James Betelle, Where Are You?

The output of new works from Guilbert & Betelle plummeted in the 1930s, as the Depression caused a suspension of school infrastructure programs. The firm layed off most of the staff, which numbered over 200 just a few years earlier.
Reduced to minor, low profile jobs—building service upgrades, interior renovations—James Betelle had little need to personally [...]

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This morning I went down to the Surrogate Court Building in New York to find information on Marie Betelle. According to her obituary, she died living in NYC, so I was hoping to both find a copy of her will and perhaps see what her building looked like (my first walk around that area revealed [...]

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As satisfying as it is to find an elusive publication, photograph or news item I had been looking for, even more thrilling is finding material I wasn’t looking for. I had a lot of this recently.

Last week I came into posession a stack of letter between Betelle and Pierre S. duPont regarding the schools [...]

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This article appeared in the October, 1929 issue of Fortune Story magazine. Fortune Story 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 [...]

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