James Betelle, Where Are You?

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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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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I found this wonderful photograph of the Chamber of Commerce Building in the Newark Library’s photo archive. It works on a both large and small scale, from the full breadth of the building down to fine details at street level.
After visiting the building recently I was hoping to find a good period photo, and this [...]

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The only private residence Guilbert & Betelle designed (that I know of) was the Franklin Murphy House in Newark, New Jersey. Franklin Murphy had quite a life; born in 1846, he fought in the Civil War as a teenager, seeing action at Gettysburg. He went on to found the Murphy Varnish Company in Newark, and [...]

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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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