Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-nwzlb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T15:17:27.368Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Iconography of the American City: or, A Gothic Tale of Modern Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Peter W. Williams
Affiliation:
Distinguished Professor of Religion and American Studies at Miami University. On January 9, 999, he delivered this paper as the presidential address to the American Society of Church History.

Extract

Some dozen years ago, I began in collaboration with David Holmes, Dewey Wallace, Charles Wallace, and others to conduct tours of houses of worship during the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church History. The challenge of these tours for me gradually metamorphosed from providing basic information on dates, architectural styles, and parish history highlights—all useful enough in themselves—to reading these buildings in the broader context of the urban built environment. Churches, synagogues, and other religious buildings do not appear in the vacuum that a slide presentation or text illustration might suggest. Rather, they are in a continual mute dialogue with their surroundings, which in the urban context tend to be other buildings of commercial or civic purpose. The context is also four-dimensional. Not only do religious buildings themselves undergo expansion, remodeling, and changes in denominational identity, but their neighbors frequently change even more rapidly.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Brown, Elizabeth Mills, The United Church on the Green: An Architectural History (New Haven, Conn.: United Church on the Green, 1965), 14.Google Scholar

2. See, for example, an 1850 version in Osterweis, Rollin G., Three Centuries of New Haven, 1638–1938 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), facing 270.Google Scholar

3. Brown, United Church, 16 ff.;Google Scholarsee also idem, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 100103,107.Google Scholar

4. Pierson, William H. Jr, American Buildings and Their Architects: The Colonial and Neoclassical Styles (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 5558, 98–99,102–105.Google Scholar

5. Pierson, William H. Jr, American Buildings and Their Architects: Technology and the Picturesque, the Corporate and Early Gothic Styles (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 125–34.Google Scholar

6. Pierson, Technology and the Picturesque, 159 it.Google Scholar

7. Pierson, Technology and the Picturesque, 184–96.Google Scholar

8. Pierson, Technology and the Picturesque, 159–67.Google Scholar

9. Pierson, Technology and the Picturesque, 432–55.Google Scholar

10. Whitehall, Walter Muir, Boston: A Topographical History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1959), 165–66.Google Scholar

11. Marquand, John P., The Late George Apley (1936; reprint, New York: Washington Square, 1965), 19.Google Scholar

12. Norton, Bettina A., ed., Trinity Church: The Story of an Episcopal Parish in the City of Boston (Boston: Wardens and Vestry of Trinity Church, 1978), 6.Google Scholar

13. Norton, Trinity Church, 57–58.Google Scholar

14. Norton, Trinity Church, 38.Google Scholar

15. Norton, Trinity Church, 46.Google Scholar

16. Quoted in Douglass Shand Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1978), 47.Google Scholar

17. Norton, Trinity Church, 30.Google Scholar

18. Tucci, Built in Boston, 55.Google Scholar

19. Whitehill, Topographical History, 172–73.Google Scholar

20. Wilson, Richard Guy, “The Great Civilization,” in The American Renaissance, 1876–1917, ed. Murray, Richard N. et al. (New York: Pantheon, Brooklyn Museum, 1979), 21.Google Scholar

21. On Chicago especially, see Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar

22. Richard Guy Wilson, in Murray, American Renaissance, 25.Google Scholar

23. Whitehill, Topographical History, 172–73.Google Scholar

24. Murray, American Renaissance, 12.Google Scholar

25. Wick, Peter Arms, A Handbook to the Art and Architecture of the Boston Public Library (Boston: Associates of the Boston Public Library, 1977), passim.Google Scholar

26. Wick, Handbook, 36.Google Scholar

27. James, Henry, The American Scene (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), 249–50.Google Scholar

28. See Levine, Lawrence W., Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), chap. 2, “The Sacralization of Culture.”Google Scholar

29. On Cram, see Tucci, Built in Boston, chap. 7, “Ralph Adams Cram and Boston Gothic”;Google ScholarMuccigrosso, Robert, American Gothic: The Mind and Art of Ralph Adams Cram (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980);Google Scholarand Williams, Peter W., “A Mirror for Unitarians: Catholicism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New England” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970), chap. 6.Google Scholar

30. See Meyer, Marilee Boyd et al. , Inspiring Reform: Boston's Arts and Crafts Movement (Wellesley, Mass.: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Harry N. Abrams, 1997).Google Scholar

31. On All Saints, Ashmont, see Tucci, Built in Boston, 158 ff.Google Scholar

32. Tucci, Douglass Shand, Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900, vol. 1 of Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).Google Scholar

33. Scroggs, Marilee Munger, A Light in the City: The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago (Chicago: Fourth Presbyterian Church 1990), 7576, 86–89.Google Scholar

34. Pierson, Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles, 360–72.Google Scholar

35. Clubbe, John, Cincinnati Observed: Architecture and History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 4956.Google Scholar

36. Pierson, Technology and the Picturesque, chap. 5.Google Scholar

37. Hall, Edward Hagaman et al. , A Guide to the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in the City of New York (New York: Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral Church, 1965).Google Scholar

38. Feller, Richard T. and Fishwick, Marshall W., For Thy Great Glory (Culpepper, Va.: Community, 1965), 3.Google Scholar

39. Feller and Fishwick, For Thy Great Glory, 4–5.Google Scholar

40. Applewhite, E. J., Washington Itself An Informal Guide to the Capital of the United States (New York: Knopf, 1981), 296.Google Scholar

41. van Leeuwen, Thomas A. P., The Skyward Trend of Thought: The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 28.Google Scholar

42. Van Leeuwen, Skyward Trend of Thought, 60.Google Scholar

43. Alberts, Robert C., Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787–1987 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), 85.Google Scholar

44. Alberts, Pitt, 86, 91, 99,100,122.Google Scholar

45. Betsky, Aaron, James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism (New York: Architectural History Foundation, MIT Press, 1994), 111.Google Scholar

46. Betsky, James Gamble Rogers, 126.Google Scholar

47. Betsky, James Gamble Rogers, 121.Google Scholar

48. Willard, Ruth Hendricks and Wilson, Carol Green, Sacred Places of San Francisco (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1985), 3742.Google Scholar

49. White, Norval and Willensky, Elliot, AIA Guide to New York City (New York: Collier, 1978), 260;Google Scholarvan Leeuwen, Skyward Trend of Thought, 71 ff.;Google ScholarLane, George A., S.J., Chicago Churches and Synagogues: An Architectural Pilgrimage (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1981), 163.Google Scholar

50. Oliver, Richard, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (New York: Architectural History Foundation, MIT Press, 1983), 151.Google Scholar

51. Oliver, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, 184 ff.;Google Scholarsee also Luebke, Frederick C., ed., A Harmony of the Arts: The Nebraska State Capitol (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).Google Scholar

52. Bogart, Michele H., Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 309316.Google Scholar