Tuesday, April 3, 2012
News Father of Brownstone Revival Has Died
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:46 PM
The architecture critic Paul Goldberger... said [the book] gave the row-house revival “a kind of moral impetus, making it clear how much genuine architectural and urban history lay within these buildings, and how much the row houses of New York are, in fact, the underlying threads of the city’s urban fabric.”
When the book came out, many row houses, once signifiers of "middle-class stability and affluence," had long ago been converted into boarding houses and become symbols of urban decay; people had just recently started buying them up and renovating them. (See L.J. Davis' A Meaningful Life from 1971.) Lockwood's book "placed the houses in historical context and sorted them by style and era, explaining how architectural features can give away a building’s provenance."
One Brownstoner commenter notes the book's effect on our own borough:
When our house hunting turned to Brooklyn, the book came alive, as there was so much more variety of styles here, and many of the neighborhoods he speaks of were easily accessible for walks.
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