St. Mark's Church (at 10th St./2nd Ave) was built in 1799 on land that belonged to Peter Stuyvesant. It's steeple, however, was erected in 1828. Some historical sources credit the design to Martin Euclid Thompson, an architect/builder of the era. Thompson designed the Assay building on Wall St. (The façade of that structure was tranfered to the Metropolitan Museum). Other documents attrubute the steeple to Thompson and Ithiel Town. Town is considered the founder of the country's first architectural firm and he is a prime suspect for the brickwork design at 211 Pearl St., given the striking associations with other designs in his manuscript collection and circumstantial evidence. In many recent surveys of New York City's architecture, however, the steeple is said to be the work of either "Town and Thompson" or "Ithiel Town" alone.
Without going into manuscript document details, it appears certain that Thompson was at the least, the principal contact between the firm and the church, and that he undertook surpervision of the construction work. Determining the weight of each partners design input is more of an open question. But given our knowledge of each figure, the steeple appears, at least in part, Town's inspiration, or at the least, that he added important refinements. But these questions are best left to architectural historians.
There also seems to be some confusion or oversight about the style of architecture, with most modern scholars identifying the steeple as "Greek revival". A review in the New York Mirror in 1828 however, discusses its Egyptian influence, with even a Venetian detail in the window treatment.This would seem a minor point, if not for the fact that there is no other extant example of the Egyptian revival from this early 19th century period. Or is there?
The symbol at 211 Pearl St. may also be read as a Greco-Egyptian document within a Christian framework, similar to the St. Mark's steeple. Measurements of the steeple are not possible at this time, but they may also reveal proportions in harmony with the brickwork symbol - as is seen between Town's villa plan, mathematical exercises and portrait geometry, and the symbolic brickwork. Moreover, restoration of Town's Trinity Church in New Haven, CT in the early 20th century, built by Town in 1818, revealed what a scholar of the period described as "…unsuspecting architectural refinements that corresponded with research done on monuments of the old world."
In summary, the associations that exist between the steeple of St. Mark's Church and the symbol at 211 Pearl Street: 1) Greco-Egyptian structures within a Christian context. 2) Built in the same period, 1828 and 1831 respectively. 3) A direct or secondary association with the same architect, Ithiel Town, who collaborated at St. Mark's church and built the prototype for the commercial warehouse at 211 Pearl St.
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Posted by: thesis paper | August 08, 2009 at 03:41 AM