James Betelle, Where Are You?

An interesting architecture magazine I discovered is Pencil Points: A Journal for the Drafting Room. Running from 1920 to 1943, Pencil Points was produced by, and for, working architects, not the more general public as with titles like Architecural Record. Pencil Points Reader is a recent collection of articles spanning the journal’s run. It gives a [...]

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I was zipping through Saturday Night Live the other day on my DVR (it’s the only sane way to watch the show), when a sketch involving a classroom made me jam on the pause button. The establishing shot was a video still of the entrance of a school building. It was a traditional Collegiate Gothic [...]

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Newark in the 1910s was a city one would hardly recognize today. Driven by an influx of money and opportunity, it was a thriving commercial and industrial port. A city on the rise needs grand structures, and certainly nothing makes a statement that a city has arrived than having a stately, luxurious hotel. Newark decided to [...]

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I live near the Julia Richman Educational Complex (JREC), a half-block school building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Built in 1923 as a vocational girls school, Julia Richman is a boxy pile of red brick with minimal but tasteful classical adornment. A simple pediment entrance is inscribed, “Knowledge is Power.” It eventually became a regular [...]

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Guilbert & Betelle designed the 1927 Essex County Hall of Records, in Newark, as a complement to the existing 1902 Court House by Cass Gilbert (to which they did the massive remodeling described in this article). Interestingly, James Betelle worked for Gilbert about that time; it’s possible he was involved in its construction as well. [...]

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