International studio (53.1914)

Some Examples of the Brick Architecture of Holland

TURFMARKT AND GROOTE KERK AT HAARLEM


SOME EXAMPLES OF THE BRICK
ARCHITECTURE OF HOLLAND
| INFLUENCING AMERICAN
BUILDING
BY ADELAIDE CURTISS
The Colonial architecture of any country is
always interesting. Every one can appreciate the
beauty and grandeur of the ruined temples at
Passtum, Selinus, Segesta and Girgenti, those
ancient cities of Southern Italy and Sicily which
as a part of Magna Graecia held such an im-
portant place as colonies that their architecture
equalled, if not surpassed, that of Greece itself,
while the almost fabulous wealth of one of these
early towns of Southern Italy has preserved to us
in the term “sybarite” the very synonym of
luxury and the love of pleasure. In America, and
coming down through the centuries to more mod-
ern times, we have in our venerable English
Colonial type of buildings a remarkable and
almost pathetic imitation of the structures of the
mother country. Our earliest settlers had usually
to build with wood instead of brick; they were
hampered by lack of suitable tools and skilled
workmen, but their constructions, though simpler,
faithfully reproduced the established types of far-
away England. The same thing can be said of
our Dutch architecture of the Colonial period.
The buildings of Holland, however, were the pro-
totypes of this latter style, and although many of

the earliest Dutch houses and churches of America
have unfortunately passed away, enough still
remain to make a comparison between the Euro-
pean and American types a most interesting one.
The cities of New York and Brooklyn and, in fact,
the villages of the whole Hudson River valley,
retain not only in the names of some of the towns
and streets, but in the very buildings of these
towns, much still to remind us of the ancient
Knickerbocker rule. The old Dutch families, too,
have by no means died out, and their descendants
are usually interested in everything that pertains
to the early chapters of their history.
While the vicinity of New York and Albany is
mainly associated with the early settlements of
the Dutch in this country, there are other sections
of the State which still retain many important
examples of historic architecture. In old Fishkill,
for instance, a small town about sixty miles north
of New York and near the Hudson River, there is
an old and most substantial church which, for
historical and architectural reasons, deserves to
be better known. This old Dutch Reformed
church, said to have been built of bricks brought
from Holland, occupied an important position not
only in the Colonial period, but also in the War
of the Revolution. The structure, standing near
the famous Fishkill Pass through the mountains,
was used as a military prison in the Revolution,
the Provincial Convention also meeting here in
1776. While repairs and restorations have been

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