| During the 1880s and the life of the Queen Anne style, the
architectural fashion that each row house have a measure of individuality
and the streetscape a visually exciting appearance reached
its culmination. The present “epoch of Queen of Anne
is a delightful insurrection against the monotonous era of
rectangular building,” declared one magazine in the early
1880s. In America, the Queen Anne style combined the “Free
Classic” work
of the esteemed British architect Richard Norman Shaw and the colonial
ornament coming from a renewed interest in America’s long
forgotten eighteenth-century buildings. Richard Norman Shaw’s
inspiration . . . was the early Georgian style brick city house
of the eighteenth century. . . . [Shaw’s] Free Classic mode
included a picturesquely irregular plan and silhouette, a pitched-gable
roofline with large chimneys, large windows, and simple white trim. The
longstanding hegemony of the brownstone front for New York row
houses ended . . . The new style row houses often had recessed
porches, set several feet into the house behind a half circle
arch, to break the flat row house front dramatically with a mysterious
dark volume. . . . A three-sided bay window at the first floor
running from the basement to the roof was another popular way
to
break the flat row house front. . . . The windows often varied
in size and shape and imaginatively employed different size glass
panes for striking visual effect. . . . Decorative stained glass
also appeared in first floor windows or the sidelights of the
front doors. Few New York row houses, whether brick or brownstone
front, completely reflected the Queen Anne style. In American
architectural history,
the late nineteenth century saw the free mixing of different
styles on a single building and a flexibility of forms and ornaments
within
each style. The Queen Anne row house, therefore, often included
forms and details of the passing Neo-Grec style and the contemporary
Romanesque and Renaissance styles. The Queen Anne style . . .
lacked any strong champions in the United States . . . By the
late 1880s, one New Yorker wrote that “the
extravagances of ‘Queen Anne’ have disappeared .
. . that strange mode of building has spent its force.”
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