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Lorenzo B. Wheeler designed the Hotel Tybee in Georgia

Version 8.5 of the list (pdf) is now set in Bell MT and includes these new items:

  • An attribution for an addition to Mr. Drysdale’s house.
  • A correction for the C.M. Pratt project incorrectly located in Riverhead.
  • A correction for the misattribution of the renovations of the Oriental Hotel: they were done by McKim, Mead & White.
  • A correction for the misnaming of Joseph D. Oliver in Indiana.
  • The inclusion of Massachusetts Hall at Dartmouth, which was left off the list somehow.
  • A correction for the location of the West project in Pittsfield, and an identification of the project as Court Hill (see images, an aerial).
  • An identification at long last of one David Foubister as the client for a 1922 project.
  • An identification but not a location for a house of Horatio M. Adams at Glen Cove of around 1903 (not his ca. 1895 house by Little & Browne).

There are several new projects or confirmations for L.B. Wheeler:

  • The Hotel Tybee in Georgia.
  • A house in Savannah.
  • Several Atlanta public school projects, including the rebuilding of the Crew Street School and the design of a new Mitchell Street School.
  • A failed competition entry for the Sumpter County Courthouse.
  • The Casa Grande hotel (unbuilt?) and a massive Casa Grande stable in Decatur, Alabama.

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[Update 05.12.2013: Broken link to Court Hill images repaired.]

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Albert Levy’s Madison Avenue mystery houses identified?

Albert Levy (Wikipedia) was a pioneering architectural photographer who produced about 36 albums of photos of modern American buildings during the 1870s.

The Art Institute of Chicago has 90 of Levy’s images on line. Many are identified, but the one project from Lamb & Wheeler is listed as being on Madison Avenue, “possibly at E. 67th St.”

Levy photo of L&W houses, from SAIC

Detail from photo of Lamb & Wheeler project in Albert Levy’s Architectural Photographic Series, Series 16, No. 70 (from the Art Institute of Chicago Historic Architecture & Landscape Image Collection).

The photo shows four houses facing Madison Avenue, with the house at the left on a corner: its entrance must be on the cross-street. The outer houses are faced with brick, the inner with stone.

The only houses so far attributed to Lamb & Wheeler that cannot be ruled out using other historic photos are the four houses at 821-827 Madison Avenue, on the southeast corner of 69th Street.

An 1898 atlas confirms that the outer two houses at 821-827 Madison were faced with brick and the inner two with stone:

Detail of 1898-1899 Bromley atlas of NYC, from NYPL

Detail from Bromley 1898-1899 atlas of New York (from NYPL).

But what about the projecting bays that are so prominent in the photo? The 1898 atlas does not depict them, but the 1916 atlas does:

Detail of 1916 Bromley atlas of NYC, from NYPL

Detail from Bromley 1916 atlas of New York (from NYPL).

Although the bays on the two northern houses were not colored, they are still depicted, and each has the correct form, whether square or rounded/faceted. All but one of the bays shown on the atlas occupies the correct position within its facade. The listed widths of 26 feet, 29 feet, 25 feet, and 20 feet 5 inches also comport the relative widths of the facades as they appear in the photo.

Montgomery Schuyler wrote[1] of the corner house at 827 Madison Avenue that

the attic story has an appearance of extreme weakness imparted to it by the introduction of piers half a brick wide to carry the gables of the dormers.

The photo shows one dormer on the corner house, and it does show some “weakness,” although its piers are not half a brick wide. Schuyler was probably referring to the dormers on the street facade, or he might have been exaggerating.

Here is the curious part: all four of these houses still exist. They have been so radically altered, however, that they no longer bear any resemblance to the houses in Albert Levy’s photograph. The owners removed the remaining bays, stoops, and porticos and put up new facades during the 1920s:




821-827 Madison Avenue today (from Google Street View).

The rear extensions of the houses still look right:




Aerial view of 821-827 Madison Avenue (from Google Maps).

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Update 05.04.2013: Broken links to Art Institute images repaired.

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  1. Montgomery Schuyler, “Recent Building in New York. — IV,” American Architect and Building News 9:279 (30 April 1881), 207 (referring to a “corner house in Madison Avenue, somewhere above Seventieth Street” by “Wheeler & Lamb”). ↩
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What became of the Chappaqua Mountain Institute in Valhalla?

Back in business with the first update in seven months, version 8.3 of the list (pdf) includes these items:

  • The “Bettis Bungalow Hospital” in Chappaqua has been identified as a hospital or infirmary building at the Chappaqua Mountain Institute in Valhalla, N.Y., directed by Charles R. Blenis. Do you know what became of the Institute after World War I?
  • The modest two-level storefront addition at 55 West 28th (Street View) has been identified as a Hugh Lamb project of 1902.
  • Frederic A. Angell’s late-1880s house in Montclair, N.J. has been identified as a Lamb & Rich project.
  • The standing “Cliffside Chapel” or St. James’s Episcopal Church has been identified as a Lamb & Wheeler project (it is typically attributed to Lamb & Rich).
  • New information on the unbuilt L&W building at 37, 39 Greene Street has been included; it turns out that the client was Hugh Lamb’s neighbor and future father-in-law.
  • Corrections have been made to 825 Broadway, the project for Bernhard Cohen, George Lowther’s Riverside (Conn.) address, and the Colgate Delta Kappa Epsilon House (still standing at its prominent location: Street View).
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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 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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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.

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Colonial Revival mania in Sharon, Connecticut

Sharon has a number of genuinely Colonial buildings, but it has more buildings erected in the Colonial style at the turn of the Twentieth Century.

While Lamb & Rich are known for the Romanesque monument on the Green in Sharon, the Wheeler Memorial Clock Tower, their other projects in town have not been identified.

The firm designed two houses and an addition to a Colonial house for Emily O. Wheeler, an addition for her sister Emily and her husband, Charles Comfort Tiffany, and projects for McClurg, Schuyler, and Van Renssalaer that might be located in Sharon.

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Lawrence Hall, precursor of Lawrence Woodmere Academy

The Lawrence element of Lawrence Woodmere Academy traces its history back to a private school established by the Lawrence Association in Lawrence, Long Island in 1891. Information on the Association’s original building, apparently a combination schoolroom and meeting hall called Lawrence Hall, is difficult to find.

The building was definitely built, however, and was supported by Association members Frederick B. Lord and George C. Rand. Lamb & Rich completed a school for Rand in 1891 that might be Lawrence Hall.