James Betelle, Where Are You?

While doing a little bit of research into Guilbert & Betelle’s New Rochelle High School, I came upon this postcard of Isaac E. Young High School, also in New Rochelle. Isaac E. Young Middle School, as it is called now, is quintessential Collegiate Gothic, featuring red brick, a central tower with octagonal corners in the [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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