Many architects believe that architecture possesses an essence all its own, separate from the arts of decoration. Thus, many architects eschew decoration. One building that exemplifies the opposite mentality is the Appellate Courthouse, of which I wrote a few weeks ago. Another such building is the Hall of Records, at the northwest corner of Chambers and Centre streets.

The architect, John Rochester Thomas, was known for Romanesque Revival churches. There appears to have been little to suggest he would design one of the city’s most sumptuous Beaux-Arts civic buildings. (He had in fact never been to Paris.) Work on the building began in 1899. Then two things happened. The Surrogate’s Court, seeking new space, horned in on the project, and indeed its name appears on the building’s front. And Thomas died, after which corrupt Tammany pols got hold of the project and insinuated their own architects – with the Hollywood-perfect name of Horgan & Slattery.

No matter how we apportion credit for the building’s final form, what’s most significant is the exterior sculptural embellishment by Philip Martiny, a native Alsatian who studied in Paris before coming to America and becoming our greatest architectural sculptor.

Several outstanding artists – William de Leftwich Dodge, Albert Weinert, Henry Kirke Bush-Brown – contributed to the building (completed in 1907), and their work deserves its own column. For now, I shall focus on Martiny, a great favorite of mine whose work continues to be criminally underappreciated.

Bush-Brown (the nephew of the famous sculptor Henry Kirke Brown) was apparently responsible for the allegorical embellishments on the rooftop. Martiny, however, gave us the eight statues on the south-facing attic. Like the roofline statues at the Appellate Courthouse, the Hall of Records statues tell a story, this one about New York history. For here are our (more or less) great civic leaders of the past both the distant past, as in the Dutch West India Company director-general Peter Stuyvesant, and of the then-recent past, as in Mayor Abram Hewitt. This last is curious, for though he was a Democrat, Hewitt was no darling of Tammany. Little known today, Hewitt, when he was a U.S. congressman, earned warm praise from Henry Adams, not notably given to the praise of politicians. Hewitt was elected mayor in 1886 in a race that pitted him against Henry George and Theodore Roosevelt; we may safely say that at no other time did three such formidable men vie for the mayoralty. Hewitt is the fourth from left.

Third from left is De Witt Clinton, frequently cited as the greatest mayor in the city’s history, builder of the Erie Canal and begetter of the city’s “gridiron” street plan. Second from right is the luckless Cadwallader Colden, a man of parts whose misfortune was to be lieutenant governor when Britain passed the Stamp Act; Colden thus got to see himself burned in effigy, among other indignities.

There is nothing of indignity, however, to the Hall of Records, as grand a building as the city can claim.

fmorrone@nysun.com