Second
Empire By Peter Barr In the nineteenth century, most Americans associated the Second Empire style with the modernization of Paris, which became an industrial powerhouse under the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. In Adrian, the style was also closely associated with the wealthy banker Elihu Clark. Architectural historians consider any house with a Mansard roof to be in the Second Empire Style, which is also referred to as the Mansard Style or the General Grant Style. A Mansard roof is a hipped roof that is nearly flat on top and steeply sloped on the sides, generally covering the entire height of the top story to the building. It is named after the seventeenth-century French architect Francois Mansart, who first popularized the form. The popularity of his roof design was revived in the nineteenth century during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie (1848-70), when Paris was transformed from a medieval city into a modern, industrial power complete with railroads, sewers, and boulevards that were lined with new five-story brownstone apartment buildings capped with Mansard roofs. The Second Empire style became fashionable in the United States following two successful international expositions of art and industry in Paris in 1855 and 1867 that featured the latest technological advances and industrial products from around the world. As a result, Americans came to consider both Paris and the Second Empire style, despite its seventeenth-century origins, to be very progressive, industrialized, modern, cosmopolitan, elegant and charming. The first major public building in the United States to feature a Mansard roof was James Renwick’s Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery (1859-71; known today as the Renwick Gallery), which, like its European counterparts, was built of stone. Then, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), public buildings and private homes throughout the country were built in the style, many featuring cast iron and pressed metal details made possible by America’s own industrial modernization following the American Civil War (1860-65). Many of these structures were the first three-story structures built in their communities. In the mid-1870s, the Second Empire style suddenly lost some of its prestige in Europe when France suffered a military defeat to the Prussians (1871) and the industrial West tumbled into an economic depression (1873). In Adrian, the style was closely linked to Elihu Clark, reported to be the wealthiest man in south-central Michigan in the 1860s and 1870s. Clark lived in a grand Second Empire-style home that he built in the early 1860s at the corner of Maumee and Locust streets, where the Adrian Post Office now stands. After Clark's death in 1880, his daughter Isabella Clark Cocker honored his memory by remodeling her own home at 312 Dennis Street in the Second Empire style. The International Order of the Odd Fellows followed suit, using the $10,000 that Clark left them in his will to build Clark Memorial Hall, designed in 1887 by architects Beck and Vogt, at 124 South Winter Street. Near the end of the century in Adrian, the Mansard roof was sometimes combined with late Gothic Revival wall gables, as can be seen on the 1890 Kaiser-Robins House at 627 North Main Street, creating an eclectic Second Empire/Gothic Revival style.
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