Richard Upjohn - Table of Contents
Richard Upjohn
and the Gothic Revival in Buffalo
By Dr.
Frank Kowsky
Originally published in the Preservation Coalition of Erie County's newsletter, Preservation Report, March/April 1986, Vol. 8 No. 2
Even before its consecration in 1846, Richard Upjohn's Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City had established the reign of Gothic in American religious architecture. It had also provided Upjohn with a formidable reputation.
Two years after Trinity opened, the vestrymen of St. Paul's in Buffalo
formed a building committee to erect a new stone church. They
immediately instructed its members to engage Upjohn as architect. The
major Episcopal church in the largest commercial industrial center in
upstate New York, St. Paul's could not escape comparison with Trinity.
Upjohn was the logical, and safest, choice.
At
his initial meeting with the building committee in March, 1848, Upjohn
presented a plan for a church that would hold one thousand worshippers.
The committee, however, found the scheme too expensive. Nonetheless,
they liked the ground plan and pressed Upjohn for less elaborate
elevations. One year later, the more economical version, embodying a
nave 105 feet long with aisles on either side, won their approval. In
1851. in order to raise money for chimes. the parish sold lithographs
of the architect's perspective views of the new church.
Construction began in the Spring of 1850. That is, immediately after
another denomination bought and moved the old Carpenter
Gothic church that since 1821 had stood on the site of the present
edifice at Church and Pearl Streets. Economy, a persistent
consideration with the congregation, dictated the use of red Medina sandstone from
nearby Orleans County, instead of the gray limestone Upjohn had first
proposed. The choice was a happy one, and may have inspired H. H. Richardson
two decades later to use the same material for his first large
'Richardsonian'' building, the Buffalo State Hospital.
Complete in its essentials, St. Paul's was consecrated in October 1851.
The tower, which resembles that of St. Paul's, Brookline,
Massachusetts, on which Upjohn worked at the same time as the Buffalo
church, took until 1870 to finish. At the service of consecration, the
rector, Dr. William Shelton, praised Upjohn profusely. But he
also reflected a penchant for overspending. "A refined, cultivated, and
religious taste has been here," said Shelton,
giving to, every object and to every part, to every line the impress of cultivated architectural skill. The cost has far exceeded, nearly doubled, his design and our intent. It has been his infirmity, and we may pardon that infirmity, in consideration of the surpassing beauty he has achieved.
The rector's indulgence notwithstanding, the building committee a few days later exacted a promise from Upjohn that the total bill for the church would be under $85,000. He further agreed to take his five percent commission on only the original estimate of $52,000.
Features of the Church
Although his earliest proposal had included a tower reminiscent of Trinity's, from the very beginning Upjohn designed St. Paul's differently from its famous forbearer. Encouraged by the triangular shape of the sloping site, he rejected the symmetry of the Manhattan church. St Paul's tower stands at the southwest corner and a two-story chapel, three bays long, adjoins the north aisle. In addition to greater picturesqueness, the Buffalo church displays more strictly than Trinity the principles of ecclesiology, the science of church building that dictated the architectural requirements for Anglo-Catholic ritual. The altar, for example, is at the eastern end of the building. Moreover, St. Paul's, built with hammer dressed random ashlar, is Early English, the style of the thirteenth century which had come to be esteemed as a purer form of Gothic than the late Medieval Perpendicular style in which Trinity is cast.
But the major ecclesiologial advance over Trinity is the design of
the chancel, the most important liturgical area of the church.
As correct ecclesiology demanded, it is distinguished externally by a
lower roofline than that of the nave, which it terminates. Upjohn
further called attention to the sanctuary by placing a bell turret near
it at the northeast angle of the building. To churchmen of the 1850s,
the back of St. Paul's gave notice of an up to date parish.
The skill with which all of these elements -- asymmetry, irregular
stonework, Early English style, and low chancel -- are united
proclaims St. Paul's the fully evolved example of a mode of a church
design Upjohn had embarked upon in such post-Trinity works as the
Church of the Holy Communion (1846), New York City, St. Mary's (1846),
Burlington, New Jersey, and Grace Church ( 1847), Brooklyn. Trinity
Church had made America aware of the movement to reinspirit Gothic
architecture that had advanced to maturity in England under the banner
of Pugin; St. Paul's confirmed that, since Trinity, America's most
well-known religious architect had moved beyond the Gothic Revival
based on Pugin to embrace the Parish Church Revival fostered by the
Ecclesiological Society, the American branch of which thought highly of
Upjohn. Upjohn's recognition of his achievement may have prompted the
statement attributed to him that he regarded St. Paul's as his best
ecclesiastical work.
Inside,
St. Paul's possessed the openness of a hall church, for there was no
clerestory and the aisles reached almost to the height of the nave. The
feeling of spaciousness, which was characteristic of Upjohn's
metropolitan churches, gained impressively from the two-story chapel
extending off of the north aisle. A hammerbeam roof, the boarding of
which was painted dark blue and decorated with gold stars, covered the
nave. Although the imitation plaster vaulting of Trinity Church was
avoided, sham was nonetheless present: the piers and arches of the nave
arcades were wood painted the color of the exterior stone. The stained
glass was described as being of a ''rich salmon color.''
The Church as Architectural Landmark
Predictably, local citizens touted
St. Paul's as the finest house of worship in the state outside of New
York City. Buffalo, the "Queen City of the Lakes," had its first
architectural landmark. Situated a short distance from the terminus of
the Erie Canal and within a few blocks of Lake Erie, St. Paul's
symbolized the progressive spirit of the young city which enjoyed
growing prosperity from its pivotal location between the farmlands and
resources of the west and the markets and industry of the east. In 1866
Upjohn's beautiful church was the natural choice to become the
Episcopal Cathedral tor the new Diocese of Western New York, a function
it continues to perform.
Other WNY Upjohn Churches
St. Paul's was Upjohn's most important ecclesiastical commission
in Western New York, but not his only one. In addition to churches in
Rochester, Niagara Falls, Mayville, and Jamestown, he is also
identified with two rural churches of considerable charm. These are
board and batten structures of the kind he and John Weller Priest (d.
1859) designed in the late 1840s and early 1850s with the blessing of
the New York Ecclesiological Society, which looked upon them as
acceptable substitutes where masonry construction proved too expensive.
St. John Episcopal Church on Main Street in the Niagara River town of
Youngstown is believed by local tradition to be by Upjohn. However, the
date of consecration, in 1878—by which time Upjohn had been retired
from active practice for many years—suggests that Richard Michell
Upjohn (1827-1903), the architect's son and successor, may have been
responsible. Correspondence dated December 30, 1853, confirms the
senior Upjohn's involvement with Trinity Episcopal Church (consecrated
in 1854) in Warsaw. The chapel closely resembles the "cheap but still
substantial'' wooden church for which Upjohn supplied specifications
and working drawings in his book Upjohn's Rural Architecture, which
appeared in 1852. Trinity seems to have been typical of many churches
built by distant parishes following Upjohn's published advice along
with written suggestions he sent by mail. Asking little or no
compensation, he acted from a sincere desire to improve the conditions
of rural churchgoing.
St. Paul's Burns
Richard Upjohn died in 1878 knowing that
St. Paul's epitomized the Gothic Revival on the Niagara Frontier.
Unfortunately, a decade after his death, fire, the scourge of Gothic
and Gothic Revival builders alike, nearly destroyed his masterpiece;
the interior, with its wooden arcading, was gutted.
Late in the summer of 1888 Robert W. Gibson (1854-1927) took charge of
repairing the damaged building. Gibson, like Upjohn an Englishman, had
immigrated to this county in 1881. He had made his name two years
later, when, in competition with H.H. Richardson, he had won the
commission for All Saints Cathedral in Albany. For all of 1889 he
supervised the work at St. Paul's. On January 3, 1890, the church
reopened with the service of Reconciling and Hallowing.
Retaining the original walls, which had remained sound, Gibson
introduced only minor changes to the exterior. The freestanding tower
escaped the blaze and stands today unaltered from Upjohn's time. It
still lifts its majestic spire 270 feet into the air, well above its
newer and more famous ''skyscraper" neighbor across the street,Louis Sullivan's Prudential
(Guaranty) Building (1894).
Gibson concentrated his efforts on rebuilding the interior which he
succeeded in making more substantial, spacious, and ornamental than it
had been before the fire. The rebuilt structure so impressed George
Shinn, the nineteenth century chronicler of Episcopal architecture,
that
in King's Handbook of Notable Episcopal Churches he attributed it
entirely to Gibson; Upjohn received only passing reference.
Nonetheless, Gibson's work was more of a sympathetic revision than a
drastic alteration of the previous design. Using stone instead of wood
for the structural parts, he preserved the basic outlines of the
original ground plan (nave,
aisles, and north chapel) but made the chancel longer and wider
and added a clerestory.
The most notable deviation from Upjohn occurs in the final bay of the nave arcade where two oversized
arches, described as transept
arches, rise to the roof, interrupting the clerestory. Together with
the chancel arch of the same height, they define before the sanctuary a
lofty area that majestically dominated the interior. The church does
not actually have fully developed transepts, for the gabled "arms'' do
not project beyond the aisles, and the hammerbeam roof, the new feature
that comes closest to reproducing Upjohn's original design, extends to
the chancel without a crossing. The pseudo-transepts, as they might be
called, were contrived not to provide more room at ground level, but to
impart to the ceremonial end of the church an air of expansiveness.
Gibson also took the opportunity afforded by the fire to endow St.
Paul's with that special charm possessed by Medieval buildings that
have various parts in different styles. More disposed toward
archaeological picturesqueness than the cautious ecclesiologists of
Upjohn's day, Gibson introduced conspicuous details from the Decorated
style of English Gothic.
Most obviously are the foliated capitals in the nave arcade (and
elsewhere) that replaced the simply molded ones of Upjohn's design and
the striking traceried window that now fills the end wall of the
chancel where earlier existed triple lancets. Gibson carefully
integrated his Decorated portions with what survived from the first
church. In so doing he insured that St. Paul's, erected in the style of
the thirteenth century and rebuilt in the style of the fourteenth
century, remained the Niagara Frontier's finest church of the
nineteenth century.
