This combination of color and wood grain is instantly familiar to anyone who has lived, or visited, New York for any meaningful period of time. Every now and then one ends up walking or driving through a neighborhood whose streets are lined with row houses known locally as brownstones (with many interior doors inside).
In the original sense, brownstone is a type of sandstone that was once a vastly popular building material, especially in England and the United States. In most American and British cities, they’re just townhouses clad in this material.
Not in New York, though.
Gotham’s brownstones are strings of houses three, four, or five stories high, oftentimes taking up the entire block, with high porches (known locally as “stoops”), bay windows, oriel spaces, high ceilings, and occasionally creaky stairs. The vast majority of these quaint structures were erected at the turn of the Nineteenth Century. One will find them in considerable quantities in places such as East Harlem; the Upper East Side; Greenwich Village; Chelsea; as well as in certain older sections of Brooklyn, such as Midwood, Sheepshead Bay, Columbia Heights, and so forth.
The Upper West Side – and its Riverside portion especially – has its own, very special, high-end type of brownstone, with Ionic columns, ornate porticos, elaborate double porches, etc. Some of them feature intricately designed façades, pediments, arched windows, picturesque entablature with neat-looking dentils on the frieze, and no elevator. The façades are often painted, the colors varying wildly sometimes, yet more often than not the color of choice seems to be the one which our Bleached Oak finish resembles closely. (Some of those well-preserved antique interior doors are quite something, too).
Many such houses were originally intended for upper-middle-class families, especially in Brooklyn. Here, lawyers, shopkeepers, and merchants of German and Irish descent, with a sprinkling of English folks, found the area’s amenities and housing schemes were perfectly suited to their tastes. Bedford-Stuyvesant, specifically, used to consist almost entirely of brownstones and was referred to by an observant contemporary as “a town of homes and churches.” (He forgot to mention the interior doors, but, hey, he was a poet, and poets are often absentminded).
Wait a minute, you might say at this point. What are we doing, discussing age-old middle-class housing arrangements? What does it have to do with interior doors?
Ah, yes: the interior doors. Hmm.
Listen. Famous landmarks, the ones that one finds depicted on calendars and postcards and mentioned in brochures and tourist guides, are important in that they make major cities instantly recognizable. They are the face of a metropolis, its business card, its introductory statement. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Central Park: those are as indispensable to New York as Notre Dame and the Pont Neuf are to Paris, or St. Peter’s Basilica and the Piazza Venezia to Rome, or the Westminster Abbey to London, or the Winter Palace and the draw bridges to St. Petersburg. Yes, absolutely. Indubitably.
But it is always the quaint side street, the rows of residential dwellings, the café on the corner, the baker’s, greengrocer’s and butcher’s shops, the local temple, areas where the locals actually live (merrily, one would hope) and socialize – that constitute the heart of a city, any city. Just like your interior doors are, in a sense, the heart of your decor.
The brownstone, whose original color so closely resembled this interior door finish, are most certainly the heart of this city, our city.
Welcome to New York.
