James Betelle, Where Are You?

One of the most important contracts for Guilbert & Betelle were the schools of the South Orange and Maplewood School District in New Jersey, where they would eventually design all of the new school buildings up through 1930. The creation of the first school they built, The Marshall School, (named for retiring Board president James [...]

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This article appeared in the October, 1929 issue of Fortune Story Magazine. FSM was a 15¢ pulp magazine filled with these kinds of up-lifting, moralistic tales aimed at impressionable younger readers. The only new information it garnered was G&B’s first office being “in an attic room over an art store”, but the writing is so [...]

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I’ve come across many ads for contractors and building equipment suppliers that all specifically mention Guilbert & Betelle, so I thought it would be fun to show them all together. Wallace & Tiernan’s “Chlorine Control Apparatus” (left) appeared in the January 1928 issue of American School Board Journal, not-so-coincidentally the same issue featuring the artice on [...]

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The December, 1931 issue of The Architectural Forum article, “Nine Senior High School Buildings” featured two Guilbert & Betelle schools; Great Neck High School and The Bronxville School. The text and illustrations for Great Neck High School (now Great Neck North High School) are shown here. While Betelle is on record as preferring the Collegiate [...]

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These are the two obituaries I found for Betelle at the Newark Public Library. The first is from The Newark Evening News from June 5th, 1954. This was a Sunday, which establishes Betelle’s death as Thursday, June 3rd (whether that is the local or Italian date is unknown). The second obit (source unclear) is almost [...]

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