"This Old House" features the Italianate style

A scene from "This Old House" this week.

I was channel-surfing tonight and was pleased to see an episode of "This Old House" that focused on Italianate-styled architecture. As I have mentioned several times on this blog, Tuscaloosa certainly has buildings constructed in this style, among them the Jemison Mansion. Receiving inspiration from the Italian Renaissance era, this style is a lot fancier than the conservative, more flat-faced Federal style dwellings built during the late eighteenth century.  Builders had to rely on local timber to construct such Federal buildings. Italianate buildings announce the growth of industry and the arrival of the railroad in mid-nineteenth century America, which permitted the transportation of materials and resources from elsewhere.

The episode of PBS' "This Old House" that I saw showed a restoration of a plain Italianate house, but also a fancier one with lusher embellishments like the tower pictured here.

One postscript: I'll be learning more about the Federal style as I prep for my American Civilization to 1865 course over the summer. I'll share some of what  I discover with students enrolled in "The Nineteenth Century City," too, because few concepts exists in a vacuum. Speaking to this point are words heard from the docent on my recent Chicago architecture river tour: "Architecture is a way for generations across time to learn more about one another." She was quoting architecture historian Vincent Scully. His words resonate with my ongoing interest in buildings. I think now about humbler structures like the shot gun house my grandparents occupied in South Florida when I was a child (so named because the rooms were lined up in such a straight line, you could point a gun through the front door and shoot out the back door). To see such a house across time during the 20th century was to know the residents were likely poor as to see an Italianate during the nineteenth century was to know the occupants were likely wealthy.

But wealth is not the only thing that determines how and where people live. The arrival of apartments in nineteenth century America, as Gunther Barth writes, owed greatly to a lack of space. We will learn more about this and other topics this fall.

the wonders of a river

Old World columns decorate this modern structure.

A view of the many bridges crossing the Chicago River.

This building curves along the Chicago River.

I just returned from a quick trip to Chicago where I saw a college friend as a means of unwinding from my work on a manuscript. During my visit, I kept my eyes open for anything that would push my thinking about this upcoming course.

Leander James McCormick's double-house.

While walking around downtown, I passed by a double-house once owned by industrialist Leander James McCormick. The house was constructed in the Italianate style also seen on Tuscaloosa’s DePalma’s Italian restaurant. The restaurant, which was originally a bank, was built in the 1870s like this house and Tuscaloosa’s Jemison Mansion. The double-house was built in 1875 after the famous 1871 fire that began in a Chicago barn. The fire has figured into many pop culture products including songs. During my visit I went on an architecture boat tour on the Chicago River and was directed by a docent to look west  in order to see a huge radio tower that now sits in the approximate area of the barn in question.

One of the things I was most struck by on this tour, which was sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, was how nineteenth century Chicagoans went to great lengths – literally  - to stop polluting nearby Lake Michigan by making the river flow toward St. Louis.  In doing so, they narrowly avoided a lawsuit by St. Louis residents who hardly wanted Chicago’s dirty water.

I learned, too, how Chicagoans across time have had a love-hate relationship with their 156-mile long river, which is interesting. This waterway was a critical reason why the city even became a key site. For sure, it was this river that drew Jean Baptist Point du Sable, a man of African and French descent who is regarded as the city’s first permanent settler, to the area in 1790. By 1837, the city was chartered and quickly grew.  The entrances of some of the buildings adjacent to the river eventually began to face away from the river, which was soon filled with debris and who knows what else. As the city gentrifies, new constructions, among them high-priced apartments, face a now-cleaner river. 

As the students in this class will learn, water is often  important to how people make decisions about where to build things.  Just look at the new construction in Tuscaloosa. A lot of such construction  - including the Embassy Suites Hotel - is on  or near the Black Warrior River!

juxtaposing a New York mansion against DePalma's building

This multi-million dollar New York mansion was built in 1871.

DePalma's restaurant sits in a building also constructed in 1871.

Ian Crawford leads the students on a tour of  Jemison Mansion.

Architecture is not my area of expertise, but I have learned more about it than I expected while teaching this class. Indeed, it was interesting to read this evening an article in The New York Times about an Upper East Side mansion that was completed in 1871, the year that the building in which Tuscaloosa's Depalma's Italian restaurant sits was constructed. At the time, the building housed, as one of the students in this class has written in a short essay, Tuscaloosa's First National Bank. In this instance, it is apparent again that Tuscaloosa posed tensions with another "urban" space during the nineteenth century. Notably, the New York mansion and Depalma's  were both constructed in the Italianate style,which was popular in the United States from the mid-19th century through the 1890s. Like numerous other architectural styles, the Italianate style receives inspiration from a more distant past, specifically the Italian Renaissance architectural period some three centuries earlier. If memory serves, Tuscaloosa's Jemison-Van de Graff Mansion, which the students visited earlier this semester, was built in the same style. As an aside, that mansion was constructed about ten years earlier on the eve of the Civil War.