On Spotting Yellow Brick

Steven Baltsas, WPAMC ’25

Yellow bricks and I are like Jean Valjean and Javert. Eluding me for some time, they appeared on more than one occasion during our Northern trip, prompting me to revisit my past encounters with the material in my home state of New York.

It begins at the lakeside. Specifically in Cazenovia, New York, a small town on a lake of the same name. Leaving the main drag, we passed a brick church looming above us in a familiar buff tone (Fig. 1).¹ A classmate drew parallels between this color and “Cream City” bricks used in the Frederick Pabst Mansion (1892) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Aside from beer and cheese, the Milwaukee’s industrial heritage also includes the manufacture of these distinctive cream-colored bricks. Their tone derives from their materiality: a light earthenware clay.

Formed from lacustrine (lakeside) clays in the Great Lakes region, the yellow is the result of combining clay from a lacustrine deposit’s upper and lower levels, bearing reddish or bluish hues, respectively, when sourced. Fired separately, the upper clay maintains its red shade—that expected of most brick—while the lower becomes white or buff. Milwaukee brickworkers found the ideal mixture of these two clays by the 1840s, capitalizing on the yellowish color of this unmatched building material.²

Despite the fame of Cream City brick, it has little to do with my research agenda. When I saw the church in Cazenovia, my first thought was of Buffalo. Similar to Milwaukee, Buffalo is situated on a Great Lake and also participated in the manufacture of yellow bricks during the nineteenth century. Evidently, the Buffalo cousins of Cream City bricks have not garnered as much scholarly interest. Period references give them the terse and less imaginative title “Buffalo bricks.”

I first encountered Buffalo brick as an undergraduate researching country houses by English immigrant architects in the Hudson Valley, located at the opposite end of New York State. In a collection of Richard Upjohn’s surviving architectural specifications, I came across references to Buffalo brick in relation to his William Moore House (1854–55) in Garrison, New York. This probably influenced Upjohn’s colleague and fellow Englishman, Frederick C. Withers, when he designed Tioronda (1859–60), the nearby yellow brick residence of Joseph and Eliza Howland.³ Influenced by John Ruskin and architectural polychromy, Withers amplified Ruskin’s ideas about composing facades with brick or stone of extraordinary colors. From the world of this design approach came Olana (1870–72), the home of painter Frederic Church in Hudson, New York. Fittingly, it was co-designed by Withers’s architectural partner Calvert Vaux, another English immigrant. On our visit there, a docent serendipitously pointed out the Buffalo bricks used in the tower.

Brick from Buffalo also began to appear in urban buildings during the 1850s. In fact, its first implementation in New York City was the Upjohn-designed Trinity Building (1851–52), which would house his firm’s architectural office.⁴ The five-story Italianate office building, with bricks of a “yellowish tinge,” was criticized not for its color, but for the appearance of its unpressed bricks, suggesting manufacturers in Buffalo were still learning how to create smooth-surfaced (pressed) bricks typically used as a veneer on buildings.⁵ As the Trinity Building moved towards completion, Upjohn began construction of the city hall for Utica, New York, similarly designed along Italian lines.⁶ 

But brick is dense. Just one brick is heavy to carry. In the beginning stages of my scholarly relationship with yellow brick, I found it hard to believe how it could have been exported from Milwaukee let alone Buffalo. That naivety admitted, the answer lies in a road of water that made these shipments possible. The Erie Canal, connecting disparate places like Buffalo and New York City with towns like Utica and Garrison helped disseminate yellow brick in the nineteenth century. How Upjohn, his architectural colleges, and builders in New York City became aware of it is yet unclear. Without a doubt, my future encounters with yellow brick will continue to spark inquiries.

1. The brick for the church was apparently made in Cazenovia, rather than a major city on the Great Lakes, see Cazenovia Public Library, “Cazenovia Methodist Church,” Clio: Your Guide to History, accessed September 5, 2024, https://theclio.com/entry/56777. ↩︎
2. Andrew Charles Stern, “Cream City: The Brick That Made Milwaukee Famous,” Master’s thesis, The University of Georgia, 2015, 22–23; Heinrich Ries, Clays: Their Occurrence, Properties, and Uses 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1927), 499. ↩︎
3. Everard M. Upjohn, Richard Upjohn: Architect and Churchman (New York: Da Capo Press, 1939) 210; Francis R. Kowsky, The Architecture of Frederick Clarke Withers and the Progress of the Gothic Revival in America after 1850 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 38. Frustratingly, the announcement of the house’s construction in The Architects’ and Mechanics’ Journal 1 (March 17, 1860): 192 only mentions that the house was being built of “yellow brick,” not specifying its place of origin. Red pressed brick was often stated as being from either Philadelphia or Baltimore. ↩︎
4. Upjohn, 203. ↩︎
5. “New-York Daguerreotyped,” Putnam’s Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art 1, no. 2 (February 1853): 131. In Buffalo itself, the Italianate style Female Academy, seemingly built at the same time as the Trinity Building, used yellow brick, see “Buffalo Female Academy,” February 9, 1852, 2, accessed through Newspapers.com. ↩︎
6. Upjohn, 130. Observer-Dispatch, “OUR VIEW: Give Rome credit for having vision,” Observer-Dispatch (Utica, NY), March 29, 2017, accessed September 5, 2024, https://www.uticaod.com/story/opinion/editorials/2017/03/29/our-view-give-rome-credit/21827733007/. ↩︎