the world. At any rate, this is true in the daytime. At night, Broadway
with its exaggerated Earl’s Court effects, its great drawings in
electric light high up against the sky of giant motor cars, pyjama-clad
men and women, appearing and disappearing, is so fantastic and absurd,
and withall so thrilling, that for a few hours round about midnight it
displaces the other thoroughfare, not only for the careless multitude,
but for the serious person, too, if such there be when he or she has
once trodden its stones. Long after twelve o’clock vast crowds line its
ample sidewalks, pour in and out of its endless theatres and its always
open shops, and get carried away with the carnival spirit of its
illuminated advertisements. It has its sky-scrapers, too, which Fifth
Avenue has not, and these are always strangest at night. To see
brilliant windows and towers of light floating in the sky, where
ordinarily one expects to see stars, means that one treads the pavement
in no solemn, downcast manner. One walks on air, not knowing what to
expect. A vermilion giant may suddenly grin at you in place of the moon,
and if you stand agape you may, with equal suddenness, find yourself
surrounded by artificially brightened eyes from all parts of Europe.
Certainly, Broadway has its thrills with which Fifth Avenue cannot
compete. It would, of course, scorn to do so. Its wonders are for the
saner hours, when Broadway, in its turn, is apt to look a little dingy.
Let us return, therefore, to our proper subject, and try to form some
general idea of its ordinary aspect. I think if one imagines a deep,
dark, strongly flowing river, gliding swiftly and silently between great
white cliffs of varying height, one will come near to it. The surface of
the water is black with occasional spots of green. The black is due to
endless streams of sleek, satin motor cars, eight abreast, in four lines
either way, which all glide along at the same pace. The green is due to
the motor omnibuses, free from all advertisements, which dot the
surface. I have not seen a horse-drawn vehicle in Fifth Avenue—perhaps
they are not allowed. The black river surface, which flows on for the
five miles or so of the street, has an occasional rock in the centre of
it. These rocks, which are really wooden towers from which the traffic
is directed, are placed on the crests of the slight rises in the
undulating surface of the street—I am afraid my metaphor is failing. In
them a big green or red light shows night and day, and with its
appearance the whole five miles of river suddenly stops, or equally
suddenly, flows on again. When it stops, the waters divide, and vast
crowds—mostly Israelites as of old—pass over dry shod. Only those who
inhabit the land of the brave and the free would allow themselves to be
so strictly regulated in this and other matters. But we have spent
enough time on the stream itself, thrilling as it is to watch; let us
examine now the perpendicular cliffs and the shore on either side.
The cliffs in the early part of the street are more even in height. They
begin with some old residences, revived in recent years as the homes of
artists, but very soon are chiefly inhabited by agents for dry goods. By
Twentieth Street, however, hotels and big stores begin, and the street
loses such continuity of skyline as it ever possessed. From there
onwards it is a series of strongly competing buildings which rarely
extend even across a whole block. The effect, therefore, against the sky
is very ragged, like an ill-grown set of giant teeth. No long cornice
lines run through. There are no continuous roofs—indeed, very few roofs
at all to be seen. In a sense, therefore, it is not a street at all,
only a collection of buildings, just as a checker-board town, like most
of New York, is not really a town at all, but only a collection of city
blocks. Unity of some sort, some continuous thought or character, is
required for both. It is this lack of unity which makes Fifth Avenue at
once so exciting and so tiring. One never knows what to expect, there is
no place for the eye to rest without distraction. If the individual
buildings were bad the streets would be a nightmare. As it is, they are
extraordinarily good, and the street becomes a museum of fine specimens,
and one knows how tiring that may be.
These specimens represent European architecture of many modern phases.
French and Italian predominate, English is conspicuous by its absence.
Gradually, however, especially in the banks and in buildings over ten
storeys high, for which no European precedent exists, a true American
type is beginning to emerge. Roughly, it consists of a rich group of
stories near the ground and an equally rich group near the top, with a
plain stalk between.
One of the earliest good buildings round about Thirtieth Street is that
for the famous firm of jewellers and glass-workers, Messrs. Tiffany. I
am told that the founder of the firm was a Venetian merchant. If so, his
architect very appropriately founded his building on the Grimani Palace
on the Grand Canal. He founded his scheme upon this; he did not copy the
original, as is often ignorantly stated. Instead, he made a peculiarly
refined building in marble and bronze, using the general composition and
great scale of the Italian building as his model. A palace on the Grand
Canal, with its rectangular shape and great size, is singularly like a
big building on this other great canal of wealth and traffic. The same
firm of architects, Messrs. McKim, Mead and White, built the Italian
building for a rival firm of silver-smiths—the Gorham building—on the
opposite side of the street. This building has a giant cornice and an
open belvedere under it, and though built twenty-five years ago, and
consequently an old building, probably in danger of destruction, it is
still one of the most striking in the street. Between Thirtieth and
Fortieth Streets are most of the big stores. Unlike similar buildings in
England, these are solid masses of stone, brick or marble architecture
standing squarely on stone piers, instead of, apparently on plate glass.
These stores do not seem to rely, as ours do, on the multitude of goods
shown in the windows. Everyone knows that it is possible to walk through
them and examine the endless counters without being asked to buy. The
windows, therefore, can have one or two typical or seasonable articles
well shown. Later on, as we approach the Central Park, the shops become
more specialised, and consequently smaller. Here are the dealers in
pictures, in jewellery, in _bric-à-brac_, and very exquisite are their
bronze windows, and indeed, their whole fronts. Gradually they are
displacing the private residences from this section of the street,
although a few multi-millionaires still maintain a French château or so,
mostly closed, for the delectation of the rubber-necks.
With the Central Park, however, the character of the street entirely
alters. One cliff disappears, and in its place you have the small trees,
grass and taxi-cab race tracks of the park. On the other side you have
individual houses, a few very vulgar, most of them very restrained and
elegant. The park itself, though, is a failure. Its winding drives and
small hummocks of hills cannot hide its rectangular shape, which the
increasing height of the buildings is every day making more evident. It
should be all levelled into terraces and relaid out in a formal manner.
Fifth Avenue practically ends where the park ends at 110th Street and
before then begins to degenerate. But out of its five miles of length it
has maintained its standard of fine if competing architecture for three
miles, and I know no other street of which that could be said. Apart
from the green of the park, there is one restful thing which we have
passed by. It is the one building of a non-competitive character, with
nothing to sell—material or spiritual—the free public library. It
occupies at least a couple of city blocks, and sets back from the street
with low cream-coloured marble façades and porticoes. Though not
entirely successful as a design, except in the rear façade to its stack
of books, it comes as a very pleasant break to the commercial buildings,
where between Thirty-ninth and Forty-second Streets they reach their
maximum intensity.
It is not only the vast scale of the street as measured by its width,
which seems enormous when one looks at the sea of traffic, but which
seems narrow when one looks at the towering buildings, nor the beauty of
those buildings or the delicacy of their detail that give Fifth Avenue
its peculiar character and interest. Without the great masses of
well-dressed men and women which crowd its wide pavements all day long
it would seem dull and heavy. I have noticed that on Sunday mornings
when searching for its half-buried cathedral and churches. Nowhere else
have I seen such floods of beautifully-dressed women. They appear, too,
to belong to all classes of society. It is only by some subtle and
slight restraint in the line of a cloak that one can distinguish the
woman with a few generations of wealth behind her from the stenographer
or shop assistant. All wear fashionable clothes, all have brilliant
complexions. The men are not so distinguished, but none are poorly
dressed. Indeed, in all New York, from the furthest east to the furthest
west, I could find no one in torn or dirty clothes. The air of
prosperity is everywhere, the rush and flow of life goes on unceasingly.
There is only one backwater, only one place where the competitive view
of life is put aside. It is in the interiors of the clubs, such as the
Metropolitan, the University, the Century, the Union and the Players.
Here the very reverse is the case. I know no clubs in any town so
spacious, so reposeful, so dignified and so pleasant. I imagine, the
human spirit tired of endless competition and the unceasing striving of
the individual to assert himself, instinctively makes a refuge where
communism in the arts of living reaches its highest point. Some of the
best Clubs are in Fifth Avenue or just off it. When one has had an
overdose of the street they are the only restoratives.
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XXIII.
LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL.
LIVERPOOL has now entered into possession of a great work of the
imagination. This work will go on growing until its mastery is evident
to the whole world, but from now onward Liverpool can follow the growth
of her Cathedral with confidence. It is no small thing that a great town
should pursue an ideal of this sort. In doing so, Liverpool has herself
shown something of this great quality of imagination. As a citizen I
like to think whatever may be her failings, it is her outstanding
attribute. During the last twenty years she has not only taken the great
step, which she has lately celebrated, towards the creation of a temple
to her faith, to be, I believe, some day as great and as noble as any
yet made, but during the same space of time she has had the imagination
and faith to follow other enterprises of this spirit, such as the
establishing of a great university, and, among lesser projects, but
still indicating something of the same devotion to non-material things,
a town’s theatre. If the artist who has been responsible for giving life
and form to the Liverpool Cathedral has risen to the heights demanded by
so supreme an occasion, we must, nevertheless, remember from the outset
those who have had the courage during these years to conceive the
project and to provide the means for its realisation on such a scale
unattempted since the Reformation. They, as well as Sir Giles Gilbert
Scott, have laid the whole town under an obligation and have done a
service to us all. Pericles built the temples on the Acropolis, at
Athens, to direct the eyes of the Greeks, flushed with the spoils of
victory, away from material things. To all Liverpool, irrespective of
creed, the great building on St. James’s Mount, in its austerity and
beauty, is a similar symbol and a similar gift.
Before the architect came on the scenes the site was chosen. Those who
were responsible for this, against a good deal of popular clamour,
deserve well of the town. No English Cathedral, with the possible
exception of Durham, has so romantic a setting when you get near to it,
while no other site would, in my view have provided so good a position
from which the Cathedral could assert itself and what it stands for to
the whole Merseyside. Already in its present truncated form it is a
dominant object from the river, though there is one unfortunate grain
elevator below it on the river bank which, in its present shape, seems
to mock it. When its great tower, however, is completed, and its whole
monumental mass is seen grouped symmetrically about it, with its
subsidiary buildings at its base, like attendant tugs to a liner, it
will, I think, focus as it should the interest of all the river views.
It is fortunately separated from the great commercial buildings at the
Pier Head, and the vaster and loftier ones which are yet to arise in
that neighbourhood, by a considerable distance and a slight depression.
The business quarter of Liverpool, like that of New York, being tied to
certain centres, there is likely, for a century or more to come, to be
an intervening space of comparatively small buildings between the
Cathedral and the only structures which may possibly rival it in height
or bulk. This is very important. It would be fatal to confuse two such
different aspects of the town’s life.
Near at hand, and under its wing as it were, the Cathedral has the one
solemn graveyard Liverpool possesses where many of the citizens of its
great period are buried. It is a graveyard, too, of great romantic
interest, in the base of an old quarry with lofty sides, from whose
stone most of the older buildings in the town have been built. On one
side is the Piranesi-like wall supporting Hope-street, lined with
sloping walks and the arched entrances to vaults, while on the other is
the old quarry cliff, in summer green with trees, on which the cathedral
stands. It is among the great merits of Sir Giles Scott’s work that it
suits itself so well in detail to this foreground, just as in bulk and
outline the finished design will suit itself to the larger picture of
the town as a whole. There is a cliff-like character in the bold faces
of the transepts which echoes the cliff below. But it is more than that.
The horizontal mass of the building, which is emphasised in a way quite
unusual in a Gothic structure, tallies very happily with the horizontal
mass of the great stone base which the face of the quarry forms. The
greenery on this base, too, well sets off the colour of the red Woolton
stone, while in the depths below among the winding paths there is hardly
a single white marble tomb or angel to form a jarring note. If there is,
time has softened it to obscurity, and now that the Cathedral
authorities control the graveyard we may be sure no new ones will arise.
So much for the site. Let us now consider for a moment the scheme for
the finished exterior as the architect has planned it. Most people
remember the interesting design with twin towers over the two
transepts—there were only two contemplated in those days—and the high
roof connecting them with which Scott won the competition. A great
feature in this design was a series of gables along the chancel and nave
roof-line like small transepts. These have all been eliminated in order
to get greater horizontal character, together with the twin towers
themselves, whose somewhat obvious picturesqueness appealed to so many
people. Gradually the present symmetrical design has been evolved as the
architect has got deeper and deeper into the work. It has been a matter
of long and mature thought. Let us recall for a moment the stages. The
old design I have just described with its somewhat restless and
irregular outline, but with its strange power and novelty, was the work
of a young pupil in an office hardly out of his teens. The judges, Mr.
Norman Shaw and Mr. Bodley were strongly in its favour. Nevertheless, it
is on record that the committee would not accept it, and, indeed,
refused to accept any of the five final designs. Especially they felt
they could not go to a young man who had as yet built nothing. Finally
they persuaded Mr. Bodley to be joint architect. The latter has often
been blamed for accepting the position, having already acted as judge,
but only by his doing so did Sir Giles Scott and his design survive. For
five years they worked together and then Mr. Bodley died. There is a
large and elaborate model in existence which shows the stage reached in
their joint work. To my thinking it is Sir Giles’ original design tamed
down and prettified. Large traceried windows appear everywhere. However,
when he was free, he reconsidered everything. If there is any Bodley
left, it is in a few mouldings in the Lady Chapel. The main Cathedral is
entirely Scott, and the merit or otherwise that is in it, is his alone.
The work, whether we like it or not at first glance, is obviously
something new in Gothic architecture. The whole development of medieval
Gothic was in the direction of eliminating the wall surfaces. It
achieved this by a sort of skeleton construction of lofty piers, arches,
vaulting ribs, and flying buttresses. Great glass windows filled the
interstices, and these themselves were articulated by stone mullions and
tracery in the same linear way. The resulting structure was an intricate
scheme of thrusts and supports. Everything was propping something else
up. If you pulled out one support the whole would in logical theory come
tumbling down. The scoffers said the Crystal Palace was the unseen goal.
Certainly, whatever hard qualities such an engineering style contained
were emphasised and increased by the archaeologically-minded architects
of the Gothic Revival of last century, not least among them in this
respect, by Sir Giles Scott’s grandfather, Sir Gilbert. Here, however,
at Liverpool, we have something quite different. Although the boney
structure of piers and arches, and ribs is there, the architect has
clothed it with flesh. The most obvious characteristics of his exterior
are its mass and weight. A shell might knock a hole in it, but there
would be no danger of its falling. Instead of his building appearing a
piece of fairylike construction, as many of our old Gothic cathedrals
do, or a thin cast-iron triumph of engineering as some of our modern
churches, Sir Giles’ building has the massiveness and almost the repose
of a great Roman structure. It appears, from a little distance where the
joints cannot be seen, as if it were carved out of the solid, part
almost of the rock on which it stands.
This breadth and solidity which will be still further increased when the
symmetry of the finished building can be seen is a new quality in Gothic
architecture. It is one which is looked for rather in classical
buildings. It seems to me, therefore, in adding this quality to Gothic,
Sir Giles has rescued Gothic from a dead end and given the style a new
life. On the old lines it could only get thinner and thinner, more and
more wiry and linear. Now, however, by his plastic treatment, Gothic can
be made almost as broad and restful, as welcoming and urbane in its
effects as classical architecture, and yet retain its essentially
romantic character. I should like now to see the same architect design a
great banking hall or railway station. I believe he could give them all
the necessary breadth and dignity and yet infuse them with new vitality
and interest. By making too his building ultimately a perfectly
symmetrical structure, he has given his Gothic structure a monumental
character which will be a further distinguishing mark. We all know how
the Gothic cathedrals, particularly in France, rise as great piles of
masonry and glass above the roofs of the town. We know, too, however,
that unless we are looking straight at the west end, with its
symmetrical composition, how ill-balanced they often appear; the strong
square towers at one end and rounded chancel at the other shored up on
every side by an intricacy of flying buttresses. The Liverpool building,
with its square-ended nave exactly balancing in length its square-ended
chancel, with its pairs of square-ended transepts on either side
opposite one another and forming a base from out of which the great wide
tower rises, will make a balanced monument from all points of view. This
is a character then, to which we are not accustomed in Gothic
architecture, but one at which most classical buildings aim. Folk have
gone so far as to say Sir Giles has classicised Gothic architecture just
as they said his American confrère, the late Bertram Goodhue, who stood
to American architecture very much in the same way that he does to
English, Gothicised Classic. Both statements are, of course, an
exaggeration. Sir Giles has not produced any hybrid building. What he
has done has been to enlarge the scope of a certain style in
architecture, and in so doing he has put all architects into his debt.
This development of Gothic which he has brought about, will, I am
convinced, when seen by the historians in retrospect, be the
distinguishing mark of our period. If I am right in this it is an even
bigger thing to have done than to have built the Cathedral.
In judging the exterior as it is to-day, it is very necessary to
remember what the finished building will look like. When this is thought
of, certain things which may seem to stand up rather crudely now, like
the two turrets at the end of the chancel, will sink into their place in
relation to the whole. The great chancel itself, so massive and
rock-like, has indeed rather a stocky appearance. To understand it, it
must be imagined as a sort of porch to the great group of the four
transepts and the central tower. Looking at it from the corner of Hope
Street and Upper Parliament Street—one of the best points of view—we see
it rising out of the quarry with the Lady Chapel on one wing and the
Chapter House on the other, with galleries of vestries and halls about
its base, with the great solid buttresses rushing up to the roof. It is
a complicated but solid mass. Think, then, what this will mean when the
great tower rises behind it, so that the whole of the present chancel
seems but a supporting block at its base, a little bigger than the other
supporting blocks, the transepts. Think of the tower as beginning in
strong, massive walls above the great arches connecting the transepts,
and then gradually breaking into greater and greater complexity as it
masters the building and rises clear above it, to dominate not only the
Cathedral but a large section of Liverpool. I can think of no building
which will have such a dramatic climax as this, and because of this I
can think of no more inspiring gift for a rich man to make to Liverpool
than the gift of this tower.
Then if you walk down under the building along St. James Road you meet
almost equally dramatic effects. The great transept rises sheer like a
cliff from the wide spread of little steps at its foot—of ordinary size
really—while there projects in front of you at one end of these steps a
strong, massive porch, with deeply-moulded doorway and Piranesi-like
grille. Everywhere there is drama, but it is drama well controlled.
There is nothing nightmarish or extreme, though there may be some
youthful excesses, especially in the Lady Chapel. Indeed, one of the
greatest interests of the Lady Chapel to-day is to see by means of it
how the architect and his architecture have grown both in power and
control. I heard someone once say that he liked the outside of the
Cathedral because it was so ugly. Ugly and pretty are dangerous words
which mean very little in themselves, but I think the person I overheard
was getting at something real by his remark. He meant the building had
character and force. It has this everywhere. The great lines of the
design will not be seen till it is completed, but from every part of the
present exterior one can feel the strength of the mind and the
adventureness of the spirit which have conceived and moulded it.