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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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Tenements for a billiards man

It is not reflected in the short version of the building list, but the client for Wheeler’s two tenements at 159 and 161 East 90th has been identified: John F. Gleason, the well-known billiards man and keeper of one of the city’s best pool rooms, in the Bowery. The 1880 Census describes his occupation as “liquors,” but everywhere else he was a “roomkeeper.” He lived next door to his building project.

Version 7.6 of the list (pdf) also incorporates this new information:

  • Wheeler’s design of a house at 35 East 68th Street (past two typos in the source and an 1899 demolition);
  • a tentative attribution of Charles A. Frank’s 1904 “Charlou House” in Glen Cove; and
  • a confirmation (via Howard Major’s later work) of the firm’s design of William Dick’s 1888 house in Islip, “Allen Winden” or “Allen Winden Farm.”
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A house for William Ledyard Vandervoort in South Oyster Bay

Vandervoort bought the property around 1880; the author of his 1882 house has now been identified. This project could suggest the means by which Theodore Roosevelt learned about the firm before he built his house in Oyster Bay.

Version 7.5 of the list (pdf) also identifies the six houses the firm designed for Gerald L. Schuyler at 307 West 83rd Street and 481-489 West End Avenue. At least two of these survive, one of which is mentioned by Christopher Gray in “The School of the Stepped Gables,” New York Times (30 January 2009).

Other new citations include:

  • an alteration to Elizabeth Milbank’s house at 6 East 38th by her daughter, Elizabeth M. Anderson;
  • some interesting hotel alterations at 53-59 West 42nd Street for the New York Real Estate and Building Improvement Company, another Ferdinand Fish production; and
  • a confirmation of the firm’s 1916 alteration of the Educational Building, now apparently the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center of the Parsons School of Design.
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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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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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Who designed Pine Tree Point?

Who designed the original “Pine Tree Point” house on Point Marguerite/Point Anthony at Alexandria Bay in the Thousand Islands, New York? John B. Taylor commissioned the imposing stone summer cottage in the early 1920s. It might have been Rich & Mathesius, since the firm referred to Taylor projects in 1920 and 1921.

The building seems to have burned several years after Taylor sold it. The current Pine Tree Point is a relatively recent replacement.

Version 6.3 of the list (pdf) has been posted. It contains a few changes and corrections.

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[Update 03.07.2013: Broken link to resort replaced.]
[Update 01.09.2011: Charles A. Rich definitely designed Pine Tree Point.]