Willis G. Hale

Willis Gaylord Hale (1848, Seneca Falls, New York – August 29, 1907, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was a late-19th century architect who worked primarily in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His flamboyant, highly-ornate style was popular in the 1880s and 1890s, but quickly fell out of fashion in the 20th century.

Contents

Career

Hale came to Philadelphia in the 1860s, and apprenticed under architects Samuel Sloan and John McArthur, Jr. He married a niece of chemical manufacturer William Weightman, who was one of the largest landowners in the city. For Weightman, he designed dozens of blocks of Philadelphia middle-class housing, and also for clients such as Peter A. B. Widener and William L. Elkins. His lively facades often contrasted sculpture, tile, inventive brick- and stone-work, in an exuberant high-Victorian style:

"Hale's genius was to take ... essentially identical rowhouses, with their mass-produced industrial parts and lathe-turned woodwork, and to make them distinctive."[1]

He designed a massive city house for Widener at the corner of Broad Street and Girard Avenue, and a country house for Weightman in Germantown: "Ravenhill" (now part of Philadelphia University).

Widener's city house was one of the most notable in Philadelphia. An ornate Flemish-style eclectic design in highly-wrought brownstone and brick, it had a 53-foot (16.2 m) facade on Broad Street and a 144-foot (43.9 m) facade on Girard Avenue. The over-the-top interiors were decorated by George Herzog, and included buxom nudes as newel posts, walls embellished with alabaster and bronze, and murals of the Widener children in Renaissance dress.[2] Almost an anachronism when completed in 1887, the family lived there only a dozen years before building a sedate neo-Georgian palace in the suburbs: Lynnewood Hall. The city house served as a branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1900–1946; the offices of an architectural firm, and in 1970 became the Conwell School of Theology's Institute for Black Ministries.[3] It suffered a catastrophic fire in 1980, and was demolished.

In 1892 Hale designed the Lorraine Apartment House at Broad and Fairmount Streets in Philadelphia, completed in 1894. Purchased by radio evangelist Father Divine in 1948, the building is now known as the Divine Lorraine Hotel.

Hale designed numerous ornate office buildings in Center City Philadelphia, but few survive unaltered. He built his own office building at the southwest corner of Chestnut and Juniper Streets (1887, expanded 1892, altered), an unsuccessful investment that almost bankrupted him. The critic for the magazine Architectural Record declared it an "architectural aberration":

“Consider the Hale Building, how it grows. The problem was to erect a seven-story office building with a narrow front on the principal street, and with rooms devoted to similar purposes and of similar dimensions throughout. The danger was that this uniformity would produce monotony. There is nothing of which your Philadelphia architect is so afraid as of monotony. In fact it is the only architectural defect of which he seems to go in fear. Variety he must have at all cost, and by securing variety he makes sure that he has avoided monotony, whereas in truth his heterogeneousness is more tiresome than any repetition could be. ...[E]very precaution has been taken, and with success, to insure that the building shall lack unity, shall lack harmony, shall lack repose and shall be a restless jumble.”[5]

Hale's architectural office was destroyed in a March 23, 1896 fire.[6] He was a near-pauper in his later years, supported by the ever-loyal Weightman. He is buried just outside Philadelphia, in Fernwood Cemetery in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania.

A portfolio of photographs of Hale's work is at the American Philosophical Society.

Frank Furness

Hale is sometimes compared to his Philadelphia contemporary Frank Furness, who he admired. But Hale's buildings tended to be derivative and decorative rather than innovative, half-a-decade behind the times rather than ahead of them, more concerned with surface ornament than ideas:

"Hale's later fate was exemplary for the followers of Furness. For them, style was an affair of specacular massing, audacious surfaces, and whimsical detail. ... Their walls were always more clever than their plans; when they were forced to change brick and brownstone arches for marble cornices, as the tastes of the nineties demanded, the new work showed seams. Overdone and uncertain at the same time, Hale's last works were execulted for one or two loyal clients from the eighties."[7]

Selected works

Residential

Commercial/Institutional

External links

References

  1. ^ Lewis, p. 28
  2. ^ Three of Herzog's interior sketches are at the Carnegie Museum of Art.[1]
  3. ^ Webster, pp. 301-02.
  4. ^ Joseph J. Korom, Jr., The American Skyscraper, 1850-1940: A Celebration of Height (Wellesley, MA: Branden Books, 2008), p. 144.
  5. ^ Montgomery Schuyler, "Architectural Aberrations," Architectural Record, vol. 9, pp. 207-10 (Oct.-Dec. 1893).
  6. ^ "Losses by Fire" The New York Times, March 24, 1896.
  7. ^ Michael J. Lewis, "Furness and the Arc of Fame," George E. Thomas, et al., Frank Furness: The Complete Works (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 128-29.
  8. ^ Fleisher house from Flickr.
  9. ^ Havod from Bryn Mawr College.
  10. ^ 2100-block N. Uber St. from HABS.
  11. ^ 1500-block N. 17th St. from HABS.
  12. ^ Ravenhill from Philadelphia University.
  13. ^ 4520 Chester Ave. The Gables Bed & Breakfast.
  14. ^ Ketcham house from Flickr.
  15. ^ "Home for Incurables" The Public Ledger, September 24, 1880.
  16. ^ St. Stephen's Church from Bryn Mawr College.
  17. ^ Philadelphia Record Building from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.
  18. ^ Philadelphia Record Building from Flickr.
  19. ^ Penfield Building (2008) from Flickr.
  20. ^ Three Banks from Bryn Mawr College.
  21. ^ Quaker City National Bank (2007) from Flickr.
  22. ^ Weightman Building from Bryn Mawr College.
  23. ^ Myers Building from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.
  24. ^ Athletic Club of the Schuylkill Navy from Bryn Mawr College.
  25. ^ Garrick Theatre from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.
  26. ^ The Powelton from University City Historical Society.
  27. ^ George E. Thomas and Carl E. Doebley, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, The Powelton Apartments, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 13 December 1978.[2]