James Betelle, Where Are You?

This past Saturday I had the rare treat of being given a tour of the clock room and astronomical observatory of Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey.
As an alumnus of CHS, the massive clock tower has always been a source of some mystery. Lucky students have the chance to climb it, either for [...]

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This Sunday’s New York Times real estate section profiles South Orange, N.J. in the Living In column. The joint school district of South Orange and Maplewood feature some of James Betelle’s finest school designs and continue draw young families today.
In the article, Dave Caldwell, a Maplewood resident, correctly notes Columbia High School as “…an 80-year-old [...]

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It was inevitable I would begin writing externally about this web site’s titular subject. To that end, I’ve had a small article published in Matters, a community magazine based in Maplewood, New Jersey. Titled New Jersey Gothic: James Betelle and the Schools of South Orange and Maplewood, it appears, appropriately enough, in the August “Back [...]

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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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I’m used to seeing old photographs of schools when they were new and pristine, set against the barren terrain that is indicative of fresh construction. And as my recent tour of Newark showed, it makes for an interesting contrast with contemporary images, where the landscape is overgrown and the school itself may be in various [...]

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