Tenements for a billiards man

By Editor | Published: 05.15.2011

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

By Editor | Published: 04.24.2011

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 Williams Villa

By Editor | Published: 04.11.2011

An 1874 design for a villa for Henry T. Williams in Essex County, N.J. by Hugh Lamb. Williams was the editor of The Horticulturist and printed Lamb’s drawings in the journal:

Henry T. Wiliams villa

Hugh Lamb design for Williams villa, from Google Books

At the time, Lamb’s office was located at 788 Broad Street in Newark, and he advertised exclusively as “H. Lamb.” Thus Williams’s reference to a “Henry Lamb” at that address appears to be an error: no other Newark architect named Lamb been found for this period.

Williams went on to establish a fringe religious group called the Williamites that believed in property ownership by the community (or by Henry T. Williams); prepared for the Second Coming; was persecuted across the West; etc.

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The Real Estate Record is officially available on line

By Editor | Published: 04.10.2011

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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California house(s)

By Editor | Published: 04.10.2011

Thanks to Professor Sparke 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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The Mallorys of Mystic and Byram Shore

By Editor | Published: 03.29.2011

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 Lowther House, Riverside, Connecticut

By Editor | Published: 02.12.2011

This might be a new attribution. It appears that Lamb & Rich were the designers of George Lowther’s 1891 house on Lowther Point, apparently part of Indian Head Point, in Riverside, Greenwich. An aerial view of the house appears on page 158 of Rachel Carley’s Building Greenwich. After serving at least four generations of Lowthers, the house appears to have been sold and demolished recently.

The replacement building’s western wing with its three dormers and tower does look slightly similar — alas, not similar enough — to the old house:



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The Augustus Frost Libby house, Summit, N.J.

By Editor | Published: 02.11.2011

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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Cottage for the Misses Stebbins, Cannon Point, Lake George, N.Y.

By Editor | Published: 01.10.2011

This ca. 1907 summer cottage is still standing:



The house is now the recreation center for a condo complex (see top photo, bottom photo).

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New version of catalog — Two houses in Riverdale, the Bronx

By Editor | Published: 01.09.2011

Version 7.2 of the list (pdf) includes clearer identifications of neighboring 1887 houses in Riverdale for Edmund Titus (below) and Frederick M. Adams (bottom).



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