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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Lux Aeterna Luceat Eis

James Betelle died in Florence, Italy on June 3rd, 1954. This I have known since my earliest research into the man, and indeed many obituaries, biographies and articles point this out. What I have noticed is that one reference is merely copying an earlier one; often turns of phrase in one article can clearly be traced to previous ones, with slightly modified wording or content. It’s a biographical game of Telephone.

With the facts surrounding his death vague and diluted over the years, it has been a goal to trace these tendrils of information back to the earliest sources possible. As fortune would have it, I am going to Florence on holiday next week.

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The Robert Treat Hotel

robert-treat-postcard.jpg

Newark in the 1910s was a city one would hardly recognize today. Driven by an influx of money and opportunity, it was a thriving commercial and industrial port.

A city on the rise needs grand structures, and certainly nothing makes a statement that a city has arrived than having a stately, luxurious hotel. Newark decided to build such a hotel, and in their local school designers, Guilbert & Betelle, they found the perfect architects. Continue reading →

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 →

Essex County Hall of Records

Guilbert & Betelle designed the 1927 Essex County Hall of Records, in Newark, as a complement to the existing 1902 Court House by Cass Gilbert (to which they did the massive remodeling described in this article). Interestingly, James Betelle worked for Gilbert about that time; it’s possible he was involved in its construction as well. Looking at the Hall today, it is remarkably untouched (both inside and out). Even the windows, often the first thing to go on older buildings, seem intact.

The following article is from Architecture and Building, April, 1929. The photographs and plan are from The Architectural Forum, February, 1929. Continue reading →