A Little Taste of Philadelphia
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Readers of this column know how I revere the Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer, who on occasion worked in New York. I’ve previously written about three Trumbauer buildings in Manhattan: the Adelaide Douglas house on Park Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets, the Wildenstein Gallery on East 64th Street, and the James B. Duke house on Fifth Avenue and 78th Street. The final Trumbauer masterpiece in New York is the Marion Carhart house at 3 E. 95th St. Built in 1913–16, this is Trumbauer at his characteristic best. That means above all an unerring sense of proportion to which all else is subordinated. A Trumbauer house may be in an 18th-century classical style, but it is as unmistakably by Trumbauer as any Frank Lloyd Wright house is by Wright.
What Trumbauer was so good at was what I think of as extrusion. His are the least squat houses in the city. Trumbauer houses are like dancers with straightened spines, shoulders back, chins high — perfect posture. He vertically elongates everything. The elegance is palpable. That has to do as well with his judicious ornamental schemes, where just the right devices and proportions of ornamentation keep the elegance from becoming stiffness. He did these things better than any other architect, yet never attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Rather, he apprenticed in Philadelphia with the Hewitt brothers, architects of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.
At the Carhart house, the rusticated base has long vertical grooves, or channels, cut into the stone, with three higharched openings. Above this is a lovely iron balcony, carried on brackets that dangle like earrings to frame each of the first-floor arches. Above the balcony Trumbauer’s trademark pilasters (representations of columns in flat relief) rise and fill in the walls beside the windows, striking the note of elegant distention.
The Lycée Français, which owned the house for many years, sold it and its modernist annex in 2000. The Manhattan firm Zivkovic Associates was hired to replace the annex so as to extend the house, which has been converted to condominiums. An early sketch for a classical addition, by Zivkovic’s Brian Connolly, suggested a sensible solution. Fears that the Landmarks Preservation Commission would more readily approve a modernist addition (for such is the topsyturvy world we live in) led to an interim modernist scheme that in its turn was rejected for the current classical addition designed by Zivkovic Associates with the famous British classicist John Simpson, architect of the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. Mr. Simpson’s star power helped win Landmarks approval, and the resulting structure, with its thick limestone walls, is quite simply one of the best buildings in Manhattan in the last half century.
The next building east, the former home of Ernesto and Edith Fabbri, is also a marvelous building, designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, who when he worked on this house (1914–16) was also working on Forest Hills Gardens. It is as though he transposed his picturesque cottages on the curving lanes to the rectilinear grid of the city, creating a house of irregularly massed cubes that is wildly different from, though wonderfully compatible with, the works by Trumbauer and Zivkovic.
