Preservation. “I have read the book many times and
have been assigning sections to my classes at Columbia
for many years.” And its admirers go beyond the classroom—
the writer Edmund White called it one of the
ten best books about New York City ever published.
As the years passed and Lockwood wrote other books
— including multiple books about California, where
he moved in the late 1970s, including “Suddenly San
Francisco: The Early Years of an Instant City” and
“Dream Palaces: Hollywood at Home” — the thought
of returning to “Bricks & Brownstone” remained an
itch. When he was originally working on the book “he
was plowing through material and then sort of just ran
out of money and time,” says Patrick Ciccone, a preservationist
and friend of Lockwood who finished the
new version of the book following his death. “There is
so much that remains after 1875, but if you look at the
original edition of the book, it is very compressed.”
“I think it’s fair to say that this book helped to give the
brownstone revival a kind of moral impetus,” wrote
the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a previous
edition of the book, “making it clear how much genuine
architectural and urban history lay within these buildings,
and how much the row houses of New York are, in
fact, the underlying threads of the city’s urban fabric.”
Nothing quite like it has been written since. Because
so little was written about these homes, Lockwood was
forced to dive into early nineteenth-century newspaper
archives, as well as literary sources such as Edith
Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” for information.
“Bricks & Brownstone” was a “pioneering work, the
first to investigate in detail the New York row house,
using period sources to help explain the character of
these buildings,” says Andrew Dolkart, a professor
of Historic Preservation at the Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and
53
Opposite page, an
entrance hall in an
1826 Federal brick
house on Willow
Street in Brooklyn
Heights.
Left, Patrick W.
Ciccone in Brooklyn
Heights this
year. Photo by
Susan De Vries.