Art: Period for a Period Piece?

While some U.S. cities spend millions rebuilding the past after it has been destroyed (as witness, Williamsburg, Va.), others heedlessly continue to destroy a rich heritage of irreplaceable architectural monuments. Case in point: the impending destruction of one of the finest Gothic Revival mansions in the U.S., designed in 1846, and maintained in near perfect condition as a period piece both inside and out until it was willed to the city of Bridgeport, Conn, last year by the late Industrialist Archer C. Wheeler. Because the mansion stands on what is now valuable downtown real estate, Bridgeport’s Socialist Mayor Jasper McLevy last August got court permission to demolish the house, build in its place a new twelve-story city hall and civic center.

What makes Bridgeport’s Walnut Wood one of the nation’s treasures is that it remains the best example of the work of Alexander Jackson Davis, one of the most versatile of architects, who designed state capitols (Indiana, North Carolina) and institutions (the first New York University), but preferred to build houses for people who felt, as one contemporary critic put it, that “there is something wonderfully captivating in the idea of a battlemented castle.” Destruction of his Walnut Wood would leave only one other of Davis’ major Gothic mansions still standing and unaltered: Lyndhurst, the marble residence of the late Jay Gould in Tarrytown, N.Y., now owned by Gould’s daughter, the Duchess of Talleyrand.

Walnut Wood, a 17-room mansion built for Saddle Maker Henry K. Harral, was looked up to in its time as a work of art and the acme of taste. It boasts a tower without, twin parlors within. Elaborate valances edged with silk ball fringe hung at the lancet bay windows, framing Chauncey Ives’s most famous statue, his marble semi-nude Pandora. The dining-room walls are paneled in fine, carved walnut. The ceiling of the great hallway is a Gothic arch of wood ribs with gilded bosses representing the heads of such men as Shakespeare, Socrates and George Washington. The stairway, lighted with bronze statues holding a gaselier on each newel post, led to the private upstairs chapel, later converted into a billiard room.

News that this historic period piece was to be razed brought cries of protest. From Washington, B.C. the National Trust for Historic Preservation wrote: “Nowhere in the state, or even in the nation, is there a better preserved or more notable example of the Gothic Revival era.” Architecture professors from Yale, Cornell and Columbia added their protest. Said Historian Wayne Andrews: “Its destruction would be a tragedy.”

As protests rolled in, including a petition with 5,000 signatures, both Republican and Democratic candidates for mayor in the Nov. 5 election came out in favor of saving the manse. Socialist Mc Levy, who is running for a 13th term, sent his men out to tear down the greenhouse, but held off advertising for bids on demolition of the house. Walnut Wood seemed to have won a stay of execution—until after the election.