indignity of being decorated with streaming ribbons in low-relief. In truth, the only detail of the work which one can contemplate even with tolerance is a grill in the basement doorway which is the simplest possible trellis of iron rods. Indecorous and incoherent as this edifice unquestionably is, it has yet the air of a gentleman taking his pleasure, albeit in a perverse and vicious fashion, when compared, for example, with the dwellings in red brick [Illustration: DOORWAY AT FIFTH AVENUE AND SIXTY-SEVENTH STREET.] and brown stone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street. In these there is no composition whatever, and the effect is so scattering, and the whole is so fortuitous an aggregation of unrelated parts, that it is impossible to describe the houses or to remember them when one’s back is turned. Their fragments only recur to memory, as the blurred images of a hideous dream. So one recalls the Batavian grace of the bulbous gables; the oriel-windows, so set as to seem in imminent danger of toppling out; the egg-and-dart moulding, niggled up and down jambs of brick-work connected by flat openings with protruding key-stones; the whiplashes cut in sandstone blocks; the decorative detail fished from the slums of the Rococo. These are not subjects for architectural criticism; they call for the intervention of an architectural police. They are cases of disorderly conduct done in brick and brown stone. Hazardous as the superlative degree generally is, it is not much of a hazard to say that they are the most thoroughly discreditable buildings ever erected in New York, and it is to be noted that they are thoroughly characteristic of the period. Such a nightmare might, perhaps, have entered the brain of some speculative builder during the wildest vulgarity of the brown-stone period, but he would not have had the effrontery to build it, being deterred by the consideration that nobody would face public ridicule by consenting to live in it. Some speculator is, however, convinced that there is now a market for a house which stands upon the street corner, and screeches for people to come and look at it, when there is nothing in it worth looking at; and we must take shame to ourselves from the reflection that the speculator may be right in counting upon this extreme vulgarization of the public taste, and that, at any rate, there is no police to prevent the emission of the screech upon the public highway. This is the result of a demand for “something new” upon a mind incapable of producing anything good. The screech is the utterance of the Sweet Singer of Michigan, exhorted not to mind about grammar, but “to fix her verses to the gauge of the round globe.” It is an extreme instance, to be sure; but there are others only less discreditable, and only to be dealt with in the way of what is called “slashing” criticism, which [Illustration: GLIMPSE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE FROM MADISON AVENUE. C. C. Haight, Architect.]