Collections : [Avery Drawings & Archives]

Undated photographs taken circa 1940s-1960s show interiors and exteriors of eighteenth and nineteenth century buildings in Kentucky. Buildings include The Grange, near Paris, built 1818; the Old Capitol, Frankfort, built 1827-1829; Adam Childers House, Versailles, built circa 1845; Betty Bryan Place, Harrodsburg Pike, built circa 1843; Holloway House, Richmond, built circa 1838; Castlelawn, near Lexington, undated; Junius Ward Place, near Georgetown, built 1859; Warwick, at Danville, built circa 1845; and others.

Collection contains large-scale black and white photographic prints taken by G.E. Kidder Smith of historic and contemporary buildings in 32 states.

The bulk of this collection consists of more than 22,000 black and white photographic negatives and more than 10,600 black and white photographic prints documenting commercial, institutional, religious, and residential architecture throughout the United States, with particular emphasis on sites in the mid-Atlantic region. These images date from the mid-1930s to Molitor's retirement in the mid-1980s, with the great majority of images created between 1946 and 1980. Also included in the collection are images of landscapes, industrial design, portraits, and events of personal significance to Molitor. In some select cases, color prints, color negatives, color transparencies, and 35mm slides are also available in addition to or instead of the black and white negatives and prints. Researchers are also advised that documents in this collection indicate that when faced with a lack of storage space in 1973, Molitor contacted clients to return inactive negatives that they had comissioned before 1955. In at least some cases, those clients declined to accept their negatives and Molitor subsequently destroyed the images. Thus, this collection has lacunae in the negatives series.

The collection includes 1134 images (photographs and postcards, with some duplicates) of approximately 60 buildings, including some earlier photographs, plans, and renderings that Morris copied to add context to her own contemporary photographs. Of properties with identified architects, the great majority were designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, with a few examples of the work of Richard Upjohn, James Renwick, and several other lesser-known architects. Major sites depicted include Lyndhurst, Tarrytown, N.Y.; Fonthill Castle, Bronx, N.Y.; Lovat, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.; Hurst-Pierrepont, Garrison, N.Y.; Belvoir, Yonkers, N.Y.; Beechwood, Yonkers, N.Y.; Mount Ida, Troy, N.Y., Llewellyn Park, Orange, N.J.; and Malbone, Newport, R.I. Some 18th-century buildings, and one 17th-century building (the Christopher Billop House, near Tottenville, Staten Island, built circa 1699), are also depicted.

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

Approximately 30,000 negatives and prints of buildings primarily on the East Coast, designed by various architects, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Constitution Hall and the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., and several churches and houses, all designed by John Pope Russell; four houses by Electus D. Litchfield; houses and other projects by Grosvenor Atterbury; houses by Peabody, Wilson & Brown; the John Ringling mansion in Sarasota, Florida, among other houses, churches, and office buildings designed by Dwight James Baum; numerous houses and apartment buildings in Miami Beach, Florida, especially those by Russell T. Pancoast and Robert Law Weed; many other houses throughout Florida by architects such as John L. Volk and Treanor and Fatio; and many houses and estates located in suburbs of New York City, particulary Greenwich, Conn., Montclair, N.J., and Mt. Kisco, Locust Valley, Oyster Bay, and South Hampton, N.Y.