Search

Included are architectural drawings, surveys, maps, and site proposals, for Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, designed primarily by McKim, Mead & White. Other architects represented include Adams & Woodbridge; Arnold Brunner (who designed the School of Mines); Eggers & Higgins; the Columbia University Buildings and Grounds Department; Howells and Stokes (designed St. Paul's Chapel); Reinhard, Hofmeister and Wahlquist; and James Gamble Rogers. Drawings for buildings no longer in existence or never constructed and drawings for later alterations, are included. Architectural drawings of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, and surveys of the asylum site prepared for Columbia, 1888-1894. Also included are site plans and proposals, surveys, and maps, circa 1890s-1910s, showing the surrounding area, including such institutions as the Jewish Theological Seminary, St. Luke's Home, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Grant's Tomb, and others. Drawings for the Womans's Hospital in the State of New York (designed by Allen & Collens, erected 1903, demolished in the 1970s), circa 1903-1914, are also included. This building was used to house the Columbia School of the Arts in the 1960s since it was located near the campus.

Architectural drawings and photographs of buildings designed by the firm dating approximately from its founding to the 1950s. Among those represented are buildings at the World's Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893; Pennsylvania Railroad Station, New York, 1906-1910; restoration, 1903, of the White House, Washington, D.C.; buildings at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, New York; Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass.; E.W. Morgan mansion; Municipal Building, N.Y.; Col. Elliott Shepherd House, Scarborough, N.Y.; buildings at Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.; Bellevue Hospital, New York; various New York City residences; and others. Also included are competition drawings for the New York Public Library; miscellaneous drawings and sketches; photographs of the partners and of other members of the firm; lists of the firm's work; clippings of articles about the firm; lists of the firm's employees; billing records, 1953-1955; account books, 1940s-1950s; bank books, 1895-1955; award certificates; and other office miscellany.

Files of the company, 1911-1920, much of which consists of unsucessful architectural bid documents, each noting the architect, building, and location, as well as estimated costs, sketches, and related correspondents. These bid documents represent commissions not awarded to NYATCC, and do, in some cases, indicate the outcome of the bid. Architects represented include McKim, Mead & White; Cass Gilbert; George Post; D.H. Burnham & Company; Warren & Wetmore, Schwartz & Gross, and many others. Also includes correspondence and office memoranda, including some describing the formative years, 1911-1914, of the National Terra Cotta Society, trade catalogs, and job photographs. Also, two albums containing photographs of sample pieces of terra cotta, and month by month construction records for three buildings, including the American Theater (42nd Street, New York, 1892) by Charles Coolidge Haight; the Renaissance Apartments (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1889) and the Imperial Apartments (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1890) both by Montrose Morris.

Collection consists primarily of White's letterpress books and correspondence, with some related bills, receipts, and other ephemera, 1887-1906, relating to his professional and personal matters. Correspondence, 1907, relates to his estate. Correspondents of note include William A. Boring, Richard Morris Hunt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Louis C. Tiffany, John La Farge, Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted, Whitney Warren, Stefano Bardini, Bessie White, William Merritt Chase, William Robert Ware, Kenyon Cox, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Percy Baker, Cass Gilbert, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, John Wanamaker, Carrère & Hastings, Thomas Dewing, James McNeill Whistler, Lawrence White, Richard White, and other architects, artists, contractors, suppliers, clients, friends, and family members. One letter book contains letters, 1922, by White's son Lawrence Grant White. Also included are White's architectural drawings for houses he built for himself at St. James, Long Island, 1892-1904, and 121 East 21st Street, New York, undated; miscellaneous drawings; and a few architectural drawings by Lawrence Grant White, and drafts of his translation of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY.