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firm active: 1907-1921 minneapolis, minnesota :: chicago, illinois |
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Garage for the Electric Carriage and Battery Company
Purcell, Feick and Elmslie
Minneapolis, Minnesota 1910 [front facade demolished]
Text by William Gray Purcell
Parabiographies entry, Volume for 1910
Job Date (in Parabiographies entry): December 27, 1909
ELECTRIC CARRIAGE & BATTERY CO., GARAGE
(M. L. Hughes, President) Working drawings, March 12, 1910 Ornamental details, G.G.E., July 5, 1910 Draughting: Marion A. Parker, G.F., Jr., W.G.P
Hughes, the president, said it was the only exclusively all-electric garage in the U.S.A.--and no gas driven car was allowed to drive in and contaminate the place, not even for delivery of supplies.
"Electrics" were cars for ladies, and this business was an institution for ladies. There were plenty of the Rauch and Lang Electric Automobiles in Minneapolis to be serviced. Many other makes were on the streets. Mrs. Garvin of Winona, was in 1930, still running hers, in apparently perfect condition. I owned a little streamlined Flanders Electric, the best looking one of them all--very low, clean-lined--more integral than most gas cars of those days, all of which were designed with a sort of front porch for the engine, with the body and its passengers trailing after.
Function of Co-operation
Haglin & Sons, Contractors, did a clever and original piece of construction work when they completed, in advance of the bearing walls, the reinforced concrete floor, roof slabs and all the interior columns, using the well braced forms as temporary supports until the walls should come up to support the concrete structural members. This clever sequence in the building operation was principally useful in keeping the rough, uncleanable face brick clean, and proved to be a fine economy.
Polychrome Terra Cotta
Here I followed through for the first time the making of polychrome terra cotta for one of our buildings, and great joy it gave me. Mr. Elmslie's sketches--the coming of the photographs of Sculptor Schneider's models for approval, the little porcelain enamel placques [sic] for color selection, and then the gorgeous ornamental pieces coming out of their hay-padded crates, all gave emphasis to pleasant days. There was a delicate frame around the entrance door, and some well-designed terminals at each end of the sign which was the principal area of the facade.
Aside from the terra cotta ornament by Mr. Elmslie which was anticipated in the design, I developed the planned design of this building from its inception, including the interior details of the show room and offices.
"Century of Progress" Finds Record
Here were early "corner windows," as show windows either side of the entrance, that had internal bends instead of external--the broad frame bent, too, with no return of wood down the corner, just the plates of glass touching. There was a fine little colonnade--"pier-ade," of square supports along the carriage entrance. Here also was our first venture in an indirect lighting system. The fixtures were of wood, accented with ornament and color. They were related to and part of the new ideas for securing decorative sources of illumination. It was a very early attempt to deal architecturally with light itself as distinct from the object which made or held the light. George Feick and I had planned the same lighting system for the Stewart Memorial Church, and in a later church combined these inverted plateaus with a ceiling ventilating system, the supporting stem of the plateau acting as an air duct. These Rauch and Lang fixtures were, perhaps, a bit too heavy but the basic idea was fine and it had its day.
This commission was a great success in every way. It made us good friends in Haglin & Sons, and this later clinched the Decker house for us. The public were interested in this very new kind of building. The owners were delighted and found it good advertising. But the day of the electric car was to be short. They were on their way out by 1917, when I sold mine. Soon gas cars were so smooth, flexible and easy to drive for women that no need at all was met by the old, slow, costly roller-skate-like electrics which sold at $2500 up.
Fugitive Art
In the early 1920s Harmon Place was widened [see Yale Place Extension, project] ; this architectural landmark and its beautiful terracotta was pick-axed into wheelbarrows and hauled to the dump. A cheap brick front now faced the public. Our fresh and vivid interpretation of twenty-eight years ago is forgotten by all, but it may have made its ripple on the shore of future American architecture.
I have a letter from Mr. Elmslie under date of February, 1939, in which he says: "I wonder how many times I've seen that skylight [word underlined by WGP in draft, with this annotation: "It was a coping panel terminal in the facade"] ornament from the Electric Carriage and Battery Company repeated in part and spoiled. But the Rhinelander one, the long gangling one, I've seen parts of it scores of times all over the U.S.A., and of course, spoiled. The smaller individual ones, alas! how many of them purloined and paralyzed. All our individual creations, too, but of course called Sullivanesque. Comparing our ornament with L.H.S.'s after 1910, left little for Louis H. to console himself with, as related to his work. No wonder a critic wanted to know what happened to the L.H.S. output in decorative elements after 1910. The entrance to the bank at Winona was swiped bodily and plastered onto a schoolhouse." For a storage warehouse on the east side of North Clark Street, Chicago, two blocks south of Oakdale, some designer took the great corner motives from the Owatonna bank, which must be eight feet high, reduced them to about thirty inches high, copied by a very unskillful modeller, and there they are, like vaudeville mimicry of great art.
I also walked into a desert cabin in Palm Springs in 1930, and there, under the sheet iron stove, was a square of galvanized iron stenciled with a pattern taken from the terra cotta of one of our banks [Annotation by WGP on draft: I have since learned that this was actually an L.H.S. design, the last he ever made. The Stove Co. paid him $10 for it!]
Collection: William Gray Purcell Papers, Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota [AR:B4d1.4]
research courtesy mark hammons