James Betelle, Where Are You?

Happy accidents are rare in the musty world of research, so I do all I can to make them happen. To that end, if I’ve gotten hold of a paper or journal with a specific article I need, I don’t leave it at that. I will comb the entire volume, and even flanking issues, in the unlikely hopes of stumbling upon some thing good.

In the issue of Pencil Points I wrote about previously, I did just that; after reading the sought-after article, I flipped through the rest of the magazine. My eye, attuned to catching James Betelle’s likeness and name in print, saw this photo immediately. It’s attached to an article on the “A. W. Brown Traveling Scholarship Competition for 1931,” to which Betelle served on the jury of five architects.

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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 a great feel for what it was like to work in architecture at that time, and how they dealt with the Depression and the onslaught of European Modernism.

Nothing in the Reader mentions James Betelle, but he is in the June, 1931 issue. He took park in an Architect’s and Producer’s Symposium, discussing their “mutual problems”.

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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 structure, very much a typical design one would see in the Northeast, but I couldn’t place it. Needless to say, I wanted to find out what this school was.

Luckily, a friend of mine knows the production staff at SNL, and found out what school they used. I was surprised to learn it’s not on the East Coast at all, but rather California; it’s John Marshall High School in Los Angeles.

A bigger surprise came when I saw pictures of the whole school. The entrance tower is incredibly similar to that of my alma mater, Columbia High School.

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James Betelle died in Florence, Italy on June 3rd, 1954. This I have known since my earliest research into the man, and indeed many obituaries, biographies and articles point this out. What I have noticed is that one reference is merely copying an earlier one; often turns of phrase in one article can clearly be traced to previous ones, with slightly modified wording or content. It’s a biographical game of Telephone.

With the facts surrounding his death vague and diluted over the years, it has been a goal to trace these tendrils of information back to the earliest sources possible. As fortune would have it, I am going to Florence on holiday next week.

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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 build such a hotel, and in their local school designers, Guilbert & Betelle, they found the perfect architects. Read more →