The towered Italian Villa[101] was introduced by John Notman (1810-65) in Bishop George W. Doane’s house at Burlington, NJ., in 1837 and soon actively propagandized by A. J. Downing (1815-52) in his influential books (see Chapters 6 and 15). Indeed, the Barryesque Renaissance mode was also probably first introduced by the Scottish-born Notman at the Philadelphia Atheneum[102] built in 1845-7 (Plate 47A). These non-Grecian, yet still basically Romantic Classical, modes were in relatively common use by 1850, though not very much earlier. Young, for example, who had made his reputation with the saucer-domed but otherwise Greek Custom House[103] that he built in Boston in 1837-47, substituted a somewhat Barryesque manner for Mills’s Grecian as the current mode for Federal buildings[104] when he became Supervising Architect in 1853. But neither Notman nor Young was a Barry—nor even as competent at such design as the youthful Tefft—and the most notable result of the waning of the Greek Revival in the forties, in the East at any rate—it waned much more slowly in the South and West—was the rise of a rather considerable variety of Picturesque modes of suburban-house design, of which the Italianate was only one (see Chapters 6 and 15). In cities, the shift from the characteristic granite or, more usually, hard red brick with white trim to the chocolate tones of brownstone, used alone or with brick, is much more indicative of a general change of taste than any widespread exploitation of Renaissance forms. A fine relatively early Italian Villa such as the Stebbins house of 1849 on Crescent St, off Maple St, in Springfield, Mass., by Henry A. Sykes belongs to the realm of Romantic Classicism like Schinkel’s or Barry’s country houses in this mode (Plate 43A). But on the whole the Italian Villa in America is rather one of the many vehicles of the Picturesque reaction against a doctrinaire Greek Revival. This fact was well illustrated in one by Eidlitz, also in Springfield, on Maple Street, that was built of brick with much wooden ‘gingerbread’ of a vaguely Tyrolean order and latterly, at least, painted a warm pink where Sykes’s villa is painted white with brown trim. Sykes’s originality within the Italian Villa mode is most happily illustrated by the former observatory at Amherst College, now known as the Octagon, whose stuccoed polygonal elements stand in such interesting contrast to the severe row of red-brick dormitories and chapel behind. Not often did the mid century add so effectively to groups of buildings produced in earlier decades.