Category Archives: Miscellaneous

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 →

All I Got is a Photograph

Chamber of Commerce BuildingI found this wonderful photograph of the Chamber of Commerce Building in the Newark Library’s photo archive. It works on a both large and small scale, from the full breadth of the building down to fine details at street level.

After visiting the building recently I was hoping to find a good period photo, and this one is better than I had hoped for; I’ve become accustomed to very sparse photos of Betelle’s schools, which were generally shot lacking any signs of life. This one, however, captures a vibrant and familiar urban landscape (the stores have since gained a certain tackiness, but it’s still as bustling).

I would like to have imagined that James Betelle is up in one of those windows, looking over the plans for some school or conducting any number of his civic-related duties. There was just one problem; I didn’t know when the picture was taken, it’s not dated. How would I figure this out? For this, we get into the tangential minutia of detective work that has been more and more the bane of my research (commonly known as yak shaving).

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The Franklin Murphy House, Newark NJ

Franklin Murhpy House

The only private residence Guilbert & Betelle designed (that I know of) was the Franklin Murphy House in Newark, New Jersey. Franklin Murphy had quite a life; born in 1846, he fought in the Civil War as a teenager, seeing action at Gettysburg. He went on to found the Murphy Varnish Company in Newark, and later became the 31st Governor of New Jersey, serving from 1901-1904. In retirement he was very active in Newark politics and civic movements, including a stint as Essex County Parks Commissioner. He died in 1920 at 74.
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Guilbert & Betelle in Advertisement

wallace-tiernan.jpgI’ve come across many ads for contractors and building equipment suppliers that all specifically mention Guilbert & Betelle, so I thought it would be fun to show them all together.

Wallace & Tiernan’s “Chlorine Control Apparatus” (left) appeared in the January 1928 issue of American School Board Journal, not-so-coincidentally the same issue featuring the artice on Columbia High School. Their ads are rather whimsical, this one with the tag line “Swim in Drinking Water”. Wallace & Tiernan followed up with a full-page ad in Architecture, which includes a picture of CHS’s pool, the tag line reading “…Get “A” in Deportment”. The ad for The Gaustavino Company appeared in the April, 1930 issue of Architectural Record. The photograph is also of CHS’s pool, which features a barrel-vaulted Gaustavino Akoustolith tile ceiling. In the Fiske Weathervanes ad, the photograph labeled “Maplewood N.J., High School” is actually Maplewood Junior High (now Middle School).

The rest of the ads appeared in the May, 1932 Architecture, no doubt because it had the G&B feature article The Trend In School-Building Design. The remainder of the ads may be seen here.

Wallace-Tiernan 2GaustavinoFiske