Alexander
Wadsworth Longfellow (l) and Frank Alden (r), Richardson's Assistants (2)
Train up an
apprentice in the way he should go, and when he is an independent
architect, he will not depart from it.
H. H. Richardson was not known to be a religious man.
However, this paraphrased Proverb describes the development of the
key assistants in his architectural office.
The staff was organized as an atelier, the practical
teaching environment that
Richardson
experienced at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in
Paris
.
A remarkably talented
group of architects emerged from the short, twenty-year existence of
Richardson
’s practice. Among those who
served as chief draftsman were Charles McKim, Stanford White, H. Langford
Warren, A. Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles A. Coolidge.
Those who supervised construction as resident architects included
Charles Rutan, George Shepley and Frank Alden.
From these individuals, prominent architectural offices formed:
McKim, Mead & White; Warren, Smith & Briscoe; Longfellow,
Alden & Harlow; and Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge.
To this group, we should add Herbert Burdett, who had a brief, productive
practice with James Marling in Buffalo.
Considering their
closely related parentage, the Romanesque Revival churches of these firms
can be considered cousins. In
two articles, we will look for family resemblances among these to
Shadyside Presbyterian (the design of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge –
SR&C). Longfellow, Alden
& Harlow (LA&H) formed at about the same time as SR&C, upon
Richardson
’s death in 1886. This
article examines LA&H churches as Shadyside’s First Cousins, Part 1
– The Younger Generation.
(See also
Shadyside's Sisters and
Shadyside's Second Cousins and First Cousins Older
Generation)
None of these firms
practiced
Richardson
’s Romanesque very long, as architectural styles continued to change
fast. The critical acclaim for
these architects has been muted until recent decades, in part because
Henry Russell Hitchcock, an influential twentieth century historian,
denigrated their talents to varying degrees.
However, newer scholarship and the legacy of their buildings attest
that
Richardson
“trained them up” well in planning, functional design and refined
proportioning.
All Saints' Episcopal
All
Saints' Episcopal Church, Reiserstown, MD, (1)
A. W. Longfellow,
nephew of the poet, was the only assistant as well educated as Richardson
– Harvard and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Wanting to flex his own muscles, and piqued by the ascendancy of
Coolidge in the office, he left shortly before
Richardson
’s death. He and Frank Alden
had both supervised work at
Pittsburgh
’s Allegheny County Buildings. When
Alden’s assignment there for SR&C ended (or, perhaps, before), they
formed a practice with Alfred Branch Harlow maintaining offices in
Boston
and
Pittsburgh. Longfellow remained in Boston
and his influence was strongest there.
In
Richardson
’s and his own practices, Longfellow developed expertise in railroad
station design. Could this
have attracted the attention of William Keyser, a railroad man and donor
of a building to All Saints’ Episcopal Church (1891), near
Baltimore
? In any case, Longfellow had
a demonstrated facility with low, horizontal, small buildings like
railroad stations. It served
him and the patron exceedingly well in the scale and form of All
Saints’.
Richardson's Old Colony Railroad
Station, North Easton, MA (4)
Keyser was a summer
resident of
Reisterstown,
MD, where he attended All Saints’. He
was charmed by a summer chapel in
Massachusetts
, which became the inspiration for the Maryland
church he dedicated to his mother. All
Saints’ charm owes not only to its picturesque massing, but also to the
efficient combination of elements required by a small Anglican
congregation.
 
All
Saints' Apse exterior and interior (1)
The broad, low roof
– terminating gracefully at “sprung” edges – embraces the nave.
An Episcopal church of this era “wants” a clearly divided
chancel. This is expressed
outside by the rounded apse, and inside by the broad Romanesque arch.
A crossing of sorts is formed by a transept balanced by a large
dormer with triplet windows. A
fleche spire, a touch that would have been well known to Longfellow from
his time in
France, tops the intersection. A
comfortable entrance is afforded by the porte cochere, a feature strongly
recalling a rail station.
Longfellow’s use of
color reflects his teacher’s mastery of polychromy, even though
Richardson
employed it rarely, late in his career.
The dark gray random ashlar of the walls is accented by lighter
stone for window trim, quoins, belt course and water table.
Both are subsidiary to the striking red tile roof.
Two years after the
church completion, a freestanding bell tower was erected.
Its design and detailing match the church so well that it is
reasonable to attribute it to Longfellow.
The two structures rest comfortably on a site that still retains
much of its rustic character.
All
Saints' Tower (1)
The ecclesiological
purposes of All Saints’ Episcopal and Shadyside Presbyterian were quite
different at the end of the nineteenth century.
Yet they show the adaptability that
Richardson
found in Romanesque. His
apprentices obviously learned this well, as each church achieved a
satisfying and lasting result. The
differences were decreased in 1937, when Shadyside’s sanctuary, under
the influence of an ecumenical movement, became “high church
Presbyterian.” Its sloped
nave was leveled, its chancel divided, raised and set into a new rounded
apse. In its compactness and
graceful medieval lines, All Saints’ relates to Shepley, Rutan &
Coolidge’s 1892 Chapel for the
Pittsburgh
church.
Shadyside Chapel
All Saints’ Church
is a gem of Longfellow’s long practice.
It is not better known, perhaps, because it is not in
Boston
or
Pittsburgh
where a majority of his work resides.
In the skillful combination of Romanesque with English Arts &
Crafts movement sensibilities, this church shows the personal influence of
Longfellow. As such, it
demonstrates an increasing independence of the
Pittsburgh
and
Boston
offices. Five years later, the
practices amicably split to concentrate their efforts regionally.
Renderings
of All Saints' (2) and West End Methodist (3)
West End Methodist Episcopal
Frank Alden had a
knack for dealing with clients. The
skill would have served him well in his role as
Richardson
’s on-site representative during construction.
It also made him an effective salesman.
He was responsible for some of LA&H’s earliest
Pittsburgh
commissions. One was for
Sunnyledge, the home of
Shadyside
Church
member Dr. James McClelland in the
East End
, just blocks from the church. Another
was at the opposite corner of the city for a Methodist congregation in the
West End
.
 
Richardson's
Emmanuel Episcopal (l), Alden's Sunnyledge (r)
Both structures show
the influence of
Richardson
churches. Sunnyledge adopted
the simple geometrical shapes, smooth surfaces and understated brickwork
patterning of Emmanuel Episcopal on Pittsburgh’s North Side. The
West End
church employed rusticated stonework and a Syrian arch entrance from the
Trinity Boston buildings. Alden
is believed to have been the principal design influence in his new firm on
these buildings. Both rise
above mere imitation of
Richardson
designs.
Entrances, Alden's West End
Church (l), Richardson's Glessner House (r)
Both show the
firm’s skill in setting structures into Pittsburgh’s steep hillsides. The
West End
church crowds its narrow street and makes the entrance/bell tower all the
more imposing. The inviting
recessed entrance is a welcome palliative.
This feature is seen at
Richardson’s Trinity Parish Hall as well as at a secondary entrance to Chicago’s Glessner House. The
stonework of this 1886 church relates it to
Shadyside
Church
(four years later).
West
End Methodist Episcopal (now AME Zion), screens cover round arch tower
windows
Like Shadyside’s
1890 sanctuary,
West End
’s seating was disposed radially on a sloping floor.
The Methodist church, however, was even more auditorium-like with
theater style seats in place of pews and no central aisle.
Alden supplied them with an Akron Plan arrangement.
Popular before and after the turn of the century, this layout
provided a Sunday School with individual classrooms arrayed around and
opening onto a central space used for opening exercises.
As at West End
Church, the Sunday School often adjoined the sanctuary through huge sliding or
folding doors, affording overflow seating for worship.
West End
Church
remains vital today, housing an active A.
M. E. Zion congregation. This
church finally replaced the folding theater seats in the late 1990s, when
maintaining them was no longer practical.
It has been said that H. H. Richardson
surely knew how to design a tower. All Saint's, West End and
Shadyside each has a round tower (as does Sunnyledge), so the disciples
learned from the master.
  
One might speculate
about the
Western Pennsylvania
rivalry between the former colleagues, LA& H and SR&C.
There was a contractual dispute concerning the LA& H commissions
for the Duquesne Club and the Carnegie Institute. It
seems likely that LA&H was one of the unsuccessful bidders at
Shadyside. While SR&C
scored two plum contracts, Shadyside Church and Freemasons’ Hall,
LA&H Pittsburgh clients equaled these in prominence and overwhelmed
them in quantity. Indeed, a
number residences on the church’s street, Westminster Place, can be firmly or tentatively attributed to Longfellow Alden &
Harlow. These two firms,
representing the younger generation of
Richardson
assistants, may have produced the most closely related “First
Cousins.”
P.S.
Another of Richardson's assistants showed great promise before, like
Richardson, he died young. Herbert Burdett moved to Buffalo to
replace Joseph Lyman Silsbee as the partner of James Marling. In
1888, a year after leaving SR&C, he assisted in the design of the Church
of the Good Shepherd. This church shows the pleasing proportion
and restraint of detail that so many of Richardson's imitators failed to
achieve.
The adjoining rectory is
designed in the compatible Shingle Style (a combination often seen in
SR&C's presentation
drawings). The scale and general appearance
of Good Shepherd Church relate it closely to All Saints' which it predates
by several years. The church deserves more architectural attention
than it gets: its neighbor across the intersection is the famed
Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Had Burdett lived beyond his
37th year in 1891, he no doubt would be as well known, at least
regionally, as fellow younger generation colleagues Longfellow and Alden.
Good Shepherd Church with
rectory (3)
Email
your comments and questions
(See also
Shadyside's Sisters and
Shadyside's Second Cousins)
Home
(1) Photos
and church history of All Saint’s Episcopal Church were generously
provided by Neal Haynie, Parish Archivist.
(2) Margaret Henderson Floyd, Architecture After Richardson, Regionalism Before Modernism,
Chicago & PHLF, 1994
(3)
West End Church and Good Shepherd Church renderings by website author, Tim Engleman
(4)
Margaret Henderson Floyd, Henry Hobson Richardson, A Genius for
Architecture, Monacelli, 1997
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