In The Bevier Memorial Building at Night: Another Dimension of Claude Bragdon, George took us to South Washington Street in downtown Rochester.
Today, George again looks at South Washington Street.
Photography and text by George Cassidy Payne
On the corner of Spring St and South Washington St, Rochester, NY, stands one of the finest examples of the Italianate style in the city. Featuring a hipped roof with cupola and an entrance porch with carved Moorish Revival ornamentation, the Brewster-Burke House was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 .
Today, the French Quarter Cafe is located inside this historic building.
“The Brewster-Burke house has a chhattri porch with a scalloped ogee arch and quatrefoils cut out in the spandrels. The brackets are oversized and are an s and c scroll shape with interesting spirals cut out. Candelabra columns are also included, but these are far more angular and have deep fluting that make them look like grass bundles. The windows have lintels with simple triangles. A monitor caps the roof and a long wing to the side has a porch that mimics the central porch. The house ends in a structure with three pointed Gothic arches, that served as a summer kitchen and carriage house according to the plans, demonstrating the stylistic link some theorists of the period found between Indian and Gothic architecture. Throughout the house has ironwork balconies on the windows, while the main porch has a fantastic wooden balcony with exotic finials on the posts. The side seems to have had a porch that was as fantastic as the main porch with carved ornament, but this has disappeared along with an exceptional fence, pictured below from HABS. The house was threatened many times with demolition but has been saved mostly intact, despite some losses.” (http://picturesqueitalianatearchitecture.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-brewster-burke-house-rochester-ny.html)
Moorish style
We wander through old streets, and pause before the age stricken houses; and, strange to say, the magic past lights them up.– Grace King, French Quarter Guidebook
Italianate Style
” Emphasizing the rambling, asymmetrical character of Italian farmhouses, the style easily fit into the informal, rural ideals of picturesque movement. Because of the increasing complexity of American building types by the 1850s – from train stations and commercial buildings to townhouses, apartments, and suburban homes, the style was modified to fit a building’s particular function. The style’s use for many of America’s main-street commercial buildings provides for one of America’s most distinctive symbolic landscapes of midwestern town centers. Like Gothic Revival, Italianate and its cousin, the Italian Villa style, was heavily promoted and popularized by Andrew Jackson Downing by the 1850s as the preferred suburban country house. By the 1860s, Italianate overshadowed Gothic Revival as America’s most popular romantic style.” (https://architecturestyles.org/italianate/)
AUSTIN, Merwin (1813-1890) was a successful architect in Rochester, N.Y. from 1845 until 1869 who executed several important works in Port Hope, Ont., a popular summer destination for visiting Americans who lived directly across Lake Ontario. Born in Hamden, Connecticut, he joined his older brother Henry Austin (1804-91), the eminent architect of New Haven, Conn., when the latter opened an office there in 1837. Merwin Austin moved to Rochester at age 31, and by 1850 had established a local reputation there with his Greek Revival design for the Monroe County Court House, Rochester, 1850.
The villas of Renaissance Italy inspired the Italianate style. It was popular from the 1840’s to the 1880’s. People who preferred Italianate homes wanted their residences to look like they had been added onto over the course of several centuries, so the houses were often composed of a series of rectangles.
Features:
- Low-pitched, often flat roofs
- Heavy brackets under the eaves
- Elaborate detailing around windows
- Windows often curve-topped
- Cupolas or belvederes
- A mix of rectangular sections
- One-story porches
In New Orleans…..You can’t separate nothing from nothing. Everything mingles each into the other…until nothing is purely itself but becomes part of one funky gumbo. – Mac Rebennack A.K.A. Dr. John, Musician
Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn’t move. – Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1, 2004
SEE
The Bevier Memorial Building at Night: Another Dimension of Claude Bragdon