June 5 benefit at the Berry-Hill Galleries. Silva was a luminist, a painter who created pictures capturing the radiant effect of light and atmosphere on the American landscape. Similar in style to Martin J. Heade and John F. Kensett, he is an important artist of this culminating phase of Hudson River painting. In the 1870s and 1880s, Silva’s quietly luminous views, such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s The Hudson River at the Tappan Zee (1876), gained an appreciative following.
His career began modestly as a sign and carriage painter in the 1850s. After service in the Civil War, he established himself as an artist in New York City and Brooklyn, showing for the first time at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibit in 1868-69.
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The titles of his oil paintings, watercolors and sketches reveal his regular excursions along the Hudson River and the Atlantic coast, from New Jersey to Massachusetts, in search of subjects. |
 Francis A. Silva, Robin's Reef Lighthouse off Tomkinsville, New York Harbor, ca. 1878-1886 |
Silva’s mature style, defined by orderly compositions, precise details and rich golden light, emerged in the 1870s. By 1876, he had established his reputation as a primary interpreter of coastal and maritime subjects from New England and the Middle Atlantic States. During the last six years of his life, he painted principally New Jersey subjects, such as A Summer Afternoon at Long Branch (1885) now at the National Gallery in Washington.
Berry-Hill Galleries is mounting the first exhibition devoted solely to the paintings of Silva. Organized under the direction of Princeton University’s Professor John Wilmerding, a distinguished American marine painting authority, the show will include about 30 works. The accompanying publication will feature contributions from Dr. Wilmerding and an illustrated catalog of Silva's known oeuvre compiled by Mark Mitchell, a doctoral candidate at Princeton. This will be the most comprehensive study of Silva’s work to date.
CAMPAIGN FOR A CLOCK STRUCK A LANDMARK FROM AUCTION
by Hilda Regier
The Jefferson Market Library, from which this issue’s embellishments are drawn, might not tower over Greenwich Village today had it not been for the imaginative efforts of Margot Gayle and neighbors she rallied just over 40 years ago when the building was slated for auction.
Knowing a man in the neighborhood was poised to bid on the property so he could clear the site for a tall apartment building, Margot formed a committee—not to save the old structure at Sixth Avenue and West 10th Street, but its tower clock. “We used the clock as a selling point,” she said in a recent interview, “because that’s one thing that appealed to everybody. Victorian architecture was still very out of style, and people would say to me, ‘Why do you want to save that old pile?’ But we said that everybody needs to have that clock running.”
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Designed by Frederick Clarke Withers and Calvert Vaux, the Jefferson Market Courthouse opened in 1877 and in 1885 was voted one of the 10 most beautiful buildings in the United States in a national poll of architects. After court restructuring in 1945, the building briefly housed a few agencies but then sat empty. “The building had a lot of dead pigeons and hanging wires inside,” recalled Margot. “It was a mess.” The four-faced illuminated clock no longer functioned. “The neighborhood missed the clock,” Margot said. “They couldn’t care less about the building.” Unsaid in the campaign to save the clock, she observed, was that “you have to have a building under it to hold it up.” |
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At Christmas 1959, her committee hit on the idea of sending a telegram to Mayor Robert F. Wagner that what they wanted for Christmas was not their two front teeth but their courthouse clock saved. That little touch of humor sparked interest, Margot reported.
In 1960 Mayor Wagner took the building off the city’s auction block. Also instrumental in saving the building were James Felt, chairman of the City Planning Commission, and Hulen Jack, the Manhattan borough president. “We didn’t have a Victorian Society yet, and we didn’t have a landmarks law yet,” Margot said, “and it was kind of tough going, to tell you the truth. But we ran the effort to save Old Jeff out of my apartment at 44 West 9th Street, and we succeeded.”
The idea to reuse the building as a library required another effort. Mayor Wagner adopted the plan and offered the building to officials of the New York Public Library for a Greenwich Village branch. “They said, ‘Well, yes, sure, and then we’ll tear it down and build a modern library,’” Margot recalled. But the mayor was adamant that the Jefferson Market building be used and refused to allow new construction. “So everything came together,” Margot said. “Giorgio Cavaglieri, a well known restoration architect, made a beautiful library in that ghostly interior. It’s a strangely shaped building for a library.” The library opened in 1967.
Margot Gayle spurred the founding of the Victorian Society in America in 1966 and the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture in 1970. Now 93, her most recent campaign restored the Yorkville Clock on Third Avenue below 85th Street near her present home.
DU PONT GRAND STYLE HIGHLIGHTS TOUR
by Robert Kaufmann
A perfect sunny day, an exquisite lunch in an elegant setting and a tour of a fabulous house with lovely gardens: these were the ingredients of the Metropolitan Chapter’s delightful trip to Delaware on Saturday, October 20. We left at 8:30 a.m. with tour leader John Metcalfe for a three-hour drive to Wilmington, where we lunched in the beautiful Green Room at the newly renovated Hotel du Pont, built in 1913. After lunch there was time to explore the hotel’s neighborhood or see a historical museum located in a Woolworth’s building. Then we drove a few miles just north of Wilmington to Nemours, a Louis XVI style mansion of 102 rooms. Designed by Carrere & Hastings, it was built in 1909-1910 for Alfred I. du Pont.
We toured the mansion in groups of six, led by impressively knowledgeable docents. Noteworthy in the house are fantastic chandeliers from the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries, antique clocks—one restored by John Metcalfe, and wonderful du Pont memorabilia. Some of the luxurious furnishings are associated with Marie Antoinette, whose husband, Louis XVI, elevated the du Pont family to the nobility. The impressive underpinnings of the grand lifestyle included double furnaces, generators, and ice-making machines in case one went out of service. After juice on the back terrace, we toured, on foot or in buses provided by the Nemours Foundation, the superb formal gardens with fountains and sculpture that stretch about a third of a mile from the front terrace.
SUPPORT GIVEN TO HISTORIC MURRAY HILL
by Joyce Mendelsohn
The Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America expressed strong support for the designation of a Murray Hill Historic District at a hearing of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on October 23. Also pressing for designation were the Municipal Art Society, Historic Districts Council, Landmarks Conservancy and many elected officials.
The boundaries of the proposed new district would stretch from East 35th to East 38th Streets, roughly between Lexington and Park Avenues, encompassing the historic core of Murray Hill—one of New York’s finest Victorian-era neighborhoods. Although situated in today’s fast-paced, commercial district in midtown Manhattan, this residential enclave maintains the elegance and tranquility of an earlier era.
Murray Hill was first developed in the 1850s as a fashionable district for some of New York’s most distinguished families. Over the years, the neighborhood has retained much of its mid-nineteenth-century appearance—its low-scale residential character of quiet, tree-shaded streets lined with handsome town houses, contiguous brownstone rows and converted carriage houses in a variety of architectural styles. Many of the dwellings are set back from the street behind front yards, graced with ornamental iron fences, adding another historic quality to the streetscape.
 Double Georgian style house at 122-124 E. 38th St. designed by Ralph Townsend |
In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, a number of noteworthy residents lived within the proposed Historic District. The narrow Italianate brownstone at 125 East 36th Street was the first home of newlyweds Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. Architect Ralph Townsend was commissioned by Todd Lincoln, son of the president, to design a double Georgian-style house at 122-124 East 38th Street for his two daughters. Another prominent architect, William Adams Delano, lived in a brownstone at 131 East 36th Street, which he transformed to a tasteful Parisian townhouse. Delano also designed a sophisticated French Renaissance facade for a former carriage house at 126 East 38th Street for use as his office. |
Murray Hill continues to be one of the city’s most desirable addresses, attracting residents who appreciate its distinctive character. However, over time, unsympathetic exterior alterations of many of the nineteenth-century buildings have threatened the architectural integrity of the area. Landmark designation will preserve and protect the heritage of one of New York’s outstanding Victorian neighborhoods.
SUMMER SCHOOL DEADLINE FEBRUARY 28
Applications for the Victorian Society 2002 Summer Schools are due February 28. Each year the Society holds two intense, comprehensive programs on Victorian architecture and culture, one in Newport, RI and the other in London, England. Applications and more information can be found on the Society’s website, www.victoriansociety.org, or by contacting Susan E. McCallum, Victorian Society Summer School Administrator, 100 Prospect Street, Summit, NJ 07901. Partial scholarships are available. Below the recipients of scholarships funded by the Metropolitan Chapter last year recall highlights of their experiences.
LONDON
In the London Summer School’s survey of nineteenth-century
architecture, David Crellin and Gavin Stamp illuminated the issues and
processes of historic preservation. The building of greatest interest to me, as
a preservation professional, was the magnificent and ruined Monastery of St.
Francis in Gorton, Manchester. Kathryn Sather, an American conservationist
working for the Monastery of St. Francis and Gorton Trust, described to us the
issues involved in redeveloping this abandoned building into a hotel. Designed
and built by Edward Welby Pugin between 1863 and 1872, St. Francis is now
poised at a point of glorious romantic “patination” before its
restoration and redevelopment commences. The interior spaces of the empty and
neglected church soar more vertiginously than they would have when filled with
the furniture and emblems of faith, and the “edge” of danger involved
with a ruined building exaggerates the visual and sensory experience. One is
glad that it is being saved but concerned for its transition and future use.
Sophia Day LaVerdiere Truslow
NEWPORT
Under Richard Guy Wilson’s expert guidance, the Newport Summer
School class discovered astounding scholarly treasures in surprising places. We
were guided through the Bell House, which is being readied for public display,
and toured Chateau-sur-Mer, Kingscote, the Breakers, Marble House and other
significant mansions. At Lyman Hazard House, Dan Snydecker, director of the
Newport Preservation Society, recounted recent work to conserve artifacts from
newly uncovered backyard privies, including rare books that are in excellent
but delicate condition. We learned of the staff’s daily life at the Elms
in a top-to-bottom exploration from the servants’ quarters in the attic to
a tunnel in the basement. In a lecture, Paul Miller shared his important
research on the interiors of Allard. Every tour and lecture was an invaluable
learning experience for us. The crowning jewel was St. Columba’s Chapel,
where we were awestruck by the Tiffany windows designed by Maitland Armstrong.
Sharon Wing
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