Sidney V. Stratton
Sidney Vanuxem Stratton (August 8, 1845[1] – June 17, 1921[2]) was an American architect born in Natchez, Mississippi,[1] but whose practice was entirely in New York City. Stratton is now scarcely known, but he was one of the first American architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, along with H. H. Richardson and Richard Morris Hunt, in whose office he worked in the 1870s before establishing his own practice.
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In his picturesque structure for the New York House and School at 120 West 16th Street (1878), a charitable institution teaching sewing skills to poor women, he introduced the Queen Anne style to the United States. This building was designated a New York City landmark in 1990.[3] At the Seventh Regiment Armory, Stratton's Queen Anne-style room[4] for the affluent and socially prominent Company K, of which he was a member, is among the best-preserved.[5]
He met Charles Follen McKim at the École, and later collaborated with McKim, Mead, and White – from whom he sublet space from 1877 as an independent contractor – on several projects: a church in Quogue, New York (1884), the redesign of the Elliott Roosevelt town house in New York City the same year,[6] and in redesigned interiors in an early classicizing style, for Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's town house at 19 Gramercy Park South (1887).[7]
Other works include:
- Avamaya, Bar Harbor, Maine, for Maj. George Montague Wheeler (Later known as Blair Eyrie for second owner D.C. Blair)[8] (1894, demolished).[9]
- Carriage House, 150 East 22nd Street, for Miss E.L. Breese (1901); Flemish Renaissance, of Roman brick and limestone, with a stepped gable.[10]
Stratton was a member of the Architectural League of New York.[11] He seems to have retired to Natchez, where he had been born and where his father had married his second wife, Miss Caroline Matilda Williams, daughter of Austin Williams of Natchez.[12]
References
- Edward Carpenter, and Louis Henry Carpenter, Samuel Carpenter and His Descendants (1912:71).
- Natchez City Cemetery Tombstone Transcriptions
- New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; Dolkart, Andrew S.; Postal, Matthew A. (2009). Postal, Matthew A. (ed.). Guide to New York City Landmarks (4th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-28963-1., p.75
- Expanded Armory History: Company K
- Mary Anne Hunting, "The Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City: restoration of the historic site in New York", The Magazine Antiques, January 1999
- Lowe, David Gerard. "19 Gramercy Park S. and Stanford White", New York Times (March 19, 2000) Accessed 19 August 2008.
- Gray, Christopher "Streetscapes/19 Gramercy Park South; An 1880s House That Asks, 'What's In a Name?'" New York Times (February 20, 2000)
- Maine Cottages: Fred L. Savage and the Architecture of Mount Desert
- Blair Eyrie, 1894-1917)
- Miss E.L. Breese Carriage House
- Year Book of the Architectural League of New York, (1887) listed him at 57, Broadway.
- Sidney V. Stratton's Stratton genealogy of Long Island, N.Y.,; was published at Natchez, Mississippi, in 1901.
External links
Media related to Sidney V. Stratton at Wikimedia Commons