Who Was Who
in the Arts & Crafts Movement in Central New York
Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866–1946)
"Bragdon's early work reflected the revival of Renaissance architecture associated with the City Beautiful, he soon became a leading participant in the arts and crafts movement, working with Harvey Ellis, Gustav Stickley, and other arts and crafts artists. Around 1900, Bragdon embraced the ideas of Louis Sullivan and began to reorient his work toward the midwestern ideal of a progressive architecture based on nature. His version of organic architecture, however, reflected different social and cultural values than did those of either Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright. Whereas for Sullivan and Wright a building was most organic when it expressed the individual character of its creator, Bragdon saw individualism as a hindrance to the formation of a consensual democratic culture. Accordingly, he promoted regular geometry and musical proportion as ways for architects to harmonize buildings with one another and with their urban context. From 1900 until he closed his architectural practice during World War I, Bragdon applied these principles to his buildings, and he continued to use them through the 1920s in both graphic designs and the theatrical sets he created during a second career as a New York stage designer."
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Albert Brockway (1864-1933)
Albert Brockway earned his education at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, then studied architecture at L'École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Brockway served as a professor of architecture at Syracuse University from 1893-95 and went on to practice architecture in New York. He served as consulting architect for the New York State Agricultural College at Cornell and the State Capitol in Albany. Brockway joined the New York State Board of Examiners for the Registration of Architects upon its creation in 1915 and served until his death in 1933. He was also a member of the American Institute of Architects, which elevated him to the College of Fellows in 1898.
Katherine Budd (1860–1951)
Architect Katharine Cotheal Budd, designed Adelaide Alsop Robineau's home "Four Winds" at 206 Robineau Road. Budd was a friend of Robineau and was recruited to build both house and ceramic studio in 1903 and 1904. A decade later (1914) Budd designed the so-called "Honeymoon Cottage," at 216 Robineau Road, for Robineau's younger sister, Clarissa and her husband, Walter Stillman. The work is influenced by English Arts & Crafts design, and the interiors reflect the Craftsman aesthetic of Gustav Stickley. Budd studied art and design in the early 1890s at William Merritt Chase's Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art in Long Island, where Robineau also was a student. She then administered the cottages there and renovated several buildings. Though not formally trained in architecture (at the time even many of her male contemporaries were not), she did study with William R. Ware who had helped found the architecture programs at Columbia and MIT. Budd maintained a Manhattan office beginning in 1899. By 1908, she had designed more than 100 houses, hospitals, and churches.
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During World War I Budd teamed up with architects Julia Morgan and Fay Kellogg to design Hostess Houses for the YMCA. These were facilities for women friends and relatives of troops that were located near army bases. The architects divided the country geographically and Budd's houses were in the South and Midwest. She designed or oversaw design of 72 of the 96 Hostess Houses, deriving her inspiration from traditional barn architecture and country houses. An Arts and Crafts aesthetic was evident in many of these structures.
After working as an architect for over 30 years Budd was recognized by the American Institute of Architects and became the first woman member of the prestigious AIA New York chapter in 1924. A major study of Budd's life, work, and professional world still needs to be written.
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Fernando Carter (1855-1931)
Fernando Carter was a Boston-born painter who as Director of Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts announced in 1911 that the Museum (known today as the Everson) would focus on collecting works made by American artists - a first for any American museum. Carter was a champion of the local Arts and Crafts Movement and especially an enthusiastic supporter of the ceramic work of Adelaide Alsop Robineau.
Frank B. Collins
Collins was the owner of the F. P. Collins Paint Co., founded in 1899, located at 225 W. Fayette St. Collins was born in Ireland and came to America in 1878. After settling in Rochester he came to Syracuse in 1890, where he established the paint business with his three sons, William E., John Emmett and Francis Chilton.
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The Collins house at 423 Euclid Avenue in Syracuse was illustrated in the undated monograph Ward Wellington Ward. Collins took out a full-page ad in the back of the book, stating that “all of the beautiful residences illustrated in the brochure are finished with Pratt & Lambert Varnishes and painted with Lawrence Paints sold exclusively by F. P. Collins Paint Company.” This house is greatly altered, and the garage has been destroyed. The roof shape is the same, but the upper level of the east porch has been changed; the faux-stone bay covered with deep wide projecting eave on the first level has been added; and the front door on Euclid, which once was flanked with columns, has been entirely altered. Son William E. lived next door at 732 Sumner Ave..
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In 1919 Ward designed a new house and garage for Collins at 2201 East Genesee Street that still survives.
George Fisk Comfort (1833–1910)
Comfort was a noted philologist first Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University, Art historian Peg Weiss wrote that his "rousing speech to a group of concerned New York artists and businessmen at the union League club in 1869 had precipitated the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of art.” (Weiss, Robineau, p. 4).
He served on Board of Syracuse of Museum of Fine Arts which he was instrumental in founding in 1896 and where he was director until his death in 1910. In 1901 he organized the Central New York Society of Artists.
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Read more about Comfort here:
https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/9285-comfort-george-fisk
Clarence Congdon (1875-1951)
Congdon was an architect and real estate developer influenced by the Craftsman style of house design. He graduated from Syracuse University’s architecture program in 1897 and was one of several young architects who studied at the University and then made careers in Syracuse. These young men contributed to the growing residential neighborhoods immediately east and south of the “Hill”.
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We only have reasonably certain attributions for a handful of houses that Congdon designed, but he probably designed and built many more.
In 1909 Congdon built his own house and another on several lots on Clarendon Street (formerly Clarke St), then a high point of the northern edge of the tract. The house is a modest cottage-like structure influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. In the full spirit of the Movement, the house was designed to exist in a natural setting, though within fifteen years this would be more limited as the area to the south rapidly developed. Early photos show it as the sole house on the hill, and in its isolation, it resembles a house featured in the Craftsman Magazine in 1906, described as “A Craftsman Farm House That is Comfortable, Homelike and Beautiful.”
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According to daughter Ruth Congdon (as recounted to Miranda Hine), her father carefully oversaw every aspect of construction, apparently critiquing the mason’s work and having him rebuild a chimney. Inside there are many special touches. Windows open from the bedrooms into the central hall and staircase, providing more natural light into the interior. Low windows in the kitchen were of a size to allow a child to look out.
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Congdon also built a small cottage-like house next door to his own. This house, now 307 Clarendon Street, was completed sometime after 1910. Like his own house, this one shows the influence of the Craftsman movement, but this is lightly applied to a simple cottage with a Dutch Revival gambrel roof, a form he'd use again at 113 Circle Road.
In 1911, Congdon purchased forty-one acres south of Strafford Street from his partners. This was land held by the company for further expansion of the Heights subdivision which is shown on the 1908 map of the city. Congdon radically altered the original design rejecting the grid pattern. Instead, he designed the streets and lots in keeping with the natural topography, including a drumlin. Congdon acted as developer and sales agent for the Berkeley Park Land Company which developed the garden suburb of Berkeley Park.
Congdon designed and built several of the first homes in Berkeley Park, including 107, 113, and 117 Circle Road. These houses combine elements of the Colonial and Craftsman styles. He worked with his former partners to secure sewer service to the new development area and when this was achieved in 1911 development and promotion of Berkeley Park really began.
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(SDG)
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adapted from http://mycentralnewyork.blogspot.com/2020/07/syracuse-architect-clarence-congdon.html]
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Harvey Ellis (1854-1904)
Architect, artist, and furniture designer Harvey Ellis worked in many cities before settling in Syracuse where he was a major contributor to the success of Gustav Stickley’s furniture business. Ellis was born in Rochester where he returned as a young man in 1877. He became one of the founders of the Rochester Art Club and soon after (1879) founded with his brother Charles the architectural firm of H. and C. S. Ellis. Charles ran the business and Harvey did the design work. The firm created many Queen Anne residential, commercial and civic buildings, but most of these have been demolished leaving little record. In 1885, Harvey won a competition for a monument for General Ulysses Grant in Utica. The design was published in American Architect and Building News. Beginning in 1886, Ellis worked in the Midwest for seven years where he was employed in several architectural offices, but little is known of his work. By mid-1889 Ellis had joined the firm of Eckel and Mann in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he produced a few Richardsonian and French-inspired projects, including the 1890 St. Louis City Hall competition, which won the first prize and the job for the firm
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Ellis returned to Rochester after the economic collapse of 1893, and resumed work with his brother. Harvey seems to have mostly shifted to painting and graphic design, possibly due to the economic depression the stifled building in the 1890s. not architecture, became Ellis's main intellectual focus after he returned to Rochester. In 1897 several of his designs reflect English Arts and Crafts architectural trends. In that year he was a founder of the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, one the first such organization in the country. Until his early death in 1904, he was immersed in the American Arts and Crafts movement.
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Ellis was in charge of installing Gustav’s Stickley’s large 1903 Arts and Crafts exhibition for its Rochester showing at the Mechanics Institute, and soon moved to Syracuse to join the architecture department of Stickley's United Crafts organization. Ellis produced many illustrations for the new Craftsman Magazine, and elegant decorations for many of Stickley’s furniture designs. Two of his paintings also appeared as Craftsman frontispieces. The lighter and more delicate furniture shown in Ellis’s architectural illustrations, differed from Stickley’s more massive designs, but were soon incorporated into United Crafts production. Ellis only worked with Stickley for seven months after moving to Syracuse, but his impact was profound.
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Ellis died in Syracuse on January 2, 1904, three months after his fifty-first birthday. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes Cemetery in Syracuse. The Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York honored him in 1997 with a simple, dignified granite marker for his grave bearing his name, a Latin cross and the word “Architect.
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Learn more about Ellis at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Ellis
Charles Estabrook (1879-1975)
Charles S. Estabrook was a prominent lawyer in Syracuse, New York and a patron of architect Ward Wellington Ward. He was the lawyer for Ward’s new in-laws, the Moyers and became a big support of the young architect.
He was born in Binghamton, educated in the public schools of Syracuse, and graduated from Cornell University in 1900 with a Bachelor of Law degree.
In 1909, when still a young man, Estabrook commissioned Ward to design a house at 819 Comstock Ave. in Syracuse for his (Estabrook’s) in-laws, Caroline and Theron Barnum. Theron Barnum was a salesman and then later building superintendent at the Syracuse Post-Standard, where HIS son was publisher. The design and detailing of the house show that at this early-stage Ward was still combining Colonial Revival details (gambrel roof and columnar porticoes) with Tudor Revival elements, especially the half-timbered and stucco exterior. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.
Ward subsequently designed an expansive mansion and auxiliary buildings for Charles Estabrook in 1922-23 in Fayetteville. The main house is a two-story, brick, stone, and half-timber Tudor Revival mansion topped by a prominent slate roof. There is also a gardener's residence; combined garage, stables, and greenhouse building; formal garden; brick gateway; two small utility buildings; and the original curving drive. The complex was long listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 and was known for many years as the Wellington House. In 2023 it was undergoing a complete restoration as the “Estabrook Conservancy” and will serve as a residence and bed and breakfast.
According to his obituary Estabrook “was the senior member of the law firm of Estabrook, Burns, Hancock and White in Syracuse, which in 1970 became part of the firm of Hancock, Estabrook, Ryan, Shove and Hust. He was a former vice president and member of the board of directors of The Post-Standard Co. For 50 years Mr. Estabrook was attorney for and a member of the board of directors of the former Syracuse Trust Co. and its successor, Marine Midland Bank Central. Mr. Estabrook was a former president of the Syracuse Home Association, a president of the former University Hospital of The Good Shepherd and a director of the Syracuse Foundation. Mr. Estabrook was a communicant of St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral of Syracuse and for many years was a vestryman and warden. He was a member of the Onondaga County Bar Association, State Bar Association and American Bar Association, Onondaga Golf and Country Club of Fayetteville, and the Century Club.”
Estabrook is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse.
Frederic W. Goudy (1865-1947)
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Merton Granger (1882-1974)
Born on February 28, 1882, in Wayland, New York, Merton Elwood Granger (1882–1974) enrolled in nearby Syracuse University in 1905. Granger studied at the University’s School of Architecture, and after graduating in 1909, he would go on to have a long career designing homes and other buildings in the city of his alma mater.
After receiving his degree, Granger got his professional start working as an architectural draftsman for Syracuse-based architect A. L. Brockway. Granger also purportedly worked for Ward Wellington Ward, but the details of this relationship are not known. In 1916, Granger started his own architectural practice in Syracuse. He later formed the firm Granger and Gillespie with Helen E. Gillespie. In 1944, he became the firm's senior partner, and he continued his work there for almost another thirty years before retiring.
In addition to working on his many professional projects, Granger was also kept busy by his involvement with local architectural organizations. He was the co-founder of the Syracuse Society of Architects, who would award him with a Certificate of Service; he was a member of the New York Association of Architects, with which he served as director for ten years; he also worked with the American Institute of Architects for over fifty years, serving on the board of directors. Other local organizations Granger was involved with include the Syracuse Board of Assessors, the Tri-Regional Chapter of the Construction Specifications Institute, Inc., and the Code Committee for the City of Syracuse.
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Granger retired in 1973, ending his career as a prominent, active figure in the local architectural community. He died just a year later, in Syracuse, on November 26, 1974.
Earl Hallenbeck (1876-1934)
Earl Hallenbeck is one of many forgotten architects of Syracuse and Central New York, but his many solid and stolid buildings still help define the institutional landscape of the region. While not a proponent or practitioner of Arts and Crafts Movement aesthetics or process, his projects for religious buildings drew on the teachings of medieval-inspired Arts and crafts architects of the 19th century.
Hallenbeck was born on March 14, 1876 in Marathon, New York and died at age 58 in Syracuse on June 2, 1934. He attended Syracuse University in the late 1890s, and except for his work as an architect in worked New York City after graduation, he spent most of his life, beginning in 1902, teaching at Syracuse University in the College of Liberal Arts and working as a regional architect. He designed 9often in partnership with Frederick Revel) Haven Hall (1904, demolished), Carnegie Library (1907), Lyman Hall (1907), Sims Hall, originally a dormitory (1907), Bowne Hall (1907), the University Power Plant (1904), Archbold Gymnasium and Stadium (1908), Slocum Hall (1918) and well as Reid Hall downtown. All of these buildings were embellished with a free interpretation of classical and Renaissance motifs. Lyman Hall is the most ornate.
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The sole exception is the power plant built in 1904 and located where Link Hall is now. This was built in a Neo-medieval style apparently suggested by the Castle of Rheinstein. In any case, the architects hid the chimney within a "medieval" tower. Hallenbeck also designed a number of private houses and school buildings which remain to be fully documented and the Gothic influenced Calvary Baptist Church (now Vineyard Church) of 1916, with early Henry Keck stained glass windows and Onondaga Valley Presbyterian Church (1924). Hallenbeck also designed High Schools in Fabius, Liverpool and Cazenovia, and probably elsewhere. The Fabius Central School survives as the local elementary school. It was completed in 1931 in the Collegiate Gothic style and is included as a late architectural contribution in the Fabius Village Historic District.
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Bibliography:
Gruber, Samuel D., “Syracuse Architects: Earl Hallenbeck (1876-1934), Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art and Monuments (Dec 27, 2010). Online at http://mycentralnewyork.blogspot.com/2010/12/syracuse-architects-earl-hallenbeck.html
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Paul Hueber (died 1943)
Hueber was is a generation younger than architects Lamont Warner, Ward Wellington Ward, and Clarence Congdon. Hueber graduated from SU's Department of Architecture in 1916, the heir to a multi-generational family of builders beginning with his great-grandfather Louis Hueber who arrived in North Manlius as a carpenter from Alsace-Lorraine in 1852 and his father and uncle who founded Hueber Brothers Builders in 1880. Hueber was immersed practical and innovative building techniques from his earliest years, and was also exposed to Arts & Crafts Movement ideals in his youth. But Paul Hueber began his architectural career when a refined - and somewhat opulent - version of both the Colonial Revival and the Tudor Revival were gaining in popularity.
Henry Keck (1874-1956)
Henry Keck was born in Geissen, Germany in 1873 and was introduced to a life of craftsmanship by his father who was a woodworker and cabinetmaker. When he was seven Keck became an apprentice in the stained glass workshops of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), the celebrated interior designer of Art Nouveau fame who is especially known for his pioneering innovations in glass design.
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While Keck was learning the craft of glass cutting and glazing from Tiffany, he decided to go further and learn the art of stained glass design. He attended night classes in drawing at the Art Students League in New York City, and in 1895 returned to Germany for two years to study the art of glass design and glass painting at the Royal Academy School of Industrial Art in Munich. Upon his return to America Keck found jobs as a designer very scarce. He first went to work in a glass studio in Chicago and then returned to New York to become a designer and glass painter for Montague Castle Studios. In 1909 he joined the Pike Stained Glass Studio in Rochester, New York as a designer.
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A man with strong ideas about glass design, Keck became dissatisfied working for others and opened his own business in Syracuse in 1913, a city where no art glass studio then existed and where there was a burgeoning business in Arts and Crafts architecture, due in no small part to Ward Wellington Ward. It is likely that Keck already was acquainted with the architect Ward by this time, since Ward had commissioned glass from the Pike studio while Keck worked there. From 1913 on, Ward used only Keck's glass in his Syracuse Houses.
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Although Keck had many commissions from Ward and others for "house jobs," as he called the, they were only a small part of his total work. His main activity was the design and fabrication of church windows. Keck applied his skills sensitively however to the requirements of the Arts and Crafts house. The small landscapes he created -- most notably, the eighteen windows in Ward's house for Dr. Harry Webb -- are important examples of art glass in America.
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Keck's windows had a distinctive Arts and Crafts style, different from traditional stained glass. His drawing was simple and inventive. By thickly leaded outlines, he emphasized stylized but naturalistic figures, trees, and other details. His compositions were carefully studied and arranged in mosaic-like patterns. Keck chose opalescent glass for its bright and pure colors and unique textures which produced remarkable and dramatic moods in response to changing light.
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By 1920, when some 900 glass studios were operating in America, Keck had a reputation as one of the best stained glass designers in the business. This reputation was base mostly on the many Gothic revival church windows he produced throughout his lifetime. Even after his death in 1956, through the efforts of his lifetime associate, Stanley Worden, to whom Keck passed his knowledge of this exacting craft, the Henry Keck Stained Glass Studios continued to produce superior glass windows until it closed in 1974.
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[This text was taken now inactive website syracusethenandnow.org]
Melvin King (1868-1946)
Born in Lafayette, NY., Melvin King attended local public schools, joining the architectural office of James H. Kirby in 1885. Four years later he started working in the office of Archimedes Russell; he became Russell's partner in 1906.
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Following Russell's death in 1915, King practiced under his own name until 1932 when his son Harry joined the firm as partner. In 1945 father and son were joined by F. Curtis King, Melvin King's nephew.
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Melvin King was an active member in the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) and served as its president from 1930-32.
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The architectural office he founded is still in existence as King and King in Syracuse.
Frederick R. Lear (1882-1950)
Born in Corning, New York, Frederick Lear (1882 to 1950 ) was the grandson of a glass cutter at the Corning glass works. He received his Bachelors degree in Architecture from Syracuse University in 1905 and immediately joined the University faculty as an instructor in graphics. The following year he married Lillian H Congdon, a recent Syracuse University graduate in design. While teaching graphics at the University, Lear also engaged in his own architectural practice in Syracuse. In 1911, he took a leave of absence from his teaching duties and traveled to the British Isles and Europe to study modern architecture. He enrolled in l'Ecole Nationale a Speciale des Beaux Arts in Paris, and when his studies were suspended by the advent of World War I, he returned to Syracuse University as professor of graphics and design. Lear then resumed his education in Paris, where he received the architect Diplome par Le Gouvernement Francais in 1918. Returning to his position at Syracuse, he continued to teach his professor of architectural design and to carry on his own work as an architect.
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The work Lear completed before his 1911 departure for Europe reveals a strong devotion to the arts and crafts concerns that were so prevalent in Syracuse at the time. He designed numerous modest cottages for which his colorful and carefully rendered drawings read like a visual compendium of arts and crafts detail. Leaders experiments with concrete as a material for construction were highly successful, especially his design for Archibold Stadium (1907 ), and, to a lesser degree, for the John Candy residents (1908 ), which was featured in the Craftsman Magazine. As a result of his studies in Paris, Lear’s later work shows a strong move toward the Beaux Arts style.
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(Text by Coy Ludwig)
Harry Phoenix
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G. Everett Quick
Everett Quick who was both architect and builder in some of Syracuse's fast growing neighborhoods on east and west sides.
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The Syracuse Post Standard of June 22, 1912, noted the sale of the “semi-bungalow” at 131 Clarke St. (now 137) to John R. Wickes by the designer and builder, G. Everett Quick. While there is, in fact, nothing of the “bungalow” about house, it is a variation of a popular form of simple compact housing that provides a lot of living space. The builder could have chosen to erect a simple cubic Foursquare house, but instead employed a more visually striking cross-gabled Dutch style gambrel roof. Five similar (but still unidentified) houses by the same builder in the neighborhood were either sold at the same time or under construction. These houses were described as "noticeable for their compactness and convenience as well as artistic appearance.” and including “a large living room with open fireplace, dining room with built-in china closet, kitchen and large side porch. A small hall with open staircase leads to the four bedrooms and bath on the second floor. The prevailing finish is white and mahogany, with handsome single-panel doors. Numerous windows and clothes closets are features.”
Mary Fanton Roberts (1864–1956)
Adelaide Alsop Robineau (1865-1929)
Adelaide Alsop was born in 1865 in Middletown, Connecticut. She developed an early interest in both drawing and the then–popular pursuit of china painting. As a young woman she helped to support her family by teaching drawing at the boarding school where she had formerly been a student. During one summer break, she enrolled in the painter William Merritt Chase's summer school, her only experience of advanced training in painting and drawing. She later studied ceramics with Charles Binns at Alfred University and with Taxile Doat.
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In 1899, she married Samuel E. Robineau, a French ceramics expert who was at one time editor of Old China magazine. The couple had three children.
In 1899, Robineau and her husband launched Keramic Studio, a periodical for potters and ceramic artists that continued in print until 1919. Within a few years, Robineau became the magazine's sole editor.
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Around the same time, the couple moved to Syracuse, New York, where their house was designed by architect Katharine Budd. Robineau later built a ceramic studio next to the house. She taught china painting and pottery at her Four Winds Pottery School and sold her painted china, watercolors, and ceramics.
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Robineau began seriously making ceramics around 1901, by which time she already had a reputation as a china painter. She became convinced that painting over the glaze — then a common technique — was the wrong approach and began to experiment with other procedures. She worked primarily in porcelain, experimenting with American clays to create a true high-fire porcelain. She also experimented with a wide range of forms, decorations, and glazes, with frequent use of multicolored, opalescent, and iridescent glazes.
Her mature work shows Art Nouveau and Japonisme influences in the use of stylized botanical and animal elements. At a time when many noted china painters worked with blanks made by other people, she handled all phases of the process herself, from forming the pots to incising and painting them. Some of the detail work on her pieces was so fine that she employed crochet needles and dental tools to get the desired effect.
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Many of Robineau's works are containers, including her most famous work, the Scarab Vase, a tall, incised porcelain vase that took over 1000 hours to make. In 2000, Art & Antiquities magazine named it the most important piece of American ceramics of the last hundred years.
Robineau taught at both Syracuse University (1920–1929) and the Art Academy of People's University, an institution founded by Edward Gardner Lewis in Missouri.
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Before her death in 1929, she designed a cinerary urn that now holds the ashes of both Robineau and her husband in Syracuse, New York. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum, and other institutions.
Samuel Robineau
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Archimedes Russell (1840-1915)
Russell was born in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1840 and moved to Syracuse about 1860. He studied with Horatio Nelson White and then opened his own office in 1868. Russell came to Syracuse at a time when Syracuse was beginning to feel the full momentum of the industrial revolution. New industries brought about a tremendous boom in population. Between 1880 and 1900, the population of Syracuse doubled to 200,000. And with this boom came a demand for quality architecture reflective of current trends.
Russell worked in an age of mounting variety in architectural styles that ranged from copies of previous styles (Period Architecture) to forward‑looking innovations in style, materials and technology. All influenced Russell's career. The result is a body of work that by his death in 1915 was prodigious in quantity and variegated in style, massing and elaboration. Many of his buildings have been destroyed, but two of his masterpieces, Crouse College and Central High School, remain in Syracuse.
During Russell's life, architecture in America became a profession with formal training programs and standards. Earlier, one architect could stand out and his work gain wide public recognition simply because there were so few architects. No other architect in his day produced as large a body of work as Russell or had a greater total impact on the appearance of Syracuse. But Russell had many colleagues, some of whom produced work of greater sophistication‑Joseph Lyman Silsbee (Syracuse Savings Bank, Howe's Jewelers), Charles Colton (City Hall), Gordon Wright (Alexander T. Brown House, First Baptist Church‑Mizpah Tower).
Russell provided his clients with virtually every sort of structure (over 800 commissions) from porches to courthouses, stables to school houses. As various styles or modes of decorative expression came into vogue, Russell's buildings reflected the fashion. He is an excellent model of the 19th century architect‑businessman whose high‑minded ideals, keen eye to modern technology and forceful presence allowed him to play such an important part in our community's development.
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Russell's work of the 1870s and 80s was influenced by developments in England, including the work of Arts & Crafts Movement writers and designers from John Ruskin to William Butterfield.
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(adapted by text by J. Brad Benson)
Irene Sargeant (1852-1932)
Sargent was one of the founders of the CNY Arts & Crafts movement and the primary mover, shaker, editor, and writer of the Craftsman Magazine for its first several years. She wrote almost the entire first three issues and thereafter contributed each issue's lead article and was the magazine editor. Sargent contributed over 80 articles to Gustav Stickley's magazine between 1901 and 1905. Oh yes, she also designed the layouts!
Her Craftsman articles had a great influence on public appreciation of the American Arts and Crafts Movement and its aesthetic. She wrote on many subjects but her first extensive articles were about her English influences - John Ruskin and William Morris. She also wrote about Gothic Revival, textile design, medieval silver, American art pottery, and much more.
After 1905 she wrote for "The Keystone," a jewelers' trade journal for which until 1920, she wrote more than 60 articles on a wide range of applied arts. She also contributed to “Keramic Studio,” the ceramics magazine published by her Syracuse University colleague Adelaide Alsop Robineau. Sargent had begun teaching at Syracuse University in 1895 - eventually teaching French, Italian, and courses in aesthetics, architecture, and art history. Beginning in 1908 she was named a professor of Art History, and then from 1914 also a professor of Italian literature.
In 2013 the ACSCNY published a limited edition Art Book "Irene Sargent: A Legend in Her Own Time" by Cleota Reed and beautifully designed, printed and bound by the Clinker Press.
Justus Moak Scrafford (1878-1945)
Scrafford taught architecture at Syracuse he was especially active as a local architect between 1910 and 1920. He designed many houses, mostly it seems in the English Colonial style, but also was the architect of the Bellevue Country Club, of which he was a member, and several churches including Erwin Methodist Church on Euclid Avenue near Westcott Street, not far from his house on Lancaster Avenue. He also designed the Parish House at Grace Episcopal Church on Madison Street at University Avenue in 1913 and St. Philip's Episcopal Church which opened in January 1922 and closed in 1957, when the congregation merged with Grace Episcopal Church. Scrafford's building was later torn down along with much else in the 15th Ward. Scrafford's religious buildings were built in varied styles, but never employing predictable historicism. They combine Arts & Crafts and more exotic elements.
Until recently, only Scrafford's own house at 726 Lancaster Ave. was identified. The house was featured in the Real Estate section of The Post-Standard with a picture on Aug. 26, 1910. The front porch has wide, fluted Doric columns with two sets of French doors that open to the living room. The foyer features an open oak staircase with a spiral-shaped newel post, and an archway with a keystone. The 14-by-15-foot dining room has a quarter-sawn oak floor and a coffered ceiling. It opens to a screened-in porch with 10-foot-high columns, beadboard ceiling and bluestone slate floor. The porch has a pass-through into the kitchen to make serving easy. The house also has a wing on the back, which Scrafford designed as a self-contained living area with a butler's pantry, full bath, bedroom and sitting room.
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Scrafford's presence in the University-Westcott neighborhood, and his teaching at Syracuse University, brought new commissions. The next year (1911), he began a fine large brick house across the street at 721 Lancaster Avenue for his University Colleague, librarian Paul Paine and wife Elizabeth. The three-story house has a symmetric facade with a modest projecting aedicule type entrance porch in front of a neo-Federal style doorway, with sidelights. The third floor is the attic level, but it has a high roof with three large dormers, providing a well-lit living space. The Paines moved into the house in 1912. Paine was a librarian and lecturer at SU and from 1915 to 1942 he was Director of the Syracuse Public Library. The public library in Eastwood opened its present building on March 19, 1958 with ceremonies and was named the Paul Mayo Paine Branch.
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In 1912, Scrafford built a similar, but even more impressive house atop the hill at Clarendon and Ackerman Avenue for the Edward and Daisy Torbert Family. This large well-sited house was one of several homes of prominent Syracusans erected in a second phase of building at the crest of Clarendon Street. This colonial Revival house is notable for its full four-column Doric porch with a decorative balcony rail above, and its three bold projecting third floor dormers, set into a hipped roof, with a fourth dormer facing east. The siting of the house provided impressive views to the south from all the upper floor windows.
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In 1913, a newspaper notices suggest that Scrafford built a house for F.M. Featherly at 701 Euclid Ave., on the northeast corner of Lancaster and Euclid. Featherly dealt in china at his business F.M Featherly, China at 209 West Fayette St.. Featherly's is a house of flats - two stories of separate but probably equal apartments. This type of house was becoming common in the neighborhood at this time.
See: http://mycentralnewyork.blogspot.com/2014/05/syracuse-architect-justus-moak.html
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Shrimpton, Louise A.
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Joseph Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913)
Silsbee was trained in art and architecture at Harvard and M.I.T.(the first such architectural school in the country), When Silsbee won the competition for The Syracuse Savings Bank he had been living in the city for about a year, coming to fill in at Horatio Nelson White's practice. He was a Professor of Architecture (1873-8) at Syracuse University and quickly took on many other notable building commissions including the White Memorial Building (1876) and the Oakwood Cemetery Mortuary Chapel, completed in 1880.
Silsbee quickly achieved national acclaim for his Syracuse work. To meet the demand for his designs he set up offices in Buffalo and Chicago, and moved to Chicago permanently in 1884. There, he had a prolific career, and an unanticipated influence on the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright who worked for a time in Silsbee's Chicago office. Wright famously credited Silsbee in his autobiography..
Elgin A. Simonds
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Charles Stickley (1860-1927)
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Gustav Stickley (1858-1942)
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John George (J.G.) Stickley (1871-1921)
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Leopold Stickley (1869-1957)
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Wellington Taber (1866-1943)
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Alfred T. Taylor (1862-1944)
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Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933)
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George Timmons
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Maude Moyer Ward
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Ward, Ward Wellington (1875-1932)
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Lamont Adelbert Warner(1876-1970)
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Horatio Nelson White (1814-1892)
Horatio Nelson White was a prolific and celebrated Syracuse-based in the second half of the 19th century. He designed hundreds of homes, armories, churches, and public buildings throughout Central New York, including the Hall of Languages at Syracuse University, the Oswego County Court House, Syracuse High School, the Weiting Block in Syracuse, Oswego's City Hall, and more. Whtie was an eclectic and versatile architect, but he seemed most comfortable working in a loose medieval-influenced and Queen Anne styles, and an ornate French Empire style. These were all popular during the decades of his greatest activity and collectively lay the foundation for many aspects of Arts & Crafts inspired design in the 1890s and early 1900s.
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White was born in Middleton, New Hampshire. And worked as a carpenter and a builder in Andover, Massachusetts. He moved to Syracuse in 1843 and established himself as a successful building contractor. He moved briefly to Brooklyn, New York in 1847 and then in 1849 to San Francisco where he worked until 1851in the gold rush-induced building boom. In 1851, White returned to his wife and daughter in Syracuse, paid off his creditors and established what became a highly successful architectural practice.
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In 1856, White was given the prestigious opportunity of designing the new Onondaga County Courthouse in Clinton Square and from that point forward, his career flourished .In 1867, he designed the original Onondaga Savings Bank (now the Gridley Building), and then in 1872, the Hall of Languages, the first building constructed on the campus of Syracuse University. White designed New York State armories in Syracuse, Dunkirk and Ballston Spa, and also Plymouth Congregational Church in Syracuse. In all, he designed over 100 churches (not all built). White also designed many houses but the identity of most of these has been lost. He died in his home in 1892. His obituary referred to him as simply "the Venerable Architect.” He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.
Worden, Stanley
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