artistic suburbs. Llewellyn Park, in Orange, was what in the old days they would have described as "a proprietary colony." The distinction of Short Hills is that its colonization was coincident with the emancipation of American architecture, and the proprietor has invited a number of the bright young freedmen to design him each a house. These mansions, to the number, I should say, of fifteen or twenty, are perched picturesquely on the surrounding knolls, connected with each other and with the lower-lying station by well-kept and winding roads, and they make a group quite unique in this, or probably in any other, country.
It is characteristic of the modern spirit in which Short Hills has been conceived that a music hall was one of its earliest buildings, having at present attained the relative venerableness of five or six years, while a church is only now under construction. At Bergen, as we saw, the first communal building was a church and school-house. This reversal of the order of spiritual wants has not, one is glad to note, reacted upon the architecture of the church, which is not playful at all, being a decorous and well-behaved and almost conventional structure, and so exempt from the hilarious spirit of most of the other architecture of Short Hills that even our Jerseyman would not call it funny. It is well that the line should be drawn somewhere at Short Hills, as well as at Rum-ti-Foo:
The islanders of Rum-ti-Foo
Are well-conducted persons, who
Enjoy a joke as much as you,
And laugh at it as such;
But if they saw their bishop land,
His leg supported in his hand,
The joke they would not understand:
'Twould pain them very much.
A square stone house near the station, a solid and somewhat box-like mansion, with no effective relief to the hardness of its outline, is the only other piece of architecture in Short Hills which is in the least amenable to the charge of conventionality. Certainly nobody would think of bringing that charge against the Music Hall, which confronts you at the station and is the most important building of Short Hills thus far, and of which Mr. Stanford White is the architect.
Taking the designer's point of view, the Music Hall is a successful and effective composition. It stands on rather low ground, and is in plan a parallelogram, with very low walls, so that the great black-slated roof seems almost to rest upon the ground. This roof is unbroken from end to end, and, if this were all, the building would be a mere barn. Its monotony, however, is very effectually relieved by a portly round tower attached to the building on the lower side and carried well clear of the roof, of rough stone up to the eaves of the main building, and above that covered with the same black slate with which the main building is roofed. The monotony of the tower itself is relieved by a chimney-stack of rough brick attached to it, and by the treatment of its own roof, which does not conform to its outline, but overlaps it in a square corner held up by a slated bracket projecting from the tower. On the upper side the devices employed for breaking up the mass of the roof are much slighter, and much less successful, and the effect on that side is of a barn-like bareness. The treatment of the material throughout is rough and rustic,—rock-faced stone in the basement, rough brick in the openings and chimneys, and black slate in the roof and tower. So long as we do not ask any questions as to what it is about, it appeals to us as a clever and picturesque composition. Even for this purpose, however, we must, as has been intimated, take the architect's point of view, not only intellectually, but physically, and stand at the point from which the composition has been chiefly studied, and from which the chimneys and the tower and its bracketed roof "come in" as they were meant to do. Even from the most sympathetic point of view it is a misfortune that a building so bold and picturesque and romantic in general effect should have been designed early in the Queen Anne period, when the starveling and stringy classicized detail was in fashion which is so opposed to any ideas of boldness and freedom
