Purcell and Elmslie, Architects

Firm active :: 1907-1921

Minneapolis, Minnesota :: Chicago, Illinois
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania :: Portland, Oregon


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6/25/2006


 
Metal label
Keepsake box by Ralph C. Pelton
White cuban mahogany
Circa 1914
This keepsake box was a companion piece made by Pelton to go with the floor lamp he produced for Lake Place. The image of the whole may be seen here.

Passageway, 2. Continuing with the Purcell "autobiography" keystrokes for William Gray Purcell, Part III (it will be up in the next day or so) of the "Preliminary Draft on 'P & E' Thesis," I confess that I have inadvertently done an injustice with the illustrations. The ones appearing with the Grind previous should really have been put here. I just got a little ahead of the narrative discourse. I shall compensate by wandering father afield in the scope of my comments and thereby increasing my opportunities for visual tesserae. Mosaic is just another word for the big picture.
 

Terra-cotta finial
Farmers National Bank
Owatonna, Minnesota  1905
Photograph by Tom Shearer
A word aside, before we go there.

Over the next four installments of the manuscript, Purcell presents the seed time two years of his apprenticeship period in the West, landing in Berkeley in 1904 after a brief exploratory job search in Los Angeles with Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, both of whom knew him from membership in the Chicago Architectural Club. He then made his way further north to Seattle where, in all likelihood, he got infected with the tuberculosis that would finally emerge in 1928 to burden the last three and a half decades of his life. The West Coast apprenticeship period ends with the insistent offer from Charles A. Purcell for his son to take a year long trip to Europe.

In one of the two documented moments of prescience by the elder Purcell, he asked his son to abandon the Pacific northwest because of his fear that WGP would be exposed to tuberculosis! The other eye-catching piece of precognition is found in his last mailed letter to his son, which he signs "So long, Pa," instead of the regular closing which he had used consistently throughout all his previous correspondence with WGP over the years. William Purcell, of course, caught this right away and annotated the letter with his amazement, since his father's death was not anticipated.

Purcell is candid about a failed marriage engagement but the reasons for the breakup with the young lady, who had his ring on her finger for about two days, were amorphous even some fifty years later. A lot of different spin can be put on the phrase "It began to seem as it we were not going to make it as a married pair." Purcell goes on to list this as one of several motivations for leaving his chair in the workless Sullivan's office and heading to Los Angeles to fulfill his long held "westering urge."



Frank Lloyd Wright being arrested in Minnesota

The other personal circumstance hinted at by Purcell as a reason to depart Oak Park can be better detailed. His father and his mother were entering the end game of a marriage that had not worked from the beginning. As people of privilege and high social standing, divorce was a bad fruit that could only be held in check as a very last resort. The example of Frank Lloyd Wright in leaving his wife had yet to rock the conservative prairie community, a scandal that would continue to dog his steps for another thirty years. The long memories of those shocked and awed by Wright's disgraceful behavior were undoubtedly stirred to smugness when he was finally arrested downstream in the transition period between Miriam and Olgivanna.

 

But none of that had yet happened when the marriage between Charles and Anna Gray Purcell was finally about to explode. Anna Purcell was never interested in motherhood and left the raising of her sons, William and his brother Ralph, to her own mother Catherine Garns Gray. While Charles Purcell was quite wealthy, a millionaire from being the arbiter of grain quality at the Chicago Board of Trade and owner of various milling companies, he was a conservative man who preferred a private, low-key lifestyle. Anna, however, loved the pleasures of traveling and salon society. The two were ill-suited companions in life but it took twenty-five years for the clock to run out. Run out it did, right at the end of the apprenticeship period for Purcell.
 
The ax would not truly fall until 1906, when Anna vehemently demanded her luggage from the ruins of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco right after the earth stopped shaking but before the fire began. William Gray Purcell was already in Europe when Anna rocketed into Los Angeles as an earthquake survivor and crashed down at with her husband's aunts in the same house where Purcell had stayed two years earlier while interviewing for work with Myron Hunt. For some reason, she started at that moment giving vicious newspaper interviews to cure the public of any high regard for her deceased father, W. C. Gray. The stories carried back to Chicago by newswire, where her stunned mother Catherine was accosted by reporters banging on her respectable Oak Park door. Being the widow of a distinguished newspaper editor and a woman whose body language never swayed from the upright, she sat exposed to an unaccustomed side of the press. Her cross to bear, she wrote in a letter, was that she could not "condone the iniquities of my children" (we may perchance consider said iniquities of the children of W. C. and Catherine Gray, son Frank and daughter Anna both, in a sooner rather than later Grind).
Palace Hotel
San Francisco, California
1906, post earthquake and fire
"Bellman! I'm checking out!"

                 --Anna Purcell

The Purcell aunts, naturally, were reduced to stone cold embarrassment and encouraged strongly the immediate departure of their houseguest. Anna returned to Chicago, where no private doors opened to her and she wound up staying in a Loop hotel. More pestilential interviews hissed forth, even though Everett Sisson, Dr. Gray's successor at his old newspaper The Interior, tried hard to get the local gossip mongering stringers to let the pseudo-story die. The whole time William Purcell, in Europe, was bombarded with time-delayed letters from both his mother and grandmother. Even though everything that was going to go badly had already happened by the time he got word via mail steamer weeks later, at least he had the good luck to be out of the country--something he noted himself. Charles A. Purcell was not so fortunate. He finally paid Anna $50,000 to grant a divorce on the condition she never opened her mouth again publicly. She ended her life with suicide in 1914, back in Los Angeles, after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Edna S. Purcell summer residence
Purcell and Elmslie
Rose Valley, Pennsylvania  1918
 
Catherine Garns Gray and William Gray Purcell
1928

In this history we see a pattern of behaviors in female family relationships that informed the role of women in Purcell's life experience. The next instance in the cycle is Edna Summy, WGP's first wife whose active lesbian relationships while staying at the Purcell summer residence in the artist enclave of Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, attracted awkward questions from adopted sons Douglas and James. As with the breakup between his mother and his father, the rancor of the 1920s between WGP and Edna terminated in abrupt separation. Purcell fled to a series of tuberculosis sanatoriums and was obliged to dip deeply into his pockets to get a final break with Edna. Fortunately yet sadly, Purcell's pockets happened right then to be the deepest that they would ever be.
 
His father, Charles, died in 1931, and Purcell inherited the bulk of his father's holdings in the form of a trust management that he immediately sought to have removed. Charles A. Purcell, the records indicate, felt his wealth was most secure in gold bars. Although he didn't keep any laying around or stashed a vault, he rather neatly owned title to several million dollars worth, but nary a single share of stock. This, together with a large acreage of land in North Dakota later sold back to the government for pennies on the dollar, the second River Forest house Purcell had designed for his father in 1927, and such business interests as were still active with long-time partner Henry Einfeldt for whom P&E did a house, banked Purcell neatly against the onslaught of the Depression. And, of course, in the democratic example of William Gray Purcell that meant a large number of friends, colleagues, and even some total strangers were also protected. You can about this period in greater detail in the Guide essay, Banning, 1930-1935.
Charles A. Purcell residence #2
River Forest, Illinois 1927


 

Venue for "Purcell and Elmslie" exhibition of 1953
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
"Surprise point" chair
Edna S. Purcell Residence
also known as Lake Place
Purcell and Elmslie
Minneapolis, Minnesota  1913

This chair is the one acquired from Edna Purcell by WGP in 1953 for the Walker Center exhibition. Although part of the William Gray Purcell Papers collection, the chair is now on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and is displayed in the place it was originally created for in the Lake Place writing nook.

Ignore the current fabric covering the seat and back. Purcell selected a bright, almost lime green silk for the exhibition covering, and there is evidence that the original silk covering was light blue. One of a pair, the other chair is still westering in -- guess -- San Francisco!

So, like Anna Catherine Gray Purcell in her own time, was Edna. This sounds, I think, racier than it really was to those having the experience. The shearing of divorce is likely unpleasant under the best of circumstances. Purcell's was complicated by simultaneously inheriting a huge fortune, being prone on a hospital bed with physical exhaustion, and having to conduct the whole transaction largely through the mail. Although expensive, the parting between Edna and WGP was vastly more civil that than that of his parents, so much so that twenty years later Purcell could call and borrow back one of the surprise point chairs from Lake Place for the Walker Center exhibition in 1953. Edna came to rest amidst the artistic shade of Santa Barbara, where she died in 1959 of breast cancer. On balance, I actually like Edna for some reason, though tangible traces of her such as letters and photographs are slim pickings. Her actual presence to us is sort of like the remains of original stencil patterns on the walls of so many P&E houses; there aren't many even though we know they were once there. For lack of evidentiary detail, Edna is destined to remain blurry in our knowledge, almost dreamlike.
 

Catherine Garns Gray and Edna Summy Purcell
Lumière autochrome
William Gray Purcell, 1915

Detail, slightly processed here but not on the link

The most awakening photograph, although it has been seen before in a Grind, we have is a Lumière autochrome taken on a trip in 1915 to the Sequoias. Here in this color image stand Catherine Garns Gray and Edna Summy Purcell, their torsos turned indirectly and backs arched stiffly as they are forced to stand too close to one another for the sake of a camera. I have come to believe that the poet in Purcell could not have missed the metaphor framed in his photograph. The axis mundi in the form of a massive tree that supports the heavens arises in the background of women who spurned each other enough to require two houses separated by an alley in Minneapolis. The image whispers of forced cordiality for the sake of the man for whom they favored a pose on vacation and who was relatively speaking their own axis in life. Unless there are family albums yet to come to archival light, this physical proximity was a rare photographic occasion. The ghost of Anna Catherine, just dead by her own hand, is also there, most likely standing right between them. Both Catherine Gray and Charles A. Purcell, who vented his strong opinion loudly in front of young teenager James Purcell during a confrontation with Edna one evening in the Portland house, considered the life of their child William had been debased, ruined bluntly put, by the presence of this woman. What else could James do, under the circumstances, but internalize the hostility for later application?
 

James, William, and Ann Purcell
Circa 1960
We can venture into these streams of family relationships and sexual orientation easily enough from Purcell's diaries, though that is one-sided, and perhaps there is even worthwhile psychological reason to do so. He's a fair man and a consistently reliable witness in his written traces in general. There's no reason to doubt that the same character was at work in records of more intimate family events. We don't have a fraction of the detail from anyone else's point of view, however, save an interview I did over the telephone with James Purcell in 1981. He recollected to me his childhood in the 1920s living in Portland, Oregon, talking to me about Edna and confirming her girlfriends with some shock that I could have even known about that. He had a history of antagonized relations with WGP, partly over money but much more about hard feelings over the divorce, that resulted in a long period of complete break. Jame's wife Ann (Purcell's mother's name minus one letter) worked to reconcile the two men. They eventually did patch things up to a certain degree in the early 1960s after Edna died, an effect that did not take deep roots because the nurturing Ann would herself pass away unexpectedly just after working the miracle of a family reunion at Westwinds.

As I noted in an earlier Grind, James Purcell related to me a history of loud arguments over money between his parents. In running her household Edna was beset with uncertain means to maintain a cook or a maid, while Purcell continued blithely to indulge his expensive penchant for the latest advances in photography. The situation grew ever worse because of repeated bad investments made by Purcell with large sums of money, then having to turn to the same man who had warned WGP not to undertake these flaky financial speculations in the first place, his father, to be saved from ruin. Even though there was a modest amount of work in his architectural office, the Portland era was made possible almost purely by burning capital. True, that same effect had been in play as the sheaves of grain converted by Charles Purcell to gold bars came to pay for the early and late years of the Purcell & Elmslie office. The difference was that the firm had at least made some money during the good years from 1910 to 1914, especially from the work done for Charles R. Crane and Henry Babson. For all the good art and architecture that sprang from his efforts, there was no profit for Purcell in Portland, just loss upon loss.
 

Margaret Little residence
Purcell and Elmslie
Berkeley, California   1914
 

Edison Shop, alterations
Purcell and Elmslie
San Francisco, California   1914

By following a young man's urge to go west in pursuit of his profession during his apprentice years, Purcell spent two years exploring not just construction and the operations of architectural offices but also surveying the landscape within which the vast majority of his life would play out. Starting from touchdown in Los Angeles, he covered the ocean front. Berkeley and San Francisco would be back briefly in 1915 with building of the Margaret Little residence on Shattuck Avenue and the opening of the Edison Shop on Union Square. Seattle was only a toe in the water in 1906, a place to which he didn't return except perhaps incidentally. Portland was the middle point where he alighted with renewed hope in late 1919 but descended slowly thereafter into the iron lung grasp of tuberculosis. Swinging south into the desert to lay on his back for four years, 1931 to 1935, in Banning, California, Purcell got his divorce, re-married to second wife Cecily (whose weakened physical condition from emphysema like his own from TB enabled a purely platonic relationship), and closed out the last thirty years at Westwinds, on the top of a low foothill in Monrovia.

A West Coast life indeed, for a man whose greatest fame centers in the heart of the continental prairies where he was born. Somehow, there is a kind of karmic jujitsu at work there.

Next up:
William Gray Purcell, Part IV

6/18/2006

 
Presentation rendering
California Hall, University of California Berkeley
John Galen Howard, architect    1905
William Gray Purcell, Clerk of the Works

Presentation rendering, aerial perspective view
Amusement Park for the Borderland White City Company
A. Warren Gould, architect   1906
William Gray Purcell, delineator
 
Passageway. With this Grind we commence a faithful journey that will take some weeks to complete. As noted earlier, Purcell wrote a group of essays that were in effect his autobiography. Ironically, I am at the moment absent the very first page, which has become inadvertently separated from the binder containing my ancient photocopy. I am in the process of looking for Page One of One, but rather than delay progress I have keyed in William Gray Purcell, Part II. This covers the period of his apprenticeship, including an account of his first jobs after graduating from Cornell and the very beginning of his relationship with Elmslie in the development of the "Village Library" competition entry for The Brickbuilder.

I considered illustrating the narrative, something that Purcell did frequently in preparing manuscripts for others and especially after he bought his photocopy machine in 1960. I have not done so, even though it would be easy to choose the standard icons. This particular manuscript has a very different background than the "presentation books" in which portions of the essays sometimes appear. In the early 1950s Purcell became involved with David S. Gebhard, an architectural historian wanting to do his doctoral dissertation on Purcell & Elmslie. Purcell opened his archives to Gebhard, providing complete access to the historical record of the firm. This manuscript was another product of that involvement.

<Comment deleted - I'm not going there>

For Purcell, this was an opportunity to ensure lasting scholarly validation of the contribution by P&E to American architecture, one only partly about his own participation. Purcell developed numerous extensive accounts of various people, commissions, events, and background circumstances to make sure a fully informed picture emerged in the dissertation. In addition to the earlier Parabiographies manuscripts, which were reviewed and further revised in this process, he also generated several hundred pages of formally organized, double-spaced typewritten pages, portions of which were produced in the third person, that were given to Gebhard. These pages were organized by section into the various periods of his life and practice up to the dissolution of P&E in 1921.


Design for a City Bank

"Bank of Reno"
Illustrated in Chicago Architectural Club Catalog (#18, 1905, plate 18)
William Gray Purcell
Subsequent to the award of his doctorate, Gebhard took the normal course and sent his thesis to numerous academic publishers to monumentalize the work as a book. All of them declined the manuscript. After his many efforts, Purcell was keenly disappointed and mounted a campaign to reconfigure and get published what was called "The Book." One result was the "Preliminary Draft on 'P & E' Thesis" by Purcell, and that manuscript evolved from 1955 to 1957 as a form of autobiography. The web structure for this manuscript has already been created. We now press forward into the individual sections as the fingertips permit.

One of the things that jumps right out in the current chapter is how Purcell honored those who brought value to both his professional and personal experience, an obvious expression of his democratic character. His accounts of architect F. W. Fitzpatrick and The Brickbuilder publisher Arthur D. Rogers are typical of those found throughout his many writings. Some of the people Purcell mentions remained in friendly touch with him for many years, an indication of the lasting good impression made by Purcell.  In other instances, Purcell's kind recollection may be the only record left on earth. Indeed, one of the more valuable but lesser known attributes of the treasury formed by the William Gray Purcell Papers is the continued remembrance of "ordinary" but productive people who have otherwise vanished, as Purcell put it elsewhere in this manuscript, "now passed from recorded life like a summer rain" [WGP Review of [David S.] Gebhard Thesis, Purcell and Elmslie III, Section B,  John Jager and other personalities" (draft dated 2 April 1956)].


Lawton S. Parker
Circa 1891

Portrait of W. C. Gray
Oil on canvas
Lawton S. G. Parker  1894
 

This chapter also includes recollection of Lawton S. Parker, an artist who is hardly likely to be forgotten until the Impressionists are no more. Parker has been mentioned in the Grind before as a prodigy discovered by Purcell's grandfather. Aside from his impact as an older "big brother" who, this manuscript reveals, started Purcell out on his very first architectural drawing, Parker's painting of W. C. Gray made for the World's Columbian Exposition is now permanently installed in Lake Place, and a second portrait done in 1894 that descended to the Purcell collection as a treasured family heirloom.

Because of the time required to key these pages, the amount of illustrative material will be somewhat reduced until the text is in place. The copy I have is too poor to be OCR'd. Some links are obvious and can be made right away, but the manuscript suggests additional content for areas of the site that have remained heretofore underdeveloped.

 

  Ornamental details
R.W. Sears Building
George Nimmons, Architect
Chicago, Illinois  1911

Other notes: The Case of the Mystery Guest has been solved! The last Grind asked readers to identify a small commercial building in Chicago near the Monadnock Building with some creditable "Sullivanesque" terra-cotta enrichment. Thanks to John Panning and Phil Pecord for letting us know that the building was done by George Nimmons.


Helen C. Pierce Public School, kindergarten alterations
Chicago, Illinois 1918

Helen C. Pierce Public School, kindergarten alterations
Chicago, Illinois 1918

New pages have been added for the Charles O. Alexander summer residence, alterations (Squam Lake, New Hampshire 1919) and the Helen C. Pierce Public School, kindergarten alterations (Chicago, Illinois 1918). The linked Quicktime virtual reality movie for the kindergarten is a neat treat available from the Chicago Institute of Art web site, but alas only six of the eleven Norton panels are visible.
 

Next up: William Gray Purcell - Part III.

6/3/2006


Capitals from upper sales floors
Schlesinger and Mayer Dry Goods Store
later Carson, Pirie, Scott
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
Chicago, Illinois
  daedal \DEE-duhl\, adjective:
1. Complex or ingenious in form or function; intricate.
2. Skillful; artistic; ingenious.
3. Rich; adorned with many things.
 

Daedal-dee and Daedal-dumb. Being the progenitors of what now passes for the English language, the Brits are still leaders in the cultivation of heritage varieties of words whereas in America descriptive ability is continually diminished by monoculture, currently into a patois of acronyms suitable for the keypads of telephones. U2, Brutus? Out of the name of an inventive artistic genius from classical yore, albeit one reported to have killed his nephew for showing signs of competitive cleverness, comes the perfect adjective for many of the images currently before my eyes. True, there all the literary permutations like daedalic, daedalian, and so forth, but at bottom the word comes from the Greek daidallein meaning "to work artfully." I have now found my seed word to describe Elmslie's decorative designs, particularly those from his fifteen years with Sullivan. I have no record of Elmslie having killed any of his sibling's children, however; we'll settle for a fit of poetic license.

   

Stair decoration
Bayard (later Condict) Building
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
New York, New York

Terra-cotta panel
Unknown building
George Grant Elmslie  1905

Stair balusters
Schlesinger and Mayer Dry Goods Store
later Carson, Pirie, Scott
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
Chicago, Illinois

Frieze panel
Schlesinger and Mayer Dry Goods Store
later Carson, Pirie, Scott
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
Chicago, Illinois


A visit to Chicago last year, my first with a digital camera, saw me homeward to California with upwards of a thousand images--some of which are better than others. Someone should write an article about the effects of casual and virtually no expense digital shooting on photography; seems sometimes like a triumph of quantity over quality in the tried and true American way. I know I am less careful when there is no film to "waste," and my focus is therefore not as reliable as was formerly the case. I was happy to visit the usual suspects in Oak Park and River Forest, including my first foray inside the FLLW Home and Studio, Unity Temple, and the Robie house, a sweet side discovery -- see mystery guest, below -- while making homage to the Monadnock Building, and a comfortable stay in the former Reliance Building, which is now the Burnham Hotel.


Capital, main entrance vestibule
Schlesinger and Mayer Dry Goods Store
later Carson, Pirie, Scott
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
Chicago, Illinois
Nearly ten years had passed since my previous visit to Chicago proper, and save for one brief couple of hours one afternoon spent in Oak Park while en route to my summer campus duties at Taliesin in 2000; nearly twenty years had elapsed since I had seen some of the P&E houses. The occasion of this recent trip was to be the in-line guide for UCLA design students on their initiatory tour of Prairie School/Progressive architecture.
I learned a great deal watching them meet places like the Auditorium Building or the Carson, Pirie, Scott store for the first time. A few were so entranced by various sites that they forgot to take pictures, which is saying something good I trust.

Photographs are being added and links will be up shortly:

  • Schlesinger & Mayer Dry Goods Store
  • Auditorium Building (making a debut here)
  • Charles A. Purcell residence #1 (River Forest)
  • Gage Building

 


Capital, first floor sales room
Bayard (later Condict) Building
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
New York, New York
The trip to New York was made all the more thrilling by fulfillment of my unshakable determination to see the Bayard/Condict Building, Sullivan's only "skyscraper" (13 stories) in the city. The effort coincided with my first trip, and at that alone, on the famed New York City subway. Walking the block from the Waldorf=Astoria to the platform where I caught the 6 train downtown, I had in hand instructions from the concierge to get off one station later than I did. When the train announcer said, "Bleeker Street," that was all I needed to step out bravely -- heaven knew where -- in New York and hope to find the building. I needn't have worried, as there it was, the very first thing to be seen coming up the stairs from the subway station.

I lucked out completely, as the building was still undergoing restoration, first floor doors were open, and the super was a friendly guy who told me what they had found, what they had done, and what the general story was on the salvation of the space. Locks tumbled and doors opened, and even the hidden grottoes of the basement yielded moments of fine treasure.

One thing to be seen was the new lobby design, for which had been dislodged the terra-cotta frieze that formerly embraced the space and now was sunk bodily, like wallpaper, to the wall behind the security desk by the front door. There were a few of these panels in excess, now loose, apparently, in the process of finding new lives beyond the building; so some may turn up at auction, no doubt, eventually. The same design of these frieze panels appears tucked beneath the eaves of the building on the thirteenth floor.
Lobby frieze panels displayed as wall grouping

Bayard (later Condict) Building
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
New York, New York

Lobby skylight

Front entrance
Bayard (later Condict) Building
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
New York, New York

Upper stories, front
Bayard (later Condict) Building
Louis Sullivan, architect; George Grant Elmslie, associated architect
New York, New York

Our mystery guest:

The following shots were taken from street level at 19 W. Jackson Street in Chicago, summer of 2005. I could see no indication of this building being recognized as a landmark, nor since it was Sunday was the building open. However, the facade is a mishmash of interesting "Sullivanesque" ornament.

Research on the internet has not yielded any information about the architect or the date of construction. Knowing that those who read this blog are often in the wise, I wonder if anyone knows who did this building? Currently it seems host to a variety of professional offices, including those of lawyers and architects.

 
Which coat of paint came first, I wonder? Was the original polychromed?

 

  

Tech note: Mobile content providers rustle with stalled discontent in the chute now, ready to find a price for positioning movies and television shows on your cell phone screen. Yeah, right. Aside from the ludicrous thought of the tiny real estate available to the eyeball -- you want widescreen with that? -- there is the small issue of the battery life. And I suppose the annoyance of an incoming call right when the movie gets to the most important part. Clearly, the notion of mobile content is another American expression of having a hammer so everything is, therefore, a nail. Thus has it always, or very nearly always, been in American architecture of any sort.

Next up: Once and future autobiography, chapter the second

research courtesy mark hammons