National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
mid-1890s with the westward shift of the national economy and the completion of the Back
Bay [Boston]. A significant portion of the monumental building generated by Boston
architectural offices and others nationwide during the late 1880s was considered
Richardsonian, being Romanesque in style. 1346
The other significant styles included Renaissance Revival, Georgian/Federal Revival, and
Neoclassical, all of which became McKim, Mead & White's forte.
The Boston firm of Peabody & Stearns was extremely successful, but the overwhelming
majority of its commissions were in New England. Robert S. Peabody had attended the Ecole
with Charles McKim and the two remained friends until McKim's death. Peabody and Stearns
designed Rough Point for the Frederick Vanderbilts in Newport, completed in 1891. The firm's
favorite idioms included the Colonial Revival, English Tudor Revival, Queen Anne, and Shingle
and Stick styles. Often a combination of selected styles would emerge in a final design.
Occasionally, Italian Renaissance Revival was employed. Although Peabody had been trained at
the Ecole, the firm seemed to avoid the more classical exterior designs, and instead preferred the
picturesque styles. Although both firms designed in Newport and the Berkshires, direct
competition between Peabody & Stearns and McKim, Mead & White was probably rare.
William Robert Ware originally studied under Richard Morris Hunt, who had set up an
atelier in his office based on his own education at the Ecole. Ware left the office in 1859, joined
with Henry Van Brunt to form an architectural partnership, and was asked by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 1865 to "investigate the possibility of setting up a professional course
in architecture." 1347 Ware and Van Brunt also concentrated its efforts in New England, but
Ware's greatest contribution to the architectural field, in addition to Harvard's Memorial Hall,
was his founding of M.I.T.'s School of Architecture in 1868. 1348 Other schools soon followed
M.I.T.'s model, and Ware went on to found Columbia's Department of Architecture in 1881. All
were organized in the Beaux-Arts tradition, which Ware had learned second-hand in Hunt's
office. This tradition was to heavily influence the new generation of American-trained
architects. 1349
One influence affected McKim, Mead & White negatively. After White's Judson
Memorial Baptist Church (1888-93), "within less than a decade the successful efforts of Henry
Vaughan and Ralph Adams Cram to reinvest Gothic with formal, iconographical, and structural
meaning were to limit the influence of McKim, Mead & White in developing a Renaissance
ecclesiastical style." 1350
Horace Trumbauer competed with McKim, Mead & White, but not on a large scale.
Trumbauer's younger Philadelphia firm was smaller, but he earned many commissions on Long
Island and a few in Newport and New York City. The majority of his work in the residential
architecture of Long Island was steeped in the Georgian and Federal Revival styles.
Trumbauer's Belmont Park Administration Building was in the Neoclassical style, and his Turf
and Field Club additions in the park complemented the existing Gothic Tudor mansion. 1351 His
1346
Floyd, 63.
1347
Baker, Richard Morris Hunt, 105.
1348
MacKay, 256.
1349
Baker, Richard Morris Hunt, 105.
1350
Roth, 157-58.
1351
MacKay, 405-12.
239