They have had their way in New York for seven or eight years, during a period unprecedented in building activity, and out of all comparison in the profusion with which money has been lavished upon building and decoration. What have they gained for architectural art? They have, indeed, subjected many miles of sandstone to the refining influence of egg-and-dart mouldings (the designer of a house in Fifth Avenue has so much faith in the efficacy of that ornament that he has belted his street front with three rows of it, one above the other), and triglyphs (faithfully to have contemplated which softens the manners, nor suffers to be rude) have been brought within the reach of the humblest in the decoration of tenement-houses. They have built so much and so expensively that they have produced in minds--like some of their own--which do not reflect much upon these things the impression that if luxury and art be not synonymous, they are at least inseparably connected, with the latter in the capacity of handmaiden. But will any educated architect assert that the characteristic monuments of the last five or six years--greatly superior in quantity, and superior by a great multiple in cost--are equal in architectural value to the work of the decade preceding? Suppose that Mr. Norman Shaw had not bedevilled the weaker of his brethren, and that this unprecedented building activity and this unparalleled spending of money that have fallen under the control of architects had been directed along the lines laid down by the Gothic revivalists, and had extended, consolidated, and refined the work begun and carried on here by such architects as Mr. Upjohn, Mr. Eidlitz, Mr. Withers, Mr. Cady, Mr. Potter, and Mr. Wight, will any educated architect maintain that the result of such a process would not have been nobler monuments than any to which we can point as characteristic products of the later movement? [Illustration: DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET. R. H. Robertson, Architect.] We might ask Mr. Harney, for example, who has been one of the noteworthy contributors to the works of both periods, whether in falling to “grace” he has not fallen from something more important. One can readily understand that Mr. Harney, in contemplating the effect of his completed work in the respectable warehouse at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, should have been disappointed in the effect of much of the detail he had designed for his building, should have found some of it rude, some of it disproportionate [Illustration: HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET. Bruce Price, Architect.]