The Lovliest of Enclaves

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The New York Sun

St. Mark’s in the Bowery, the Episcopal church at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street, commands one of the most anomalous and interesting enclaves carved from the Manhattan street grid.

The church building itself comprises parts from three distinct periods of New York architecture.The main, fieldstone body of the church dates to 1799, when it was built on the site of the private chapel on the Stuyvesant farm. In 1826–28, Ithiel Town, one of America’s most important architects, added the stone steeple, one of New York’s earliest examples of Greek revival architecture. The church’s distinctive porch, of cast iron, was added in 1854.

The church faces diagonally across its intersection, toward what used to be the Second Avenue Deli. In front of the church is a generous plaza, as much like a European church square as New York has. From this plaza you can look west, to a highly unusual wedge of row houses fronting on East 10th Street and on Stuyvesant Street. The latter skews from the grid in a northeast-southwest direction, one of the few rural lanes that property owners succeeded in saving from the grid. Consequently, there’s that wedge of houses, which at the eastern end of the wedge are incredibly shallow, only 16 feet deep. The houses deepen to 48 feet at the north end.

These are mostly 1850s and 1860s houses in the “Italianate” style.Though that style brought us the house fully fronted in brown sandstone, the houses of the St.Mark’s wedge are mostly brick, with stone trim. Be sure to look at 118 East 10th Street, built in 1861. The American Institute of Architects Guide says architect Stanford White was born in an earlier house on the site. In fact, White was born at 110 East 10th Street, but he resided in the very house at no. 118 in the 1870s, when he lived with his parents while working for Henry Hobson Richardson. As a budding architect, he must have thought a lot about his own home, and it’s hard to think he wouldn’t have been impressed by its exuberant rustication, window enframements that make the windows look like pictures in a gallery, and the lush brackets on either side of the doorway entablature. McKim, Mead & White later helped end the Victorian free-for-all by establishing the Italianate as the dominant style of New York.

In an entirely different vein is 21 Stuyvesant Street, a Federal-style mansion built in 1803–04 by the Dutch colonial director-general Peter Stuyvesant’s great-grandson for his daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Nicholas Fish.In 1808, their son, Hamilton, was born in this house. He went on to become governor of New York. It is a textbook Federal house, with dormers, Flemish-bond brickwork, six-over-six windows, elliptical fanlight over the door, and so on. We call it the “Stuyvesant-Fish house” — note the hyphen. At Irving Place and Gramercy Park is a house once owned by Hamilton Fish’s son Stuyvesant. This is the “Stuyvesant Fish” house, with no hyphen. How lovely it is the way this simple (though large) Federal house fits so well with its much more elaborate Italianate neighbors, demonstrating how the old architectural etiquette was responsible for creating the city’s loveliest enclaves.

fmorrone@nysun.com


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