Version 9.3 of the list (pdf) contains a few updates:

• Street numbers and dates for Henderson’s six cottages on Staten Island have been improved.
• President Seelye’s house, which fell out of the list somehow, has been put back in.
• The supposed design for an administration building at Smith College has been removed — the one contemporary reference to it was actually an erroneous caption for John M. Greene Hall.
• The Mattlage house is a bit closer to identification.
• The extensive renovations for H.P. Davison to his house at Peacock Point (a house built for C.O. Gates) have been attributed to the firm. The house is obscure today because it burned less than two years after the renovations and was replaced by a Walker & Gillette house.

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.

Other changes:

• The list is now crediting Rich with the design of the 1900 Poillon house in Water Witch Park, rather than Rossiter & Wright, on the basis of a reference in firm records and a notice published in the American Architect and Real Estate Record. Son Howard Andrews Poillon would marry daughter Francis Wright, but not until 1914.
• The suspicion that Rich designed the Samuel Seabury Jones house at Water Witch, on the other hand, has finally been excised. That was clearly a Rossiter & Wright project.
• Spelling corrections include the names of Niven (not Nivens) and Peugnet (not Penguet). Puegnet and Morrison were sisters, it turns out, and were involved in St. Louis skyscrapers including the Holland Building. That and related entries have been reorganized.
• The credit for the simple remodeling of the Hubbard House in Hanover, N.H. has been removed; the relevant listing in firm records likely reflects only an unbuilt addition.
• The house for Frank Enos in Englewood is placed with more confidence at 148 Grand Avenue.
• The building that the Consolidated Ice Co. had the firm alter was designed by Napoleon Le Brun as a church.

[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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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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• The duplicate reference to the A.B. Ansbacher project has been removed.
• The 534 Madison Avenue project has been confirmed: until now, only the coincidence of a reference to “534 Mad. Ave. Corp.” in firm records and the address of Mathesius’s uncle’s furniture showroom suggested a link.
• The 1916 addition and alteration for Ray W. McMullen to a New Canaan house has been added.
• J.B. Taylor had the firm design a house (another house) in Watertown in 1919.
• The John C. Minor house in Elizabeth, N.J. of 1913 has been added. This is the third or fourth time the firm has worked for someone in the soda-water business. The house is no longer standing.
• Lamb’s ca. 1873 designs for model farm cottages have been added.

A research trip to Wilmington, Delaware yielded a tour of the Playhouse Theatre in the DuPont Building (thanks, Michael). The interior is being renovated:

The theater was added to the rear of an existing building and was not meant to have a public facade. This is the most interesting “exterior” wall:

• 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.]

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.”

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:

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:

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:

The rear extensions of the houses still look right:

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Update 05.04.2013: Broken links to Art Institute images repaired.

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