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California house(s)

Thanks to Professor Sparke (Wikipedia) for covering Rich in her discussion of Barnard College’s Brooks Hall:

Instead Charles Rich was given the responsibility for the project, doubtless because of his long association with Elizabeth Anderson, for whose family he designed more than a dozen buildings, including the family mausoleum, her father’s house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and her own homes in New York City and Santa Monica, California. Rich also was the architect of Sagamore Hill, the great Shingle Style country house created for Teddy Roosevelt, a close friend of Anderson’s husband.

Penny Sparke, ed. Mitchell Owens, Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (Acanthus Press, 2005), 59.

But Santa Monica? I wonder, is that Anderson’s Long Beach house, or her daughter’s house at 671 Wilshire Boulevard, or a third house?

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[Update 12.02.2013: Broken link to Prof. Sparke replaced with Wikipedia citation.]
[Update 05.04.2013: Broken link to museum repaired.]

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The Mallorys of Mystic and Byram Shore

Version 7.4 of the list (pdf) corrects W.H.H. Jones to W.H.H. James and clarifies the Henry R. Mallory projects in Greenwich somewhat. Of the three Mallory houses built in a row on Byram Shore beginning around 1884, only the middle one, that of Henry, appears to survive:

Henry R. Mallory house.

Part of the confusion comes from the suggestion in a recent Greenwich book that Charles Mallory’s son Clifford replaced Charles’s original 1885 house, “Clifton.” One of Charles’s sons, probably Robert, apparently did replace “Clifton,” but it was not Clifford Day Mallory. Clifford was the grandson of Charles Mallory and the son of Henry R. Mallory, the one whose house survives.

(Compare the recent Sotheby’s catalog, which claimed that “Clifton” still stood. The site of “Clifton” is visible to the north of the Henry R. Mallory house in the photo above.)

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The Lowther House, Riverside, Connecticut

This might be a new attribution. It appears that Lamb & Rich were the designers of George Lowther’s 1891 house on Lowther Point, apparently part of Indian Head Point, in Riverside, Greenwich. An aerial view of the house appears on page 158 of Rachel Carley’s Building Greenwich. After serving at least four generations of Lowthers, the house appears to have been sold and demolished recently.

The replacement building’s western wing with its three dormers and tower does look slightly similar — alas, not similar enough — to the old house:



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The Augustus Frost Libby house, Summit, N.J.

Version 7.3 of the list (pdf) clears up the addresses of the nine houses the firm developed at 290-298 West End Avenue and 254-260 West 74th Street and identifies “Easterly,” the George F. Dominick house on Field Point Circle in Greenwich, Conn. (1902). This one still stands, and images of recent renovations show how much the house shares with the contemporary College Hall at Dartmouth.

The list is now one step closer to locating Augustus Libby’s house in Summit, N.J. The property was known as “Finisterre,” and its preferred street address appears to have started out on Springfield Avenue and later shifted to Beekman Place. The Benziger family owned it after the Libby family.

Alex Hanson, in “Building by Building,” Valley News (15 January 2011), refers to

a book about Lamb & Rich, a New York architecture firm that designed nearly two dozen buildings for Dartmouth when it expanded dramatically at the beginning of the 20th century.

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Martin’s Villa or Fairmount, Chatham, N.J.

Version 7.1 of the list (pdf) has only a few new buildings, by far the most interesting of which is one that Hugh Lamb advertised on the back of the 1877 Newark city directory:

Martin's Villa, Chatham, N.J. by Hugh Lamb
Martin’s Villa (Fairmount?), Chatham, N.J.

This might be the grand mansion built on Long Hill (Fairmount Avenue) by William A. Martin of New York, a wholesale liquor dealer (or tea importer?). It does not look like Fairview House, the long-time hotel apparently established by a William Martin.

Incidentally, Lamb first appears — as an architect — in Newark in a directory published in 1868. He seems to have been a draftsman, but the directories do not indicate which firm he was with. He would have been only 19 or 20.

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The Woman’s Apartment House Association

Version 7.0 of the list (pdf) has been posted. Along with a minor reorganization and the dropping of Rich’s Charlottesville house as far too late to include, these are some of the changes:

  • An interesting unbuilt Woman’s Apartment House Association design is noted. This was an answer to the popular bachelor apartment of the 1890s — for “girl bachelors,” women who were frustrated at being turned away from restaurants after 9 pm when not accompanied by a man.
  • The New Rochelle apartment building has finally been given a tentative identification.
  • “Pine Tree Point” of J.B. Taylor in the Thousand Islands has been conclusively identified.
  • The firm designed a competition entry for the St. Joseph County Courthouse in South Bend, Ind.
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Pratt Manor, of course

Version 6.5 of the list (pdf) was posted a while back. Recent additions include:

  • Pratt Manor or “the Manor House,” at Glen Cove, Charles Pratt’s ca. 1890 alteration of an existing house. The house was moved and replaced by Pratt’s son John Teele Pratt around 1912. The son’s replacement, called “the Manor,” was designed by Charles Platt, which accounts for the present confusion.
  • Unbuilt design for Alpha Delta Phi house at Amherst College.
  • The big attribution: Anderson Hall at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky (University of Louisville photo), almost certainly the “Mrs. Anderson Kentucky school” designed by Charles A. Rich.
  • An 1892 addition to a Tinpan Alley building commissioned by Charles Baron von Woodcock Savage, a “favorite” of the King of Württemberg and the subject of a fascinating article by Jonathan Ned Katz.
  • A tentative attribution for the W.H.H. James house at around 80 Munn Avenue in East Orange.

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[Update 12.02.2013: Broken link to Katz article replaced.]
[Update 09.19.2013: Savage article author’s name corrected; link broken but left up for the time being.]

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Short Hills Congregational Church, unbuilt

Version 6.4 of the list (pdf) is up.

New are the references to Wheeler’s two tenements for John F. Gleason (a consolidation of references to Gleason and “Mr. Mason”; not sure whether Gleason is the famous billiards man of that name); the sports pavilion at the Berkeley Oval (not the same as the Berkeley Oval Cottage, apparently); and a flamboyant unbuilt design for Short Hills Congregational Church.

The strange disjunction between the number of houses apparently built in Henderson Place, thirty-two, and the repeated reference to the Lamb & Rich project as containing forty houses might be closer to a solution. It turns out that a year or so before work began, Lamb & Wheeler filed plans for a dozen houses on a plot adjoining the site to the west, on East 86th Street. A hospital has occupied that site since the early 1900s, and it is difficult to tell whether this original dozen was built. It seems doubtful.