Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [294]
Mangin was an emigre architect who had worked on the place de la Concorde in Paris and (allegedly) made his way to New York via Saint-Domingue in the midnineties. On Washington’s recommendation, he was commissioned to design fortifications for the city. Appointed city surveyor soon thereafter, Mangin, along with a German engineer named Casimer Goerck, prepared an official map of the town and projected new streets into the rolling meadows of northern Manhattan. By the end of the decade his credits also included Rickett’s Equestrian Circus on Greenwich Street, the Park Theater, and Newgate Prison in Greenwich. The exterior he and McComb proposed for the new City Hall clearly reflected his sense of scale and proportion.
Mangin’s role in the project soon faded, however. Nervous about expenses, the council insisted upon alterations—reducing the depth of the building, shortening its wings, and substituting Newark brownstone for marble on its rear (which was obscured by the nearby almshouse anyway). Maybe Mangin quit in a huff, maybe the council fired him for fighting the changes: one way or the other, he was out of the picture when construction got underway in the summer of 1803. McComb, his erstwhile partner, was now the supervising architect (at a salary of six dollars per day), and it was McComb who in the end got the credit for seeing the building through to completion eight years later (at a cost of half a million dollars—twice the initial estimate).
McComb, a home-grown “mason and master builder,” was to architecture in New York what Duncan Phyfe was to furniture—an enterprising artisan who would win fame and fortune purveying the new Federal style to the city’s propertied classes. In the facade of Government House, completed in 1791 when he was just thirty, McComb had combined a Georgian portico with four slender Ionic columns of the kind favored by the English architect Robert Adam. On the pediment above the roofline, along the cornices, and at the sides of the building, his judicious deployment of pilasters, dentils, and other classical motifs created an effect that was up-to-date and elegant without being pretentious.
As the work on City Hall progressed, McComb achieved the same effect with even more convincing artistry. He deftly blended the principal elements of Mangin’s French Renaissance facade—its palace-like horizontal massing, central pavilion, and swagged window panels—with Federal-style detailing derived from the design book of Robert Adam. Inside, inspired by plans of an English Palladian mansion, McComb created a magnificent rotunda that rises the full height of the building to a skylight at the center of the coffered dome. From the ground level of the rotunda, a pair of flying marble staircases sweep up to a second-story circular gallery ringed by Corinthian columns. In the wings that extend off the rotunda on both floors, McComb placed offices for the mayor and governor, the City Council chambers, and assorted other hearing rooms, committee rooms, and courtrooms, all finished with the moldings, swags, and pilasters that were by now his trademark.
When it was finally done, Benjamin Henry Latrobe sourly dismissed the new City Hall as a “vile heterogeneous composition . . . the invention of a New York bricklayer and a St. Domingo Frenchman.” Prevailing opinion, however, held that McComb had produced a masterpiece. As an emblem of the municipal corporation’s enlarged sense of responsibility for the city’s affairs—for its legitimacy as a “public” entity in a republican society—the building could hardly have been more apt.
24
Philosophes and Philanthropists
A year or so after Evacuation Day, Robert R. Livingston bought a house on Bowling Green—only to discover that the municipal corporation meant to sell off a dozen nearby lots fronting the Hudson River for commercial development. This was a terrible mistake, Livingston warned Mayor James Duane. The corporation should stop construction along