By Justin Matthews
The 1833 row of red brick townhouses on the north end of Washington Square Park, known as “Waverly Place,” belongs to the later phase of the Federal style, spanning the late-18th to early-19th century in the newly independent former American colonies.
The houses built of red brick with Doric and Ionic stone columned entrances follow the tradition of simple and spare, classically-inspired decorative composition and motifs inherited from the preceding 18th century Georgian style shared by Britain and its colonies.
The buildings of Washington Square North are among the oldest structures in the vicinity of the park and grandest of their style in New York. They are among the last remaining houses of a part of a broader group of building projects comprising rows of stylistically similar houses bordering the park, built between the early 1830s and 1840.
In response to the busy commercial character of lower Manhattan further south, this area of the city became an enclave for a segment of the city’s elite. It was home to some of the oldest prominent families in New York, merchant families from the Hudson valley and upstate, as well as New England. This community of elite New Yorkers was associated with Grace Church to the northeast, toward Union Square.
The rows of fashionable townhouses built at the site of Washington Square Park were modeled after those of London’s Regent’s Park, built in 1820, and are more broadly reminiscent of long rows of stately houses such those of Bath, built of pale stone, dating from the late 18th century.
The row known as the Fourth Street Houses of circa 1830, commissioned by the local merchant and politician, Colonel James B. Murray, helped to transplant a particular feature, also followed at Waverly Place, from the stately English townhouses of the late 18th to early 19th century. Like many in contemporary England, the houses of the park, including those of the northern row, were built with stoops set back about four feet to accommodate a small space. This ornamental yard gave the effect of a forecourt in contrast to earlier structures of the type whose stoops tended to abut the street.
Although the Fourth Street row was faced with stone, in imitation of many fashionable townhouses of contemporary England, the otherwise similar buildings of the north side follow the pre-mid-19th-century tendency to substitute brick, even in more genteel urban houses.
The Greco-Roman influence in the American Federal style was often more directly derived (inspired by the ruins of newly discovered Greek and Roman temples) than the Renaissance-mediated Palladian influence of the earlier Georgian style. The period toward the mid-19th century saw an enhancement of the “Greek Revival” tendency in American residential architecture in which classicizing elements become more boldly expressed.The red brick of the buildings at Waverly Place contrast with pale stone Doric and Ionic columned doorways with flat pediments. Their imposing columns parallel, in a more modest and compact way, the columned entrances of stately rural houses built toward the
mid-19th century, and at the end of the Federal period. The Doric columns also recall those of the Regent’s Park rows’ ground floor colonnades.
The substantial stone railings add a grandeur rarely seen in other surviving New York houses of the Federal era, as do ornamental urns and sculptures remaining on the square stone plinths flanking the bases of a few stoops. The classicizing effect is enhanced by the iron front gate motifs derived from the honeysuckle designs of certain Greek temple finials and stone reliefs.
Washington Square North is also known for some famous historical residents. The painter and printmaker Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine Hopper, lived in a studio at 3 Washington Square North from 1913 until Hopper’s death in 1967. The writer Henry James often visited his grandmother at 18 Washington Square North and portrayed the area in his 1881 novel “Washington Square.”
