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Charlou House on Long Island

Version 9.2 of the list (pdf) contains a few fixes (Plainfield Church, removal of a duplicate NYC firehouse), new addresses for Smith and White in Ridgewood, and some more certainty about Charlou House and Oakleigh in Glen Cove.

News:

–The top floor of the Pratt Institute’s Main Building burned in a frightening fire in the middle of February (New York Times).

–Christopher Gray’s latest Streetscapes column covers William B. Tubby, the Pratt family architect. Tubby had a lot of overlap with Lamb & Rich, not only in the Pratt family buildings but also in Elizabeth M. Anderson’s Greenwich Library, where Tubby designed an addition.

—Reason has an interesting profile of Tom Tryniski, creator of Fultonhistory.com, a huge online archive of New York State newspapers that been useful to this project for several years now. The article gives an accurate introduction:

Fultonhistory.com also has a bizarre interface that includes swimming fish and the occasional live video stream of squirrels eating corn on Tryniski’s front deck. Perhaps the strangest detail is a moving graphic in the left hand corner of the screen that shows Tryniski’s head grafted on top of the body of a spider.

–Thanks to the Art Institute of Chicago for the cite to this site in the data sheet for the historic Staten Island Academy image and other images.

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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 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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A monograph of the work of Lamb & Rich, Architects

As mentioned in the Dartmouth Parents & Grandparents Fund newsletter (Winter 2009), the book project underway at the moment is a monograph on Lamb & Rich. This is the same project mentioned in the Times back in 2004 and will take a few more years to complete.

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Update 05.04.2013: Broken link to newsletter removed.
Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.