The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-06-13
THE RISE AND FALL OF BROWN
 STONE.

THE RISE AND FALL OF BROWN
 STONE.
 The agreeable variety that the New Workers of 1880 thought brownstone would introduce into Manhattan dwell lings did not last very many years: At first slowly and finally at an extermely rapid rate the new stone came in. One finds very little of it south of the num- bered streets: along the streets with low numbers it shared the honors with brick; above Twenty-third Street the brownstone completely dominates the architectural landscape on those streets which are given over to dwelling and it was even used extensively for the early five-story flat. Its final triumph consisted in it's adoption during the early eighties by the architect of the Vanderbilt houses, between Flfty-first and Fifty-second streets on Fifth ave nue, and thereafter it was abandoned so rapidly, both by speculative builders and by the :icher men who built their own houses, that the sudden change can only be accounted for on the ground, partly, no doubt, unconscious, of an ut ter weariness of the flesh and the spirit. New Workers had been surfeited with brownstone until their strong architec- tura1 digestion gave way. They sud- denly realized that there were other stones and that there was brick. With in a few years this heavy, dreary material which could not be satisfac- torily combined with brick, or with any other stone, and which made somehow dull and <, depressing even very skilful designs, was entirely superseded. -
 At the time when brownstone began to be superseded, it looked as if the evil .dence of it's supremacy during so many years would, like the poor, be always with us, for it was scarcely conceivable that all the houses buitsof this material, which extends almost twenty-third Street to beyond Eightieth Street on the East Side, would ever be entirely ss- troyed to make room for business. And, indeed, the time is still indefinitely dis tant when the old brownstone fronts north of Thirty-fourth Street, particu- larly on the East Side, will be displaced for any such purpose. But fortunately there are other causes as we'll which are making for the destruction of these buildings, and the substitution in their place of more varied materials and more pleasing designs. It is on the East Side, between Thirty-fourth and Eightieth Streets, that brownstore particularly prevails, and 1t is just this section of the city in which economic conditions have become such recently as to encourage and justify a wholesale reconstruction. The price of a good site alone has ad- vanced beyond the oldSvaluegof the land and buildings; at the same time the .high-stoop brownstone dwellings are now in the way of being extremely un- fashionable, both in design and plan;
 and movement has set in which is gradually gathering momentum towards the subtitution of reconstructed Ameri- can basement dwellings, for the old brownstone fronts. In some few cases the reconstruction has gone no farther than the destruction of the stoop. the placing of the entrance on the ground floor, and the encouragement of the interior but for the most part people de- mand that the old houses shall be either utterly destroyed or subjected to such drastic process of prrging that every trace of the brownstone is re- ved.-Herbert Croly in Architectural Record. .-....