The Jersey City news. (Jersey City [N.J.]) 1889-1906, 1895-07-26

front. piece OF pam wall Is MS ShiSA
aversion. 1t seems to him that if he does
not 81 do something" with it he is not earn
ing his money or vindicating his capacity
Lord Melbo she's famous question, Cant
you let 1t alone?" never by any chance pro-
po lLds itself to him. To give a front a
countenance it is necessary to him TO furnish
it with a minimum of two noses and four
ears IL he cannot put on more things for
the money in cut stone he cheerfully adds
them in sheet metal At all hazards he must
have plenty of things, and his variety thus
comes to mean nothing but tightness.
His procedure is illustrated with an anus
ing naivete in the work now under considera-
ton. His principal front has things enough
for front three times as long. AT the cen
tire, to begin with, there is porch with two
columns on each side with composite capitals,
inclosing Romanesque entrance-arch with
two nook shafts on each side. One is amused
| to remark here, as elsewhere throughout the
building, that the carving is done ''in place,
as If the sensitive soul of the designer could
not be appeased without seeing its actual
effect in execution, an assumption which be-
comes wildly hilarious when applied to
| forms that are transferred bodily from the
ssStair Builders Guide" Behind this por-
| tico rises a tower with three openings, which
are two too many for its width, squeezed
into its surface and extended through two
stories with most preposterous treatment
of the interpolated transom. In this tower
This characteristic is the squeezed and
pinched appearance that comes from the de-
signers effort to get more things IN given
space than it will accommodate, and all that
it will accommodate, and all that it can he
made to hold by extreme crowding. A front
so composed, even if it were composed of good
| things, would be as incapable of dignity or
repose as the platform of an elevated rail
road car during the busy hours. In this
main front, for example, which would be OF
a respectable expanse if let alone, there IS
! squeezed on each side Of the tower slice OF
curtain wall; on the outside of each strip OF
curtain wall pedimented tristylar Corin-
| THAN order: on the ontside of each order a
| terminal piece of wall. This huddle of things
would be fatal if the things were all good, and
| the things are all of an excruciating badness.
Add that the building is divided vertically
and ineffect equally by heavy modillioned
cornice which would of itself preclude any
| effective composition of the front.
| The Contemplating front is a scene OF
! equal activity. The central feature here, in
place of the porch and the tower, is an arch
, in the two-story basement, which is Roman
esque if it be anything, and in the second
story a colonnade of three pairs of the lean
| est Corinthian columns ever erected. We
| should Judge the shaft to be about thirteen
with great force to the designer as an adj
mirable architectural quality. The division
| of the fronts, the arrangement and the forms
of the openings and the manner in which
| they are huddled, and the detail, all conduce
!
| to give the effect of spindling. These varl-
GUS arrangements are so successful that a
front of hundred feet in extent and only
| four stories high, or three-and-a-half, be-
comes painfully inadequate to its heighth
| The squeezed curtain fanking the central
portico in the flank now under construction
| is flanked by projected towers, with two
openings crowded into the lower stage of
each, and with plaster at the angle, at
tenuated like the central columns, which
feature is repeated, after another crowded
| wall at the angle of the building.
| These two are the architecturesque fronts
of the building. Tho other two, which are
not architecturesque, ought to afford some
relief, and indeed one is grateful to the
| architect for what he has here left out, but
he has managed to make these fronts uneasy,
| all the same
'.And yet this old woman could never keep
quiet"
The openings are here as slim and as
squeezed as elsewhere They differ, OF
course, in each story, those of the second
having pediments that are about as exasper
ating as anything in the building, and any
chance that was.left to the wall of making
an effect by its unbroken extent is destroyed
by the projection of the centre with open
ings in the upper story different from any OF
the others.
/ 1t remains to be added that the SKY line i:
as tormented as the designer knew how te
make it, mainly with cupolas over the
towers bearing nlinarets, and entirely incon-
| yr1lous with any Of the things below them,
as many of these things are with eacn other.
The eliminating atrocity is that all this is
cheap and initiative finery. Above and in