Chester County Courthouse Extension

The modern courthouse extension to the north of Thomas Ustick Walter's building ( CH6) mixes Beaux-Arts references in the integration of sculpture into the design and the overscaled dentils of the parapet with modernist asymmetry and broad planar surfaces. The sculptural panels illustrate names selected to link the region to the national story of the Revolution, to mid-nineteenth-century writers such as Bayard Taylor (the “bard of Chester,” who is now barely remembered), and for the twentieth century, a Hall-of-Fame baseball star, Yankees pitcher Herb Pennock. At the root of this cultural schizophrenia were the architects, who came out of the Philadelphia office of Ritter and Shay and after World War II were thrown into the free style of International modernism.