Image: Chautauqua County Courthouse Old and New, Mayville, New York - 20210501

Description: Chautauqua County Courthouse, 3 North Erie Street at East Chautauqua Street, Mayville, New York, May 2021. The most majestic and architecturally significant of the cluster of county government buildings gathered around Mayville's main intersection, the bipartite courthouse - together with the earlier buildings across the street once home to the county clerk's office - is an able narrator of the changing tide of American architectural tastes in the 19th and 20th centuries. The original portion, seen at right, was built in 1907 to a design by Poughkeepsie, New York architect W. J. Beardsley. Its design is a perfect encapsulation of the High Neoclassicism that pervaded the era's institutional architecture, with an entrance framed consecutively by a projecting engaged pediment undergirded by ancone brackets and a majestic tetrastyle Ionic temple front with dentil rows crowning the frieze and climbing the sloping sides of the pediment. Above looms a domed cupola resting on a low pedestal that's defined at the corners by a quartet of squat Ionic pilaster strips with ornamental urns as pinnacles. The north side annex, seen at left, dates to 1968 and is a work of the Jamestown-based firm of Naetzker, Thorsell & Dove. Here, elements of the then-trending New Formalist style come into play in the façade, where a repetitive pattern of vertical bars between the windows give the impression of a colonnade - and impression that's reinforced by the pair of monumental cylindrical pillars that serve as central components of the façade.
Title: Chautauqua County Courthouse Old and New, Mayville, New York - 20210501
Credit: Own work
Author: Andre Carrotflower
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes