Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [570]
Equally startling, most of the new structures were made of a triassic sandstone, which, thanks to the presence of hematite iron ore, turned from pink to chocolate as it weathered. Brownstone, as it was called, was a familiar building material in New York City—St. Paul’s (1766) had used it along with Manhattan schist—but until now it had mainly been a substitute for marble or limestone, reserved for basements, stoops, and details. Suddenly it became a luxury item, deemed more dignified than brick or wood and more in tune with the current romantic aesthetic favoring “natural” darks over “artificial” whites.
The soft brown stone also allowed for richly carved facades and lavish ornamentation, to the delight of the wealthy, who were sick of simplicity and republican restraint. Federal houses now seemed dowdy, while brownstones (as one magazine observed) allowed their owners to “make a gratifying display of knowledge and taste.” This wondrous material, moreover, was relatively inexpensive, thanks to new steam-cutting technology, and readily available from nearby Paterson, New Jersey, and Portland, Connecticut. Soon nearly every architect and builder in the city was putting up Italianate brownstone mansions for rich clients, and four- or five-story brownstone row houses for the merely affluent. Marching up Fifth and its adjacent avenues, these buildings created block after chocolate block of monumental streetscapes, and by the 1850s it was agreed that, as one magazine put it, “the prevailing tint of New York is fixed.”
As uppertens clambered uptown, they drew their institutions up with them. The Union Club relocated to a Florentine mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 21st Street, while the Century settled into a clubhouse on East 15th Street, just off Union Square. But churches remained the anchors of choice.
In 1839 the wardens of Trinity Church, fearing their building was about to collapse, had pulled it down and begun work on what would be the third Episcopal house of worship to occupy that site since 1699. Designed by Richard Upjohn, an up-andcoming young architect, and completed in 1846, the new structure of reddish-brown sandstone was a paragon of the “pointed” or spiritualized Gothic style newly popular among “high church” adherents. Its “very ornaments,” one writer enthused, “remind one of the joys of a life beyond the grave.”
But the flight of the propertied classes out of lower Manhattan meant that Trinity could no longer claim to be the ne plus ultra of city churches. That distinction now belonged to Grace Episcopal, housed on Broadway at 10th Street in a Gothic masterpiece designed by James Renwick. Situated only a few blocks below the refined precincts of Union Square, Grace served a congregation notable for long pedigrees and deep pockets. Pews sold for as much as sixteen hundred dollars, and it became the preferred setting for baptisms, weddings, and funerals among well-to-do New Yorkers. (The cachet of the nearby Church of the Ascension got a huge boost when August Belmont married Commodore Perry’s daughter in its sanctuary.)
As in the past, the Presbyterian wing of respectable society came closest to matching Episcopalians in wealth and influence, and several Presbyterian congregations, almost as exclusive as Grace, also struck out for uptown. In 1845 a high-powered group that included James Brown and Henry Raymond called a meeting, subscribed the money, purchased a site, hired Richard Upjohn, and put up a church on University Place at 10th Street. Pew for pew, the congregation was probably the wealthiest in New York. The very next year, led by the redoubtably rich James Lenox, First Presbyterian abandoned Wall Street for an imposing Gothic edifice and tree-shaded grounds on Fifth Avenue between 11th and 12th streets. A decade later,