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Horace Trumbauer

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Born in the Frankford section of Philadelphia in 1868, Horace Trumbauer quit school at age fourteen to enter the architecture profession as an errand boy at G. W. and W. D. Hewitt's prominent Philadelphia firm. Advancing quickly, he was soon promoted to draftsman. After accumulating valuable experience, in 1890 he set out on his own, opening an office at 310 Chestnut Street. According to Trumbauer historian Frederick Platt, the architect received $171.75 for his first commission, a house near Narberth, Pennsylvania for Mrs. A. M. Walker. Soon afterward, he landed his first major commission, designing a mansion in Glenside for sugar baron William Welsh Harrison. When Harrison's mansion burned to the ground in 1893, the businessman again commissioned Trumbauer, who created Grey Towers (now part of Arcadia University), an enormous, crenellated, castle-like mansion that marks the architect's ascendance to prominence in the profession.

Within a few years of completing Grey Towers, Trumbauer's firm, which became known for its elegant homes for America's elite, was flourishing. For several decades, until the stock market crashed in 1929, Trumbauer enjoyed what his stepdaughter called "the big money years." In the 1890s, Trumbauer, chief designer Frank Seeburger, and the other members of the growing office planned large country houses for the wealthy, smaller suburban houses for developers like Wendell & Smith, the creators of Overbrook Farms, and even several buildings for Willow Grove Amusement Park. While working at the amusement park, Trumbauer developed lucrative relationships with its proprietors, the Widener and Elkins families, for whom he would complete numerous important commissions. Significantly, traction magnate Peter A. B. Widener, the family patriarch and vice president of the Free Library's Board of Trustees, was instrumental in Trumbauer's receipt of the main Free Library commission in 1911.

In 1903, Trumbauer married Sara Thomson Williams. For his new family, which included Sara's daughter Agnes Helena, Trumbauer erected a home in the Wynnefield section, on the western edge of the city. There, he enjoyed gardening and collecting architecture books and antiques. In the first years of the new century, Trumbauer's firm expanded its scope, designing not only mansions for the rich in Philadelphia, New York City, and Newport, Rhode Island, but also apartment houses and other large structures. The first, the St. James Apartments on the southeast corner of Thirteenth and Chestnut Streets, was erected in 1902.

Over the next decades, Trumbauer and his staff, who executed more than one thousand commissions, would add office and school buildings, theaters, hospitals, club houses, churches, libraries, museums, and other building types to their ever expanding repertoire. By 1904, when the prominent Architectural Record published a lengthy account of Trumbauer's work, the self-educated architect had become one of the country's most distinguished. Yet, because he worked exclusively in period styles, reviving the architecture of distant times and places, Trumbauer's celebrity did not persist into the mid twentieth century, when critics enamored with European Modernism valued architecture that renounced all historical precedents.

After World War I and the completion of Whitemarsh Hall, Edward T. Stotesbury's tremendous palace outside Philadelphia, Trumbauer built fewer mansions for the nouveau riche. In this period, his commission list included growing numbers of office buildings like the Public Ledger Building, hotels like the colossal Ben Franklin and Chateau Crillon, and medical buildings like Jefferson Hospital's Curtis Clinic and Hahneman Medical College. With collaborators Zantzinger, Borie & Medary, he also erected the magnificent Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among his most important commissions of the period was the Gothic Revival Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina.

With changing tastes and the Great Depression, Trumbauer's practice dwindled in the 1930s and his staff fell from a high of about 30 members to his longtime associate Julian Abele and a few others. Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, Trumbauer died on September 18, 1938. Honorary pallbearers at his funeral included George D. and Joseph E. Widener, architect Charles L. Borie Jr., eminent art dealer Joseph Duveen, and Duke University's Frank C. Brown. Denigrated by modernists for his preference for revival styles, Trumbauer, one of the most accomplished architects of the Gilded Age, was neither appreciated nor understood until the end of the twentieth century, when architects and historians looked back and explored their rich heritage.

Horace Trumbauer established his architectural firm in 1890. He erected buildings throughout the United States: Saint Catherine's Chapel (1901) in Spring Lake, New Jersey, the Hotel Pere Marquette (1925) in Peoria, Illinois, and the New York Evening Post Building (1925). However the vast majority of his buildings were designed for Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs. In the greater Philadelphia area, Trumbauer erected several hundred buildings, from modest suburban homes to towering skyscrapers. Two of the most important are the Reading Railroad's imposing, classical station (1928) on Broad Street in North Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania's English medieval style Irvine Auditorium (1929).

In 1906 He recruited the accomplished young architect, Julian Abele, to join him. Over the ensuing 30 years Abele grew into the chief designer and primary consultant for the firm. During those decades, leading up to the Stock Market crash in 1929, as the city's business district shifted west from the Independence Hall neighborhood to Broad Street, Trumbauer and his talented designers, especially Abele, erected dozens of offices, homes, hotels, clubs, and cultural institutions for the city's burgeoning business class in the area.

Like William Penn, who devised Philadelphia's grid plan in the late seventeenth century, and Edmund Bacon, who led the drives to redevelop Penn Center and Market East after World War II, Horace Trumbauer and his gifted associates played a critical role creating the modern skyline around Philadelphia's City Hall. Perhaps more than any other architects, Trumbauer and Abele defined the Philadelphia cityscape we experience today.

During his illustrious, half-century career, architect Horace Trumbauer planned hundreds of residences, from modest suburban houses to sprawling country estates. In the quarter-century leading up to World War I, he cemented his reputation as one of the premier Gilded Age architects, designing dozens of the country's most exquisite and extravagant mansions for captains of industry and finance. After the war, he built fewer residences, large and small, as his practice shifted to commercial and institutional commissions.

Trumbauer opened his architectural office in 1890. According to noted Trumbauer historian Frederick Platt, Mrs. A. M. Walker was the first to commission a design from the young architect. In the spring of 1890, she employed him to plan a modest house for a suburban neighborhood near Narberth, Pennsylvania. When the job was complete, Trumbauer charged $171.75 for his services plus $7.00 for travel.

Following the inaugural commission for Mrs. Walker, Trumbauer planned numerous suburban homes for middle-class clients during the 1890s. Among these, he designed several houses for developers Wendell & Smith for their Philadelphia-area planned communities in Germantown, Wayne, St. Davids, and Overbrook. Typical of his work of this period are two designs for the Overbrook Farms development, one for an eclectic style house with Queen Anne, Romanesque, and Norman influences and the other for a house in the style of contemporary British architect C. F. A. Voysey. These designs were published in the American Architect and Building News in 1893. Although ornamented with details from various historical periods, the designs were nonetheless modern.

Trumbauer combined simple geometric forms in a quiet harmony, eschewing the cluttered, almost frenetic assemblages common to the Victorian era. As he matured as an architect and designed larger and larger homes, Trumbauer continued to develop a noble, classical architecture that was predicated on his discerning sense of form and proportion.

Trumbauer's big break came in 1893, while only 24 years of age, when he designed his first great country estate, a mansion for sugar baron William W. Harrison. Two years earlier he had renovated a house for Harrison in Glenside, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill neighborhood. After the renovated house burned in January 1893, the sugar producer commissioned Trumbauer to design Grey Towers, a much larger house for the same site. Drawing on his experiences in the mid-1880s while working on the design of Drum Moir, a castle-like mansion for Henry Howard Houston, Trumbauer produced a design for a crenelated mansion based on an English castle. Unlike most of his later works, which were orderly and balanced, Grey Towers is a jagged, asymmetrical pile based on medieval precedents. With 40 rooms, many of which were decorated in various French historical styles by the renowned Parisian firm Allard et Fils, Grey Towers was one of the largest residences in the United States. The noteworthy mansion, which was purchased by Beaver College (recently renamed Arcadia University) in 1929, catapulted Trumbauer to fame.

Capitalizing on the notoriety of Grey Towers, Trumbauer designed the first of a complex of mansions for the intertwined Widener and Elkins families in Elkins Park, directly north of the Philadelphia border at the end of Broad Street. The patriarchs of the two families, Peter A. B. Widener and William L. Elkins were business partners, in-laws, trustees, and great supporters of the Free Library of Philadelphia. When completed, the complex of five mansions and numerous subsidiary buildings, including a polo grounds, would form the most exquisite neighborhood in the entire Delaware Valley.

Trumbauer erected Chelten House, a half-timber Elizabethan mansion, in 1896 for George W. Elkins, the son of the family patriarch. Chelten House burned in 1908 and Trumbauer rebuilt it the following year. For George W. Elkins's daughter Stella and her husband George F. Tyler, Trumbauer erected Georgian Terrace, a mansion south of Chelten House, in 1905. Georgian Terrace now serves as the main building of Temple University's Tyler School of Fine Arts.

For the patriarch William L. Elkins, in 1898 Trumbauer designed Elstowe Manor, an Italian Renaissance style palace as grand as any home in the United States. Parisian interior designers Allard et Fils decorated Elstowe Manor's 45 rooms in elegant French styles with exquisite woods, marbles, and other luxurious materials. Together, Chelten House and Elstowe Manor now form a Dominican retreat.

Adjacent to the Elkins family mansions, Trumbauer built a vast complex of buildings on the Widener family's 300-acre estate. For Peter A. B. Widener, the family patriarch, Trumbauer designed and erected Lynnewood Hall between 1897 and 1900. At the same time, the architect converted Widener's former mansion at the corner of Broad and Girard Streets in North Philadelphia into the Josephine H. Widener Memorial Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Several years later, Widener presided over Trumbauer's selection as the architect of the central library building.

Lynnewood Hall was one of the most imposing, magnificent residences in America when completed in 1900. Based on Prior Park, a mid eighteenth-century Palladian Revival palace in Bath, England designed by John Wood the Elder, the 110-room mansion provided a dignified setting for Widener's famous art collection, which now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Surrounded by an iron fence one mile in length, the mansion and its formal French garden, which was landscaped by Jacques Gréber between 1914 and 1916, was an incredible accomplishment for an architect who was not 30 years of age when the planning began. For decades after the completion of Lynnewood Hall, Trumbauer added myriad out buildings to the estate including barns, stables, and cottages.

The most important of these was Ronaele Manor, a Tudor Revival mansion. Between 1923 and 1926, Trumbauer designed and constructed the mansion with 60 rooms and 28 chimneys for Widener's granddaughter Eleanor Widener and her husband Fitz Eugene Dixon. Much of the southern section of the Widener estate, which was known as Lynnewood Farm, was developed as an apartment complex in the 1950s. Sadly, today Lynnewood Hall lies in ruins and is threatened with demolition.

The wealthy Widener and Elkins families recommended Trumbauer's burgeoning architecture firm to their friends and associates. Several commissioned the favored architect. For example, coal millionaire Edward J. Berwind, who had collaborated with Widener on the financing of the New York City subway system, commissioned Trumbauer to design The Elms in Newport, Rhode Island at the turn of the century. Based on the mid eighteenth-century French Château d'Asnières outside Paris, The Elms was one of the most exquisite vacation villas in Newport, a gathering place for the country's rich and powerful. Purchased by the Preservation Society of Newport County in 1962 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1996, The Elms is one of only a few Trumbauer residences open to the public.

During the teens, Trumbauer designed Miramar, a grand French classical vacation villa in Newport, for Eleanor Elkins Widener. Widener summered at Miramar with her second husband Alexander Hamilton Rice, the son of a former Massachusetts governor. She met Rice in 1915 at the dedication of Harvard University's Widener Library, which she had commissioned from Trumbauer to memorialize her son, Harry Elkins Widener, who died on the Titanic in 1912. Like several other great Trumbauer houses, Miramar was set in formal French gardens designed by famous landscape architect Jacques Gréber. A renowned planner, Gréber not only prepared the final plans for Philadelphia's Fairmount or Ben Franklin Parkway, but also collaborated with architect Paul Cret on the Rodin Museum, which sits on the Parkway west of the Central Library building.

Throughout his long career, Trumbauer built numerous other stately suburban and seaside homes including a residence for C. J. Matthews (1910) in Langhorne, Pennsylvania and Androssan, meaning "high promontory," a residence for Robert L. Montgomery (1913) in Villanova, Pennsylvania.

In addition to these mansions and villas, Trumbauer also erected several lavish urban townhouses including one on New York City's Fifth Avenue for Miramar-owner Eleanor Elkins Widener (1922). The Edward C. Knight House at 1629 Locust Street in Philadelphia is an excellent example of Trumbauer's townhouse designs. Erected in 1902, Knight's French-inspired home reveals the architect's ability to bestow dignity and grandeur on a smaller scale and in an urban setting. Trumbauer also designed a grand summer residence for Knight in Newport.

In 1909, Trumbauer, with the help of his gifted assistant Julian Abele, designed one of his greatest urban townhouses, a residence for James B. Duke, also on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The wealthy Duke was an associate of Peter A. B. Widener, the founder of American Tobacco Company, and the benefactor of Duke University. Like many of Trumbauer's most impressive commissions, the Duke mansion was conceived in a mid eighteenth-century French classical style. According to Trumbauer scholar Frederick Platt, it is based on architect Etiene Laclotte's Hôtel Labottière, constructed in Bordeaux in 1773. Dignified, noble, and grand, the Duke mansion, which is now occupied by New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, is closely related stylistically to the Central Library building. Notably, Trumbauer commissioned famed architectural illustrator Jules Guerin to execute perspective renderings of the two related buildings, the Duke mansion and the central library building. Guerin's beautiful watercolor of the library building now hangs in the Central Library's Executive Offices.

During the twenty years after World War I, Trumbauer shifted his practice, building fewer and fewer grand residences, which had been the mainstay of his firm, and more and more commercial and institutional buildings. Whereas, for example, in 1902 Trumbauer's firm erected eight residences and one church. In 1925 the firm was at work on not only one home but four office buildings, a hotel, and the campus for Duke University. Between 1916 and 1921, during the transition away from residential design, Trumbauer planned and constructed Whitemarsh Hall, his greatest but one of his last palatial estates.

Although architect Horace Trumbauer forged his reputation at the end of the nineteenth century with his grand homes for wealthy financiers and industrialists, he and his staff of designers also planned numerous other types of structures. From simple mill and office buildings to churches, railroad stations, hotels, skyscrapers, and educational and cultural buildings, Trumbauer and his team erected many significant commercial and institutional buildings in the Philadelphia area and throughout the United States.

In 1895, he branched out, building several structures at Willow Grove Amusement Park including the famous Music Pavilion. Through this commission, Trumbauer met his greatest benefactors, the intertwined Widener and Elkins families, whose rapid transit company financed the park. Situated at the end of a trolley line, the park provided weekend riders for a transit system that primarily carried weekday commuters. Over the next four decades, Trumbauer designed several mansions and other important buildings for the Wideners and Elkins.

 

In Philadelphia, the powerful patrons commissioned the architect to erect the Ritz Carlton Hotel (1911) at Walnut and Broad Streets, the Widener Building (1915) on South Penn Square across from City Hall, the Elkins Memorial YMCA (1911) on Arch Street west of Broad,

and the Widener Memorial Training School for Crippled Children (1902) in the city's Logan section.

Peter A. B. Widener, the patriarch of the Widener family, was also instrumental in the selection of Trumbauer to design the Free Library's central building as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on which he collaborated with the firm of Zantzinger, Borie & Medary between 1911 and 1928. One of the most important commissions from the families came in 1912 when Eleanor Elkins Widener retained Trumbauer to design a main library for Harvard University as a memorial to her son Harry Elkins Widener, a Free Library trustee who had died in the Titanic disaster earlier that year. Trumbauer's only other library commission, Harvard's classical Widener Library opened with a solemn ceremony on June 24, 1915.

Trumbauer's association with the Widener and Elkins families led to commissions from their wealthy and powerful associates in Philadelphia, New York City, and elsewhere. For example, Peter A. B. Widener introduced business associate and founder of the American Tobacco Company James B. Duke to Trumbauer. For Duke, Trumbauer not only erected city and country homes, but also designed Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Trumbauer and his long-time chief designer Julian Abele, who completed the firm's work at Duke after Trumbauer's death in 1938, planned the east campus in the Georgian style between 1925 and 1927 and the west campus in the Gothic style between 1926 and 1939. One of America's greatest college campuses, Duke is a Trumbauer masterpiece.

More than any other neighborhood, Trumbauer and his staff left their mark on the area around Philadelphia's City Hall. In the Center City area alone, they built more than 40 structures including several large hotels, apartment and office buildings, and homes for cultural institutions. In 1901, the architect designed his first major building in the neighborhood, the urbane St. James Apartments at Thirteenth and Walnut Streets, an eclectic, Beaux-Arts influenced apartment house for the city's elite. At the same time, Trumbauer collaborated with famous Chicago architect Daniel Burnham on the second Land Title Building, a classically ornamented skyscraper at Broad and Sansom Streets. A few years later, he built the first of several buildings, a maternity ward, for Hahnemann Hospital. During the second half of the first decade of the century, he erected two important club buildings in the neighborhood, the brick Georgian style Racquet Club (1906) on Seventeenth between Walnut and Locust Streets and the French-inspired Union League Annex (1909) on Fifteenth Street at Sansom.

Trumbauer also designed numerous important buildings for the neighborhood during the second decade of the century. In 1912 he planned the high-rise Adelphia Hotel for the northeast corner of Thirteenth and Chestnut Streets. The next year, he and his staff designed the Stock Exchange on Walnut Street west of Broad. To house the exchange and offices, Trumbauer planned a sophisticated, tripartite building with discernable base, middle, and capital; in the middle section, he frankly revealed the underlying steel frame while simultaneously dematerializing the brick infill with texturing. Two years later, Trumbauer employed innovative cast concrete ornamentation for his elegant, French classical Widener Building on South Penn Square. Not long before the United States entered the World War, Trumbauer and his designers planned the impressive, classical Beneficial Savings Fund Society building (1916) at Twelfth and Chestnut Streets. Almost unchanged in nine decades, Beneficial Savings Fund Society building, which shares many details with the Free Library's central building, is perhaps the best preserved Trumbauer building in the city.

In the 1920s, as Trumbauer's emphasis shifted further from grand residential commissions to commercial and institutional commissions, he erected sundry buildings in Center City. Adding to his many buildings south of City Hall, he constructed the utilitarian, high-rise Bankers' Trust Office Building (1922) on the northeast corner of Juniper and Walnut Streets and the Albert M. Greenfield Building (1925, demolished) at 1313 Walnut Street. To the east, Trumbauer built two major buildings, the Georgian style Public Ledger Building (1923), a headquarters for the important daily newspaper, at Sixth and Chestnut Streets and the enormous Ben Franklin Hotel (1925) at Ninth and Chestnut Streets. To the west, in addition to completing the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Trumbauer and his staff erected several buildings including the sleek Le Chateau Hotel (1928), a skyscraper with Gothic ornament at Nineteenth and Locust Streets on Rittenhouse Square. In the late 1920s, Trumbauer also designed a towering station for the B & O Railroad on Market Street along the east bank of the Schuylkill River, but the station was never built.

Toward the end of his career, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Trumbauer experimented with a modern style based on the soaring vertical lines of Gothic cathedrals and popularized by illustrator Hugh Ferriss, who sketched enigmatic, looming skyscrapers. Relaxing his steadfast commitment to historical styles, he designed two major hospital buildings in Center City in this modern, vertical style, the Hahnemann Medical College building (1927, now called the South Tower) at 230 North Broad Street and the Jefferson Hospital Curtis Clinic (1930) on Walnut west of Tenth Street.

Despite this turn toward a modern style of design, the Trumbauer firm is best remembered for its elegant, dignified buildings in revival styles, especially an eclectic style based on a Beaux-Arts reinterpretation of the classical vocabulary.

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