Finally the web page for this project has been put into blog form, moved from http://www.dartmo.com/lambandrich/index.html to http://www.dartmo.com/lambandrich/index.php.
The various updates listed on the old page have been recreated here as backdated posts.
The old page will not be updated but will remain available at http://www.dartmo.com/lambandrich/index2.html.
Thanks to Edward R. Bosley and Anne E. Mallek for the citation to this project’s Pratt family information in A New and Native Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene (Merrell Publishers, 2008).
[Update 12.31.2009. This information moved to this blog from static web page at http://www.dartmo.com/lambandrich/index.html.]
The “Buildings and Projects” list (v. 5) is posted. Still a bare list, it has been made as comprehensive as possible, describing about 600 projects.
[Update 12.31.2009. This information moved to this blog from static web page at http://www.dartmo.com/lambandrich/index.html.]
A new list of about 675 Lamb & Rich projects should be available here in the next few weeks.
[Update 12.07.2009: It is more like 600 projects.]
[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]
While the Office for Metropolitan History has — fabulously — made Manhattan new building application information available through a database covering the years from 1900 to 1986, the building permits of the nineteenth century represent a larger project that is yet to be undertaken.
It turns out that the Internet Archive is hosting scanned and searchable copies of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from 1879 to 1922, each reporting new buildings, alterations, purchases, mortgages, and other transactions in detail. Searching for this journal returns a list of volumes available in pdf and other formats. The one unnumbered volume is 73 (1904), and volumes 26, 28, 30, 38, and 46 appear to be unavailable. Of those, volume 28 (second half of 1881) is available from Google Books.
[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]
Posts have become even less frequent because of a research trip to Manhattan and New Jersey…
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Reid Buckley (of those Buckleys) tries to describe* Lamb & Rich’s clock tower in Sharon, Connecticut:
[T]he clock is referred to always as a structure in “Gothic” style, with its granite blocks quarried nearby in Sharon, its red stones imported from Potsdam, New York. But it is properly called “Richardsonian Romanesque,” I am informed by Liz Shapiro of the Sharon Historical Society, after a New York architect by the name of Charles Alonzo Rich, who is described as “renowned,” would he had not.
Reid would that Rich had not done what? The anti-Victorian sentiment seems to have been tripped up by sloppy editing.
One doubts that the tower is referred to “always” as being in the Gothic style, especially among the Buckleys, who are familiar with the Gothic architecture of Yale. It also seems obvious that “Richardsonian Romanesque” must be named for someone named Richardson — in this case, Henry Hobson Richardson, not a particularly obscure architect.
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*Reid Buckley, An American Family: The Buckleys (Threshold Editions, 2008), 225-226 n3.
[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]
About 600 individual projects by Lamb & Wheeler/Rich have been identified for the book. Progress is occurring in the Manhattan projects, while the Colgate University/family projects remain mysterious. Illustrations are beginning to come in, and a tentative publication date of early 2012 has been established.
[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]
One of the main sources of information on the early days of the Romantic suburb of Short Hills, New Jersey is William Ingraham Russell’s gossipy book The Romance and Tragedy of a Widely Known Business Man of New York . It appears to have been self-published in at least three editions through 1913 as Russell added postscripts. No one yet seems to have tried to figure out the pseudonyms he used for his neighbors in the early 1880s:
House names (“Redstone,” “Sunnyside”) are unchanged, as are place names and addresses outside of Short Hills. “Edward ‘Ned’ Banford,” “William Curtice,” “George Todd,” “Albert Caine,” and “Mr. Viedler” will require more work. (Is “Mr. Viedler” George Vietor?) The Banfords rented 39 Knollwood Road and the Todds rented 1 Park Place around 1893, so it should be possible to identify them.
[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]
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.
[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]
The Queen Anne House: America’s Victorian Vernacular
Thanks to Janet W. Foster for detailed coverage of Lamb & Rich in The Queen Anne House: America’s Victorian Vernacular (Abrams, 2006).