New Life for Litchfield Villa in Prospect Park
Little by little, the Litchfield Villa, one of the most beautiful houses in America, is coming back from near-death.
Situated in Prospect Park, the villa rose between 1854 and 1857 — predating the park itself. The Prospect Park Alliance, which shares the house with the Department of Parks & Recreation, has since 1987 marshaled private and public funds to effect a restoration of Prospect Park as breathtaking as what the Central Park Conservancy has done in Manhattan. The president of the Alliance, Tupper Thomas, also made it a point to "save Litchfield Villa from further deterioration." With interior work recently completed, the organization has done that, and much more.
The home became the Brooklyn Park Department headquarters in 1894, and the New York City Parks Department's Brooklyn office four years later. For the next century, municipal occupancy, with its utilitarian exigencies, ran the house down. On the outside, the coup de grâce came in the 1930s, when the city removed the house's white stucco façade. Apparently, the stucco had deteriorated and was going to be replaced. But it wasn't replaced, and ever since the house has stood naked — red brick, not white stucco.
The 1950s through the 1970s brought us new extremes in bureaucratic squalor, a true Dark Ages forgetfulness of the most basic amenities of daily life. It was especially wrenching when the blight — fluorescent lights, linoleum floors, plywood partitions — overtook beautiful buildings such as Litchfield Villa.
Happily, that doleful trend has been reversed, thanks in large part to vigorous public-private partnerships such as the Prospect Park Alliance.
Alliance architect Ralph Carmosino, who is now with the now with the City University of New York, oversaw both exterior renovation (funded by the city) and interior renovation (funded by an anonymous member of the family of canal builder and railroad tycoon Edwin Litchfield, the villa's original owner). Exterior work was planned in 2001, when it appeared there would be money for re-stuccoing. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, following which the government rechanneled all kinds of funds. Renovations took place in 2002 and 2003. Stucco aside, the exterior looks splendid. A lot of the work — reroofing above all — was a matter of strict necessity. But even in such cases Mr. Carmosino sought to restore or at least capture the spirit of the house as it was originally. We see this in the splendid woodwork of the bays, balconies, balustrades, friezes, columns, and cornices, all among the most beautiful in the city. We see it as well in the metal roof, and in the wonderful way the architect exposed and restored the long-concealed scrollwork panels of the dome.
Inside, in work completed earlier this year, Mr. Carmosino's team revived the villa's lost or sullied features. And the gorgeous Minton tile floor was beautifully restored. In encaustic tiles, color and pattern are embedded in the clay, rather than applied to the surface, thus answering to moralistic Victorian architects' "truth to materials" philosophy, which — what with stuccoed façades and marbleized wood — hardly informed Litchfield Villa, where the tiles were used solely for their beauty, not their morality.
Edwin Litchfield built his house when the City of Brooklyn was only one of Kings County's six towns and his property was out near the city's farthest rural extremity. From his cupolaed eyrie, Litchfield could gaze down upon the Gowanus Canal, which he built. He hired the preeminent architect of the day, Alexander Jackson Davis, whose credits included the magnificent house called "Lyndhurst," in Tarrytown, N.Y. Davis had been a friend and collaborator of Andrew Jackson Downing, the mentor of architect Calvert Vaux. It was fitting when Brooklyn acquired land adjacent to Litchfield's for Vaux's Prospect Park. As it happened, Vaux came to believe that the land occupied by Litchfield's house was needed for the park. A deal was made whereby Litchfield and his wife got to lease the house until they died, in 1885 and 1881, respectively. After their deaths, the city took possession of the structure.
Davis was a master of the Italian country villa style. Like the contemporaneous Gothic Revival, the Italian villa style belonged to romantic decades when architects created picturesque cottages and villas integrated with the bucolic surroundings of a nascent suburbia. The chief thing about the Italian villa style is its rambling asymmetry, which, as Davis believed, grew in attractiveness the more it was added to over time.
The public may enter the villa to view the main hall and ascend by stair to the second floor for a view down onto the rotunda. Paint analysis and the study of old photographs showed that the wooden frames of the hall's doors and windows had been marbleized, while the plaster walls, treated with copal varnish, looked more like wood than the wood. The Alliance's press director, Eugene Patron, reports that representatives of Maw & Company, the still-thriving, Stoke-on-Trent, England-based makers of the original tiles, have suggested that the Litchfield tiles, or some of them, may have come from an overproduction of the identically designed tiles for the U.S. Capitol.
Now all we need is a coat of stucco.
