United States or Belgium ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The seats, back to back, one for each doorway, recall those of the Johnson house. One notices with admiration the beautifully detailed pedimental dormers with their round-topped windows, and with interest the unusual use of shutters on both the first and second stories.
The famous old Wistar house at the southeast corner of Fourth and Locust streets is a case in point. Pedimental dormers were the rule, sometimes with round-headed windows. Elaborate molded wood cornices were a feature, often with prominent, even hand-tooled modillions.
Over the doorway, with its simple flanking seats, there is the familiar pedimental and slightly projecting hood, while the door itself is of the quaint divided type, permitting the upper half to be opened while the lower half is closed.
It is probable that the necessities of pedimental composition first led the artist to place the river-god in a reclining position. The head of the Ilissus being broken off, we are not sure whether he had bull's horns, like the Sicilian figures already described.
It has the simple excellence in detail of the South Seventh Street doorway, with better proportion, less height of pediment and greater apparent breadth, owing to the six-panel arrangement of the door and the fact that it is white like the wood trim about it. The only carved molding is the Grecian fret of the dentil course in the pedimental cornice.
Throughout the interior the wood finish is worthy of the exterior trim. Beautifully tooled cornices, graceful pilasters, nicely molded door and window casings, heavy pedimental doorheads, all are of excellent design and more carefully wrought than in average Colonial work.
Two or three on a side were the rule, although a few small houses have only one. For the most part they were pedimental or gable-roofed. Segmental topped dormers were rare, although a row of them is to be seen in Camac Street, "the street of little clubs", and occasional individual instances are to be found elsewhere.
The simple, carefully wrought dentil course of the doorheads lends a refining influence and pleasing sense of scale that seems to lighten the design very materially. Philadelphia has no handsomer example of the enriched pedimental doorhead than the interior treatment of the entrance doorway of the Blackwell house, Number 224 Pine Street.
One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to our nourishing luminary: at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king, after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish smack-o'-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella.
Erected in 1795 by the first Bank of the United States, this beautiful stone and brick structure in the Corinthian order, with its fine pedimental portico bearing in high relief a modification of the seal of the United States, was owned and occupied by Stephen Girard from 1812 to 1831, and since 1832 by the Girard Bank and the Girard National Bank.
Word Of The Day