Commercial is hard to classify the multifarious struc tures of the present day, and even the best classification may be con sidered simply as a mode of convenient reference. Office-buildings can scarcely be distinguished from apartment-houses, and stores—which, of all buildings except warehouses and factories, are the most strictly com mcrcial—are even in these days of suburban life usually surmounted by storeys occupied as living- or bedrooms. Yet in a general way the archi tecture of the business-streets of a city derives its from the commer cial buildings, the wholesale and retail stores, office and insurance build ings, banks, warehouses, and factories, while the aspect of the rest of the city is dependent upon its private dwellings. The public buildings of any city, grand and conspicuous as they may appear in a distant view, have in most cases comparatively little effect upon the street-architecture.
Stores and street-architecture of New York City is in many respects unsurpassed in the world. Nowhere else do business piles rise to such commanding heights; nowhere else can so much variety be found in combination with so much honest striving after architectural effect. There is more originality in a mile of a New York avenue than in ten miles of Parisian streets, and the picturesqueness and variety thus obtained more than atone for the want of palatial regularity. But it was not always thus: the older New York stores consisted of three storeys resting on granite posts and a girder. But a new impetus has been given to commercial architecture, and little now remains of the New York of a generation ago.
Although it is a rule that a building which most aptly expresses its purpose is the most satisfactory cesthetically, yet this rule has its excep tions. The great purpose of a store-window—or, as the English call it, shop-wiudow—is to gratify the desire for display: space for the most at tractive goods is the first desideratum. The architect who most completely yields to this desire doubtless produces the most suitable building, but in so doing lie jeopardizes the apparent stability of the structure. It does not look constructional to raise four or five storeys apparently upon the edge of a great sheet of plate glass; the best architects, therefore, endeavor to meet the demand for glass without the complete negation of the ele ments of architectural effect. They seek to give the building something to stand upon without too greatly diminishing the window-area. who
best succeeds in reconciling these opposite requirements must be pro nounced the best designer of store-edifices.
In narrow fronts the only brickwork or stonework visible upon the ground-floor is frequently the edges of the party-walls; the intervening space is bridged by a girder, and upon this the superstructure rests. An iron column may flank the entrance, but practically the entire space is filled with plate glass. By a slight widening of the edge of the party wall, and by accentuation of the details at that point, the appearance as well as the reality of a solid pier can be given, and the solidity of effect is much heightened when the span is sufficiently small to allow the ordinary wooden cornice concealing a girder to give way to a substantial arch or lintel of stone or brick adorned with appropriate ornament.
Iron the whole front is of iron, which usually takes more or less Renaissance forms, sometimes retaining the screen of orders in conjunction with arched construction, while in other cases piers and arches only are employed. There is a tendency to attenuation in the columns, and still more in the piers. Many iron fronts are not Renais sance, and some follow forms which can be executed only in metal, having narrow piers with mouldings which project forward, the piers being bound together by visible lintels of iron. This is honest construction, but fails to produce an architectonic effect. New York City contains in its business-portions a great number of these iron fronts, principally Renais sance in style. The Saracenic, lending itself to slenderness, would seem well adapted to ironwork, but does not appear to have been attempted often in store-fronts.
The commercial buildings of Philadelphia have until quite recently seldom exceeded five or six storeys, and thus, as the streets are as a rule somewhat narrow, the Quaker City does not equal New York in the gen eral effect of its street-architecture. Some of the most imposing stores of decades preceding the Centennial were of white marble, Renaissance in their detail, but usually with string-courses and round-arched openings. Contemporaneous with these were iron fronts principally in the Italian style. But the iron front, whether of the palatial Italian or of the hon estly-expressed ironwork type, is now becoming a thing of the past, and is giving way to brick and terra-cotta.