This web site was featured in the New Jersey Star-Ledger on Friday, January 4th. The column, Jersey Blogs, was a Q&A with staff writer Kelly Heyboer conducted in early December.
Any exposure for this arcane subject is welcome, and the article certainly gained a nice bit of readership. If you’ve discovered this site from reading the article, glad to have you here. Poke around, ask questions.
The whole interview can be read at Heyboer’s blog.
Now this is a fun little thing. By sheer luck I’ve found caricature illustrations of both James Betelle and Ernest Guilbert. I’ve had the Betelle drawing for a while, but just recently acquired the Guilbert, so I can now present them as the symmetrical pair they were destined to be.
Ye Architect of Ye Great Inn
The illustration of Betelle is from the book A History of Newark and Notable Newarkers, by Thomas Fleming, a noted cartoonist of the day. Written in celebration of Newark’s gala 250th anniversary in 1916, it’s a tongue-in-cheek history of the city, with contemporary figures inserted into historical guise.
Betelle is dressed in puritan garb, standing by his then most celebrated work, the Robert Treat Hotel. He doesn’t seem particularly thrilled in the getup, but the quote does give him respect:
James O. Betelle is the Architect of Robert Treats finest monument – the beautiful Hotel named in his honor. His motto is – “Newark knows how–So does Architect Betelle.”
A Leg Up
Guilbert’s drawing (clearly taken from his portrait) is a bit of a mystery. It was part of a folio of dozens of similar caricatures of other notable figures from Essex County (NJ). Sadly it’s neither signed nor dated, but I would place it at about 1914. It doesn’t seem to be Fleming’s work.
Guilbert is shown seated at a roll-top desk at the “Board of Education Construction Dept.”, where he was employed as Newark’s school architect before teaming with Betelle. The casual pose with the leg on the desk is a funny detail; was the artist capturing a trait of Guilbert’s, or simply giving the illustration some visual interest?
If James Betelle was a mystery when this project began, than Ernest F. Guilbert, his partner, was a mystery wrapped in an enigma encased in a block of lucite. There was–and is–very little information regarding this architect who clearly had a strong influence on Betelle.
Today the mystery is lessened. I found his obituary in the Newark Evening News of Friday, December 1, 1916, the same day of his death. It provides as good a biography of Guilbert as we’re likely to get.
While 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.
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.
