Tag Archives: newspaper

The New York Times Gets it Right

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 Collegiate Gothic building that sits a block from the South Orange border.” A brief description, to be sure, but one that is often wrong (it was completed in 1927, not earlier, and is in Maplewood, not SO).

Kudos to Caldwell and the Times from this stickler of a Betelle historian.

The Star-Ledger Q&A Interview

star-ledger.jpgThis 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.

James Betelle Obituaries

These are the two obituaries I found for Betelle at the Newark Public Library. The first is from The Newark Evening News from June 5th, 1954. This was a Sunday, which establishes Betelle’s death as Thursday, June 3rd (whether that is the local or Italian date is unknown). The second obit (source unclear) is almost identical to the first, but does give one new bit of information: it confirms that Betelle was buried in Florence.

JAMES O. BETELLE, 75
Retired Newark Architect, Specialist in School Buildings,
Dies in Florence, Italy
The Newark Evening News, June 5, 1954

James O. Betelle, retired Newark architect who rose from a $2-a-week clerk in an architect’s office to become one of the country’s outstanding designers of educational buildings, died Thursday in Florence, Italy. Mr. Betelle, who was 75, had been suffering from a heart ailment.
Mr. Betelle, who formerly lived in Short Hills, had spent much of his time traveling in recent years. He went to Italy earlier this Spring.

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