“Broadway looked so medieval.” So sang Tom Verlaine of the punk rock group Television in his 1977 song “Venus.” That song plays in my head when I walk on Broadway between Rector and Cedar Streets.

On the west side is an elaborate Gothic fantasy built over more than half a century. It starts with Trinity Church, opposite Wall Street. Opened in 1846, it was the third Trinity Church on the site. Its architect was an Englishman, Richard Upjohn. (He was a friend of his fellow Englishman in New York, painter Thomas Cole.) Upjohn’s Gothic was the English Gothic resurrected after some 300 to 400 years of latency under the Anglican regime of post-Reformation Britain. The style was resurrected as part of a widespread romanticization of the medieval past. This was part of what the historian Norman Cantor called, in his book of the same name, “Inventing the Middle Ages.” The leading romancer was the driven English designer Augustus Pugin. In addition to designing the astonishing decoration of London’s Houses of Parliament, Pugin wrote a book, “Contrasts,” contrasting the salubriousness and comeliness of medieval life with the ghastly inferno of the modern world. The vision of a medieval Eden, however historically wide of the mark, charmed a century.

Upjohn was a follower of Pugin. Indeed, historian Phoebe Stanton has shown that Upjohn probably derived his design for Trinity Church from one of Pugin’s churches in England.

At the northern end of the block, separated from Trinity by its lovely churchyard, set with Upjohn’s Gothic monument to the Revolutionary War dead, stand the “twin towers” of the Trinity and U.S. Realty Buildings, themselves bisected by narrow, canyonlike Thames Street. The architect of these buildings was Francis Kimball, one of those late-19th-century founts overflowing with romantic notions, most of them Gothic.

The Gothic 19th century was a sequence of shifting influences, of deconstructions and reconstructions of medieval forms, from Pugin through Ruskin to Morris and George Edmund Street and George Gilbert Scott, or in New York from Upjohn (an Englishman) through Calvert Vaux (an Englishman) to Kimball, who supervised the construction of Hartford’s Trinity College (which was designed by the Englishman William Burges, a major figure of the Gothic revival). The Gothic revival’s major phase lasted at least until 1941, when the Episcopal Diocese dedicated the redesigned (and half-finished) Cathedral of St. John the Divine, whose architect, Ralph Adams Cram, sobered up the forms the Victorians got drunk on.

Kimball’s tall, slab-like office buildings were built as a pair in 1905-07. They are a study in subtle asymmetry, and in eclectic accretion of ornamental forms: arches, pediments, thick courses, heavy enframements, towers and turrets, varied fenestration, and stained glass. The building on the south wonderfully encloses the churchyard with a cliff of Gothic details that explode the Gothic purity of the church and in so doing form its perfect foil, helping us to see the church together with the office buildings as a historical romance, or, as Tom Verlaine sang, “some new kind of drug.”

fmorrone@nysun.com