Law and Order and Disorder
Around the corner from our vet is a 120+ year old building that used to be a police station, but in recent years was turned into an office building. It’s a massive place, once one of the biggest buildings in its neighborhood.
And it’s fantastically ornate by modern standards. Not just in terms of the front of the building…
… but also the back, which faces out on an alley. When it was built, there’s a good chance the nearby houses still had outhouses facing that alley. I’ve heard that well into the 1950s, many houses didn’t have hot water heaters and men would line up to use the sinks in the building’s restrooms for hot water for their morning shave.
Also, I met one old neighbor once who had stories to tell about paddy wagons rolling up late at night to the alley door below, and while police assumed nobody was watching, they’d club the arrested people into submission.
The building is not just decorated with details in the brickwork, like spires and arches, but also facades of elaborately carved brownstone, like around these windows.
And if you look, you notice the faces.
All over the building there are beautifully carved faces.
And what’s more, each one is completely different from the others. Most are hard to make out from the ground without binoculars or a camera lens, but the architect still went to the effort and expense to customize even these details.
Part of the thinking, no doubt, was civic pride, but you also have to wonder if there was a projection of medieval mentality over the people who were brought through the doors.
The one with the leaves looks like the Green Man. Very cool building.
Ooh, I love those carvings.
Not a police station but Pittsburgh has beautiful old county jail downtown. You may have seen it if you ever watched the movie Mrs. Soffel.
The oldest parts of Alcatraz dating to the 1800s are pretty ornate, although they were originally built for the military and then converted to a prison. Of course the idea that the military would have such elaborate ornamentation is pretty hard to imagine now.
The old Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is supposed to be awfully ornate in places too.
https://www.inquirer.com/things-to-do/eastern-state-penitentiary-museums-philadelphia-tours-tickets-20190417.html
I wonder if there’s intentional iconography to the faces and we just don’t get the reference. Like you could tell me the dude with the grapes around his face is Bacchus and meant to reflect the vice of public drunkenness.
…I think there’s at least a decent chance of that sort of thing…stonemasons are an odd bunch & those are pretty far along the way to being gargoyle-type adornments…by way of some sort of bas-relief tradition?
…I know in plenty of cities you can get more confusing-but-entertaining mileage out of masonic signs & portents in various levels of architectural abundance than dan brown wrung out of the da vinci code, anyway…so it certainly wouldn’t surprise me
What really stands out to me is they depict different faces. Like generalized silly face bas-relief sculptures, especially at that height, wouldn’t need to be so distinct.
…could be I’m wrong about this part…but the each-one-unique-even-though-few-people-could-see-them-well-enough-to-notice thing is/was generally the case with the gargoyle carvings, I think
…but either way, very much yes to that part
That’s an amazing example of Richardsonian Romanesque. Do you happen to know if it’s an H. H. Richardson? His stuff is to be found all over the place, and the style is/was even more common. There’s a trolley line in Boston that takes you out to the suburbs and there’s a small building, I guess it’s a waiting room, and that’s a Richardson. That’s kind of like wandering into a Greyhound station and discovering that the men’s room was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. As someone who relishes the look and feel of turn-of-the-20th century, if not the social mores, Richardson is one of my faves.
Just ETA, many cities have cutesy trolley lines geared to tourists. San Diego has one, and the San Francisco cable cars. Better Half dragged me to somewhere in the Boston area and we took a trolley, which I loved because it was very 1900, and he told me that it wasn’t a tourist attraction, it was actually a vital part of the transportation network.
I think it was on that same trip (he’s from Boston; we’ve been many times) that we strolled up to a very buzz-y restaurant on a Saturday night at 8:45 pm and they wouldn’t let us in because the kitchen closed at 9. Also very 1900.
AND, I can’t tell you the number of restaurants we’ve been to up there where I’ve said, “And we’d like a drinks menu/wine list” and the response has been “We don’t serve liquor!” As if I had asked about dog soup. Very strange place. Very cute, though.
The date on the front is 1896 and Richardson was dead, so at best it might have been a follower.