 Books
THIS OLD HOUSE
Living more or less the way
Wharton and James
did.
BY JUDITH THURMAN
At midday on March 6, 1970, Charles Lockwood,
a senior at Princeton, and his friend Robert Mayer, a photographer,
were taking pictures of a particularly fine Greek Revival doorway
on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village for Lockwood’s
undergraduate thesis on the history of New York row houses (three-to-five-story
attached dwellings of brick or brownstone, most of them built
in the nineteenth century). Their work was interrupted by an
explosion at the Fifth Avenue end of the block followed by a
terrific shock wave. Quickly deciding to document whatever disaster
had taken place, they ran toward the flames and debris spewing
from No. 18, shot a roll of film, and brought it to the Times,
which printed one of the pictures on the front page the next
morning. Lockwood and Mayer learned that the blasted house (also
a Greek Revival gem), which burned to the ground when the gas
lines ignited, was owned by a Midwestern media mogul named James
Wilkerson, whose daughter Cathlyn was a member of the Weathermen.
She and her comrades were using the basement as a “bomb factory,” and, through inexpertness
or bad luck, they had blown themselves up. I was working in Union
Square that spring, and I often walked past the site. After the
rubble was cleared and before the new owner of the lot erected
an anomalous modern house on it—with diagonally canted bay
windows that obscurely commemorated the explosion—the gaping
hole between Nos. 16 and 20 depressed me. It was as if a healthy
tooth had been extracted violently from a familiar smile, transforming
it into the grimace of a memento mori.
In 1972, Lockwood’s much expanded thesis was published as
a book, “Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House, 1783-1929,” illustrated
by Mayer’s photographs, and it became a bible for buffs,
architects, and preservationists. It has just been reissued by
Rizzoli ($75), with sixty-six new color plates by Madeleine Isom,
a section suggesting walking tours of the best row-house blocks
in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and an introduction by Paul Goldberger.
Though Lockwood describes the explosion on West Eleventh Street
as an isolated adventure, the story he tells is that of the demographic
explosions and economic shock waves that have transformed New York
City. The row house is an artifact of the same periods, culture,
and upheavals that shaped the novel. They originate together in
the late eighteenth century and a hundred years afterward jointly
arrive at a golden age. The serene frontage of a venerable street
in Murray Hill or Park Slope—the consensus expressed by its
aesthetic unity about what constitutes moral virtue—is an
image for the predicament of a stifled James hero or a warped Wharton
heroine struggling against prudery and beholdenness to break the
social mold. From Lockwood’s work, a contemporary novelist
might construct a narrative about the enduring intrigue, romance,
poison, and nuance of class privilege—the rise and fall of
the house of Wilkerson. It would consider the way that successive
American generations ruthlessly desecrate the past so that their
rootless heirs will have something to idealize.
In one of Louis Auchincloss’s many fictions that treat or
at least graze the same theme, a patrician hero suffers a reversal
of fortune and moves his family from Park Avenue to much humbler
quarters: a small brownstone on an unfashionable street in the
East Eighties—making do there, as I recall, with a skeleton
staff of a cook and a maid, and adjusting to the disgrace of being
déclassé. Their stoicism in having to crowd themselves
into four floors amused me when I read the story, for I was, at
the time, subletting a studio that had once been the third-best
bedroom of a grand house on East Tenth Street—a residence
of the sort that Auchincloss characters are born in or inherit
and take for granted until fate serves them an eviction notice.
Though I once briefly owned a Tribeca loft (before the neighborhood
was developed), I had, like everyone normal, spent my entire New
York life in a shoebox. There was a sordid hovel on East First
Street that was torched during the immolation-murder of a Hell’s
Angel; a railroad flat on a gang-infested block in the West Eighties;
a garret in Little Italy where I shared a toilet in the hall with
the drag queen next door; a derelict though charming former push-cart
stable; and an illegal crash pad in a brick firetrap above an Irish
bar on Water Street, where I cohabited with a jazz trombonist and
his roommate, a baby-faced heroin addict. Below us lived two elderly
Collyer-like brothers who never saw the light of day and who, for
fifty years, had been collecting manhole covers, pornography, cigar
boxes, orthopedic prostheses, and the carcasses of old radios.
If there were, in 1970, any other residents of the Financial District,
they were moles, like the brothers, and we never saw them. My mother,
who never saw me, thought I was studying Milton while rooming with
a widowed piano teacher on Riverside Drive.
 I eventually outgrew my youthful contempt
for “bourgeois,” which
is to say, habitable, apartments, though never for those in modern
buildings. Like Charles Lockwood, but without his sense of purpose,
I roamed the brownstone blocks of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn
Heights, often at dusk, just as the lights came on and before the
shades were drawn, peeping into the parlor windows of old houses
inhabited by rich bohemians, and lusting for a saffron-yellow library
with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder; a gilt
pier glass with chipped gesso above an Eastlake mantle; French
doors opening to a little balcony or a cobbled patio; a lumpy recamier
with a broken leg propped up by an unabridged dictionary; slanting
pine floors; a high ceiling with a plaster rosette; a spitting
fire; and a piano in the corner under which slept a shaggy dog.
I was gratified to read in “Bricks and Brownstone” that
James Fenimore Cooper was an errant voyeur of my ilk. “There
is,” he writes in “Notions of the Americans” (1828), “a
species of second-rate, genteel houses, that abound in New York,
into which I have looked when passing with the utmost pleasure.
They have, as usual, a story that is half sunk in the earth . .
. and two floors above. The tenants of these are chiefly merchants,
or professional men, in moderate circumstances, who pay rents of
from $300 to $500 a year. You know that no American who is at all
comfortable in life will share his dwelling with another.” The
relish with which he describes the tasteful opulence of these mediocre
houses’ mahogany appointments suggests that he did more ogling
from the sidewalk than passing by. Fashions in and prices of New
York real estate are, as one knows, eminently labile, but the habit
of yearning for a poetic old house is so ingrained in some of us—me,
in particular—that I sometimes forget I have one.
My own reversals of fortune are too predictable
to relate, but my son and I now live in a narrow Yorkville brownstone
with a deep garden dominated by a majestic elm that has miraculously
weathered the epidemics that have decimated its species. Our
house has also weathered the epidemics—of decay, development, and conversion—that
have decimated its species, and about which Lockwood writes with
artless passion and consummate authority. It is part of a row built
in the early eighteen-seventies for middle-class families, possibly
those of the foremen or managers at the Ruppert Brewery, which
opened in 1867 and was, for a century, a major employer of the
neighborhood’s German and Hungarian immigrants. In 2003,
one needs real nerve to call any single-family house in Manhattan
second-rate genteel, though mine was originally not even that.
It is fifteen feet side (most town houses are from three to ten
feet wider), with two rooms to a floor and a basement that was
once the coal cellar. One block to the east, a “better” class
of native New Yorker lived in more lavish dwellings with “English
basements” and Anglo-Italianate facades. My son, however,
doesn’t care about such nice, and in any case antiquated,
social distinctions: he complains that we have too much room (and
perhaps we did until a friend gave him a drum set), and wishes
that, “like everybody else,” we lived in an ordinary,
two-bedroom apartment. To console him for the embarrassments of
privilege, I make him do chores, and one is to lock up at night.
In the dead of winter, when the dogs are howling in the back yards
and the wind is high, he sometimes guiltily professes a desire
for a doorman. We bought the house—and it’s why we
could—at a moment when most New Yorkers were, like my son,
wary of a shadowy garden, a front door that opened from the street
into their kitchen, and bedroom windows accessible by a painter’s
ladder. Insecurity, however, is a luxury on which I never economize.
Having studied Lockwood’s text with relative assiduity,
I set out one morning shod in cross-trainers to give my reading
comprehension a pop quiz. I wasn’t sanguine about my powers
of discernment, as I’ve failed similar exercises in the Central
Park Ramble, where I practice bird-watching for dummies and am
scarcely able to distinguish a rook from a duck. There are fewer
principal styles of New York row-house architecture than avian
species, though there are still plenty: red brick Federal (the
earliest and the sparest of ornament); Greek Revival (fluted columns
with Doric or Ionic capitals are the giveaway); Gothic Revival
(creepy); Italianate (the classic brownstone with protruding stoop);
Second Empire (mansard roof); Neo-Grec (“squared-off forms
and incised detail”); Queen Anne (asymmetrical and gloomy,
with recessed porches); Romanesque (rounded arches and Byzantine
leaf-work); Renaissance (pale limestone or yellow brick with fancy
pilasters); Colonial Revival (fanlight windows); and my favorite
multiple-choice option—“Eclectic.” A few “countrified” wooden
frame houses still exist, as does the odd brick dwelling with a
crenellated Dutch gable. I was quickly able to identify a steel-and-concrete
private house with walls of translucent glass as an homage to modernism,
but I found it difficult to tell one nineteenth-century style from
another—partly, of course, because so few row houses are
still virginal. My own, for example, which should, in principle,
have been budget Italianate, was deflowered by a fashionable architect
in the nineteen-thirties, who performed a “neoclassical” makeover
inside and out—stripping the façade of its stoop,
cornice, and lintels, and the interiors of their black-walnut woodwork
and florid detail. Thus have innumerable overwrought maidens been
relieved of heavy petticoats and transformed into women of the
world.
I know that one should resist the impulse
to anthropomorphize, but town houses have a presence and a civility
missing from more monolithic forms of residential real estate,
particularly high-rise apartment buildings. Those “human” qualities are obviously
a function of scale, age, and the imprint of hand labor, though
perhaps not merely. The mien of old houses—their solidarity
and defiance as survivors—makes them seem animate. There
are graffiti-scarred terraces in Hell’s Kitchen that remind
me of painted girls in shabby finery (most
hopelessly degraded, a few improbably intact) lined up in a cheap
dance hall. There are uniform brown ranks in Fort Greene as solemn
about their virile dignity as a phalanx of cadets in their class
picture. One of the functions of a high rise is to deflect curiosity
and contamination, and it returns one’s gaze with the stony inscrutability of
a thing. I’ve always felt that there was something inherently
soulful about row houses, and, with Lockwood’s help, I can
now say that a house may guard the mystery of its inner life, but
its face invites us to imagine that it has one.
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