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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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Ornament and truth

Another comparison to one of the greats of Modernist architecture: Adolf Loos (Wikipedia), who famously connected ornament and crime, wrote that “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.”[1] Lorenzo Wheeler, on the other hand, warned clients to “Beware of ornament,”[2]. He wrote:

[F]eatures which, by their presence, imply that they are there for a practical purpose which they do not fulfill, … are not ornaments; they are architectural lies.[3]

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Version 8.9 of the list (pdf) includes updated information on the Bronx building built by Dr. Charles Graef and the addition to the Littleton Hospital. That addition, it turns out, survives behind the original hospital building:


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  1. Adolf Loos, Ornament und Verbrechen (1913). ↩
  2. Lorenzo B. Wheeler, “Furniture. / A Series of Interesting Papers / By L.B. Wheeler, Architect of the H.I. Kimball House,” Atlanta Constitution (10 January 1886), 8. ↩
  3. Lorenzo B. Wheeler, “Style and Fashion. / By L.B. Wheeler, Architect of the New H.I. Kimball House,” Atlanta Constitution (27 December 1885), 4. ↩
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Form following function

Lorenzo B. Wheeler makes a fascinating contrast to Louis Sullivan. Wheeler had his St. Louis office in Sullivan’s Wainwright Building (1890), and he built his own skyscraper across the street (the Holland Building, 1897).

In 1896, Louis Sullivan wrote his famous “form follows function” maxim:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.[1]

A decade earlier, Wheeler wrote this:

A form, gracefully and beautifully shaped to perform its proper functions, is the greatest source of beauty and expression an object can have, and anything that interferes with this perfection of form or with the performance of the proper duties of the object, does not ornament, but on the contrary, detracts from it.[2]

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Version 8.8 of the list (pdf) contains several new Georgia projects by Wheeler:

  • a design for a school for the Woman’s Industrial Union
  • a design for a standard mausoleum for the New Mausoleum Company — this was a Kimball plan for a sort of national cemetery chain
  • Atlanta houses for Hugh T. Inman and Louis Gholstin

The reference to Clark Howell, Sr. has been changed to Clark Howell, Jr. to match several contemporary references, even though Junior was not born yet; the likely client, Clark Sr. (1863-1936), was the son of Evan Park Howell.

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  1. Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 57 (March 1896), 408. ↩
  2. Lorenzo B. Wheeler, “Furniture,” Atlanta Constitution (10 January 1886), 8. ↩
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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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An addition to Richard Colgate’s house in Llewellyn Park

Version 8.2 of the list (pdf) includes new information about an interesting Decatur Car Works project by Lorenzo Wheeler, E.A. Shepard’s house in Montclair, and an addition to Richard Colgate’s house.

The second of two posts on pseudonyms in William I. Russell’s autobiography has been updated to reflect the identification of “Ned Banford” as Edward F. Sanford, thanks to a reader.

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The Wheeler sisters in Sharon, Connecticut

Version 8.0 of the list (pdf) now credits the firm with:

  • A whole series of projects in Sharon, Connecticut for the Wheelers, McClurgs, and Tiffanys, including works at 32, 36, and 44 South Main Street.
  • The Old Guard Armory at 49th Street in Manhattan: Nathaniel Witherell was a co-owner of the commercial building.
  • Charles T. Root’s house in East Orange.
  • Judge Beattie’s house in Warwick, N.Y.
  • The Sparks house in Greenwich, which turns out to be well identified and well preserved.
  • Charles Greer’s four rental cottages on Evergreen Avenue in Rye, N.Y. Here is one of them:

A Greer cottage, Rye, N.Y.

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Mystery houses of East Orange identified

What’s new in version 7.7 of the list? (pdf)

  • Two unidentified photos published in the Inland Architect a century ago and recently put on line as part of the Ryerson & Burnham Digital Collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have been identified: the Georgian brick house (SAIC image) was built for Charles Hathaway at 155 Prospect Street (1896), while the “Renaissance” stone house (SAIC image) was built at 92 Harrison Street (1901). Neither stands today.
  • Lorenzo Wheeler’s and Herbert Chivers’s unbuilt design for the Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church in St. Louis is now mentioned.
  • Corrections: W.H.H. Jones’s name has been corrected from James, and Mount Morris Bank is now correctly sited in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn.
  • Caroline and Gustav Schwab’s cottage in Tuxedo Park has been identified, and it appears to stand today on West Lake Road at Mountain Farm Road (aerial below). This can’t be confirmed using Google Street View, of course:


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The Real Estate Record is officially available on line

The Avery Library announced on February 4 that its on-line trove of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, from 1868 to 1922, is officially available and searchable. A fantastic resource.

There is no longer any need to use the cumbersome process outlined in this 2009 post. The OMH Manhattan N.B. Database remains the only place to look up building permits directly, and it covers 1900 to 1986.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to RERBG fixed.]

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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.)