Collections : [Avery Drawings & Archives]

This collection contains architectural drawings, photographs, business records and reference materials related to the projects and designs of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and his successor firm, Mayers, Murray & Philips, primarily in the New York City region. A large portion of the collection consists of personal and professional correspondence to and from Goodhue from the early 1900s until his death in 1926. Relatively few architectural drawings from his professional practice survive.

Included are drawings--from preliminary sketches to finished renderings--done by students in the architecture program at the School of Mines at Columbia and, later, at the School of Architecture at Columbia. The bulk of these were done circa 1884-1912, during the tenures of Deans William Robert Ware (1881-1903) and A.D.F. Hamlin (1903-1912). Included in collection are student drawings by William A. Boring, Harry Allan Jacobs, Benjamin Wistar Morris, Jr., Julian Clarence Levi, Arthur Ware, Talbot Faulkner Hamlin, Leopold F. Arnaud, Perry Coke Smith, Theodor Karl Rohdenburg, and Aladar Olgyay. Also, drawings done by architecture students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, circa 1880s; a photograph, undated, of William Robert Ware; and one drawing, 1879, by architect Cass Gilbert.

Included is Cox's correspondence, circa 1880 until his death in 1919, with architects, painters, sculptors, and writers including Bernard Berenson, Edwin Howland Blashfield, Will Hicock Low, John La Farge, Henry Oliver Walker, H. Siddons Mowbray, Theodore Robinson, Elliott Daingerfield, Lucia Fairchild Fuller, Howard Pyle, William A. Coffin, Russell Cowles, Daniel Chester French, Irving R. Wiles, James Monroe Hewlett, Harry Wilson Watrous, Edward R. Simmons, Maxfield and Stephen Parrish, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Louis Saint-Gaudens, John C. Van Dyke, Wendell P. Garrison, Richard Watson Gilder, Robert Underwood Johnson, the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, Stanford White, Charles F. McKim, Cass Gilbert, Charles Adams Platt, and others. Of note are 136 from Cox to lawyer and author Leonard E. Opdyke. Correspondence, circa 1870-1922, with family members, particularly his father, Jacob Dolson Cox (a Union officer), his mother, Louise Howland King Cox (a painter), and his brother Jacob Dolson Cox, Jr. (a Cleveland industrialist and founder of the Cleveland Twist Drill Company). Correspondence of various other family members either among themselves, beginning circa 1860, or with Kenyon Cox is included. Also, manuscripts of Cox's essays, addresses, articles, and other writings on art, circa1870-1919; poetry; and juvenilia.

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.

Also, McKim, Mead & White; Pearsall and Mills; Boring and Tilton; Peabody, Wilson and Brown; Holabird and Root; John B. Peterkin; York and Sawyer; Jackson, Robinson and Adams; George Vernon Russell; John H. Barry; Pliny Rogers; Allen and De Young; Augustus N. Allen; Henry Ives Cobb, Jr.; Bottomley, Wagner and White; Andrew J. Thomas; Harvey Stevenson; R.A. Tissington; John C. Dodd; Walker and Gillette; Grosvenor Atterbury, John Tompkins Assoc.; Donn Barber; Wakefield Worcester; Farrar and Watmough; Henry Wright II; Ralph Thomas Walker; Schultze and Weaver; Henry B. Marsh; Hunter McDonnell; and a few unidentified architects

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.