Tag Archives: school

Focused discussion of specific schools by Guilbert & Betelle

More Newark, More Schools

Last week I headed down to Newark to learn more about James Betelle’s tragically short-lived partner, Ernest F. Guilbert. I scored quickly by finding Guilbert’s obituary at the library, which painted a pretty good portrait of his life and career. With that done, I was off to chase down a number of schools I hadn’t had a chance to visit before. Most of them would be primarily Guilbert’s work, from around the time he first joined up with Betelle.

My first stop was Weequahic High School, built in 1932. It’s a monolithic Art Deco design very much along the lines of the School of Fine and Industrial Arts and the Girls Vocational School, also built about the same time. It also has the dubious distinction of being the last complete school the firm built (as far as I know).
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The Spectre of Typos

Isaac Young High SchoolWhile 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 classic Princeton mode, and a sprawling, asymmetrical profile. Needless to say I wanted to find out it’s architect. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Betelle, but my records of his buildings is far from complete, so you never know.

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Separated at Birth?

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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Old Schools = Bad Schools?

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 high school and slowly declined into the 1980s as a drug-infested, vandalized urban nightmare. Continue reading →

“Modern American Schoolhouses – Some Recent Examples of Specialized Buildings”

The following excerpts are from Modern American Schoolhouses – Some Recent Examples of Specialized Buildings Guilbert & Betelle, Architects by Rawson W. Haddon in The Architectural Record, September 1914. This lengthy article is a survey of the firm’s work of that period, before the death of Guilbert. The author ruminates on the not-strictly Gothic eclecticism of these buildings, as I explored in my recent drive through Newark.

Many things have combined to make the school house one of the most complicated of modern architectural problems. Not only are the usual appointments changed extensively from year to year, but the growing tendency to devote the school to the broader educational uses and to various sorts of social betterment and neighborhood work has also brought special problems: and each new use, whether educational or sociological, puts before the architect intricate questions of design to solve.
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