The prevailing fashion in retail stores is to fill in the upper portion of the store-front on the ground-floor with sashes divided into small lights, in accordance with the Queen-Anne manner, and to fill these lights with stained or corrugated glass. This colored glass certainly has a good effect inside, and the breaking up of the area of glass enables the lower portion to be made in a single sheet. Ornamental stone fronts are often inserted on the ground-floor of a structure the tipper part of which retains unaltered the plainness of the less resthetic period in which it was erected. Many warehouses in Philadelphia are built of red brick, with the heads and sills of the windows and the bond-stones of the piers of stone. The chief projections are the vertical lines of the piers, which run from bottom to top. Such structures have a look of strength, and express their purpose admirably.
Chicago, placed low down upon a lakeside flat, needs every architectu ral advantage, and has done her best to attain it. In magnificence, even before the fire of 1S71, Chicago streets were not far behind those of New York City, but in zesthetic qualities they were deficient. Since the fire better things have been done, though there is still far too much adherence to the vernacular variety of Italian before mentioned. Many warehouses in this and other Western cities, however, exhibit Gothic sentiment, though with an almost complete absence of Gothic detail. Such struc tures are without projections except the window-sills and cornice, which latter projects but slightly. The lines of the piers are emphasized, the openings are square, and there is a tendency to horizontal bands of stone at the level of the heads and sills of the windows, and to bond-stones which appear on the face of the piers.
The rather narrow and often tortuous streets of Boston are lined with fine commercial edifices, the best of which have been erected since the great fire of 1872.
Banks and has some notable ings which have been erected during late years. Prominent among these is the Provident Life and Trust. The façade is massive in the extreme, giving an appearance of security in harmony with the purpose of the building. The material is granite in large blocks. Three bold and un adorned arches span the void left between four columns of polished gran ite with short shafts and salient sculptured capitals. Above these the front divides into a centre and two flanks. This centre is a square-browed, heavy-corniced turret carried by a massive pointed arch borne on columns like those below. Symmetry, variety, continuity of design, and an accent uated centre are here concentrated in one small facade 44 feet wide. The
interior consists almost entirely of a hall 72 feet in height and about r2o feet in length, the walls set with glazed bricks and tiles in patterns in various depths of buff.
The National Bank of the _Republic is another remarkable ing. Here, again, the architect has contrived to be startlingly original in a small space. Symmetry is dispensed with, and the material is largely brick. A heavy half-arch abuts against the half of a semicir cular brick turret, and forms the portal. Above the arch is a sloping surface, permitting the semicircle of the turret to grow out and continue upward into a pinnacle. To the right of the turret are windows of bold design, the lower with conspicuous grilles of twisted iron. The structure is not hampered by close adherence to any style, though the details have much Gothic feeling about them. In the interior bilateral symmetry reigns, yet there is something unique in the two half-arches springing from a fireplace and abutting at their crowns against the side walls of the long and narrow hall. The side-walls are colored of a deep dull red above a black-marble capping surmounting a buff-tinted dado. The two ends of the hall are of white stone with bands of bold carv ing, and the ceiling exhibits a series of stout wooden trusses borne on brackets.
The Insurance Company of North America is a very favorable speci men of the Queen Anne style. It has an ornate and picturesque facade with deep window-recesses, a fine oriel over the entrance, and a loggia above the oriel. Red brick, brownstone, and metal are employed, and show as such. The equilateral gable and the frieze of the main cornice are a mass of carving in brick—effective, but not delicate.
The Haselline Building is a combination of store, picture-gallery, and offices. Red terra-cotta and buff brick varied with Indiana limestone are relied upon to give a greater play of color than is usual in Phil adelphia edifices. The entrance to the picture-gallery and the offices is in the centre, and above it is a square oriel surmounted by a balcony with light stone colonnettes (O./. 65, fig. 2).
The finllilt Building, or Fourth Street National Bank, is one of the largest as well as one of the most massive and striking of Philadelphia's new edifices. The principal materials of the facade are brownstone and red brick, the details are few and large and covered with carving in low relief, and the aim of the designer has evidently been to produce an impression of power, and at the same time to combine Romanesque with Gothic.