Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [373]
None of this dampened the enthusiasm of the propertied classes for international republicanism. In 1830, when the July Revolution in France toppled the regime of Charles X, a committee chaired by Philip Hone chose Evacuation Day, November 25, for a massive show of solidarity. Thousands of merchants, manufacturers, and tradesmen, many accompanied by elaborately decorated floats, turned out to march from the Battery up to a rally at the Washington parade-ground. Several old Revolutionary soldiers were present as well, among them John Van Arsdale, who had pulled down the last British flag in 1783 and now carried the banner he had hoisted in its place.
The clamor for Greek independence (nudged along by a recent British fad for Greek antiquities) had meanwhile sparked a demand among wealthy New Yorkers for buildings designed to look as if they belonged on the Acropolis in ancient Athens. Greek Revival architecture, as it came to be known, seemed particularly well suited to the United States. Its basic elements—massive fluted columns, triangular pediments, heavy cornices—created a highly satisfying sense of kinship with the Athenian citystate famed as the birthplace of Western democracy. The first full-blown example of Greek Revival architecture in America was the headquarters of the Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, a Parthenon-like edifice completed in 1824. Only a few years later, New York’s booming financial district got its first taste of the new style in Martin Euclin Thompson’s Phoenix Bank.
The spread of Greek Revival architecture in the city quickened with the arrival of a Yankee engineer-architect named Ithiel Town. Town moved down from New Haven in the mid-twenties, certain that New York was about to become the pivot of the republic—and that its rich patricians would pay generously for the new style. His first commission, a Greek Doric design for the New York [later renamed Bowery] Theater, came in 1826. The following year he went into partnership with Thompson to form the city’s first professional architectural firm, Town and Thompson, which quickly produced the Church of the Ascension on Canal Street (1827-29), among other notable structures, as well as renovations to St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie (1828).
Thompson left Town in 1829 and went on to fame as the architect of the gracefully proportioned row houses on Washington Square North (1829-33) and, with another newcomer named Minard Lefever, of Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island (1831-33)—both still among the best surviving examples of Greek Revival building in the country. Town had meanwhile teamed up with Alexander Jackson Davis, a native New Yorker nineteen years his junior. Davis was a skilled architectural draftsman who had thrived by furnishing plans and elevations to the burgeoning ranks of speculative builders. After Davis won a commission to remodel the old almshouse—New York’s first civic building in the new style—Town took him on as a partner and opened an office in the Merchants’ Exchange. The two soon made Greek Revival architecture as prevalent a symbol of genteel New York as Santa Claus. Their temple-fronted churches and columned town houses sprang up throughout Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and other fashionable new neighborhoods. The Greek Revival facade that Town designed for Arthur Tappan’s store at Pearl and Hanover streets in 1829 was the first to make use of post-and-lintel construction, so obvious an improvement for displaying as well as storing wares that it quickly became the norm for downtown commercial buildings.
CIVIC PATRONS
Ever since the 1790s, De Witt Clinton and a small handful of like-minded gentlemen had been urging more systematic support for the arts and sciences—equally to encourage republican virtue among the people and to counter the city’s reputation for