Commentator Charles Boney looks at preservation of architecture.
By Charles Boney
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/national/local-national-585181.mp3
Wilmington, NC – Thomas Wolfe wrote "You can't go home again" and I believe him, but I also offer him my corollary: "You can visit whenever you want." And so I traveled to Philadelphia, my home for two years of graduate studies at Penn, a city that taught me to value the rich diversity of people, of cultures, and- of course- architecture.
After twenty-five years, my touchstones remain imbedded in that great city's framework. Penn's campus remains an academic oasis where Frank Furness' quirky-Victorian Gothic library for the College of Design reigns over its end of Locust Walk. The Victor Cafe in South Philly still offers good Italian food and better opera from its wait-staff. City Hall is once again under restoration, and the current mayor's race is still a fight against the corrupt insiders.
But the Phillies no longer have the pennant, Mayor Goode is gone for good, and that marvelous Girard Bank headquarters on South Broad Street, center of architectural controversy a hundred years ago, has now been converted into a lobby for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The white marble walls of this huge columned space keep conversations subdued in awe-like reference. Having a drink in the central lounge beneath the coffered dome is like having a drink in the Pantheon, and Bacchus' wares are appropriately expensive.
The building's history is curious and one that abruptly bridges a transition of architectural styles from Victorian to Classical Revival. Frank Furness, architect of so many Girard Banks, designed his own version of Victorian grandeur with traces of the Biltmore's Richard Morris Hunt and France's Violet le Duc, a sort of Romanesque night out with Gothic. The resulting designs, like Furness' library for Penn, are now beloved landmarks and define a uniquely Philadelphia style of Victorian architecture.
But Furness' designs were not always revered. When Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 exposed the world to the Gleaming White City, it signaled the end to the Furness Victorian age and a beginning of a Beaux-Arts period for American architecture.
Girard Bank, tired of Frank's now wacky Victorian, initiated a design competition for their new flagship bank. McKim Meade and White, masters of the Beaux-Arts, won the competition with the domed pantheon scheme that exists today, but the elder Furness cried foul! It seems that the scheme had originated under his hand and was spirited away from his drafting room to McKim's. Credit for the building has ultimately been attributed to Furness, with detailing by McKim Meade and White.
The landmark has been admirably renovated as a fine hotel, and it is a fitting reminder of the value of significant architecture, and the preservation of significant architecture, as we enter May- and begin National Preservation Month.
With preservation of architecture, maybe you can go home again.