So what got you interested in this?

For the past few years, I have done a New Years resolution of sorts. Each year, I pick something that I want to get better at and I focus on that one thing more than others throughout the year. Last year at this time, I pledged to work on my bread making skills. With the help of a worldwide pandemic, this "goal" would eventually become a nationwide, if not worldwide, craze. 

An example of last year's breadmaking. I got pretty good at it.

This year, I have pledged to work on my writing. I have never been a particularly good writer and it has taken me years to get to the point where I even have any sort of discipline about it. I intend on writing something every day. I am hoping that by doing this, I gain some confidence and maybe even make some headway on my book about Silsbee.

For this, the first day, I thought it would be good to start at a beginning. A question I often get asked is how I became obsessed with Joseph Silsbee. It is an endeavor that grew over time but it got its start in my second year of architecture school at the University at Buffalo. 

A core component of any architecture program is the architecture design studio. It is a class where theoretical projects are designed and critiqued by a group of professors and critics. That semester, we were introduced to multi-family housing design with a project assignment for an apartment building. The site for the project was at the corner of North Street and Elmwood Avenue, in Buffalo. Before beginning design, I walked the blocks around the project site, taking in some of Buffalo's remarkable turn of the century residential architecture. 

North Street was one of several streets lined with mansions. By the time I visited the area, in the mid 1990's, the years had taken its toll on the neighborhood. Many of the mansions had fallen into disrepair and many others had been demolished to make way for parking lots and strip malls. Condition aside, there were still many incredible homes left on North Street and one home in particular had piqued my interest. That home was the former mansion belonging to Buffalo businessman, John Bemis. 

The Bemis Mansion, now occupied by a law firm, is an imposing brick and terra cotta clad structure. It is three stories tall, with a prominent front gable crowned with an imposing sculpture of a mountain lion. This feature alone makes it very conspicuous. What also struck me at the time was the level of craftsmanship on the structure. Brick work, banding, intricately carved terra cotta come together in a striking composition.

The John Bemis Home (1885) on North Street in Buffalo, NY.

A quick review of a popular guide to Buffalo architecture and I learned that the home was designed by a Syracuse architect named Joseph Silsbee. Having grown up in Syracuse myself, I already knew Silsbee's name as he was the architect of the most prominent downtown building there, the Syracuse Savings Bank. Another fact from the guide stated that Silsbee gave Frank Lloyd Wright his first job when the young architect arrived in Chicago from Wisconsin.   

The Syracuse Savings Bank (1876) on Clinton Square in downtown Syracuse, NY.

Prior to graduate school, I had taken several courses in architectural history but none that focused on this era, so my cursory "research" raised many questions: How did a Syracuse architect end up in Chicago hiring Frank Lloyd Wright? How did a Syracuse architect end up designing buildings in Buffalo? Given the look of the Bemis house and the Savings Bank, he must have designed other interesting structures, where were they and how could I see them?

I did a lot of digging those few months and at the end of that school year, I had collected quite a bit of information about Silsbee. I found that the Syracuse Savings Bank appeared in almost every major publication on American architecture as a "textbook example" of High Victorian Gothic architecture. Several publications also credited Silsbee with introducing the Shingle Style to the Midwest. Clearly, he had a knack for design. 

I also located his offices and learned that he had three of them open at the same time in Chicago, Buffalo, and Syracuse. I also learned about his employees and that in addition to Wright, other gifted architects like George Maher, George Elmsie, and Irving Gill also worked for him. So in addition to his design ability, he must have known a thing or two about business.

In the first semester of my third year of graduate school, I decided to take up Joseph Silsbee as the topic for an independent study under professor and architecture historian, Betsy Cromley. She gave me my first education in how to research using old newspapers, journals, and other archival materials. She also pushed me to reach out to other historians and to actually visit and document the structures I was studying. Some of that early research, in dark old libraries, pouring through microfilm and large bound volumes of old architectural journals seems incredibly far away and even quaint in light of the power and remoteness of today's online search engines.  

That independent study resulted in a list of about 100 works by Joseph Silsbee and a small mountain of photocopies, notes, and photographs that is the basis for the work that I continue today. It has been 27 years and that small mountain has multiplied several times over. It now occupies a file cabinet and countless digital file folders full of material. 

One of my several files cabinet drawers filled with material, organized by date and project. 

Over the years, I have visited most of the existing buildings in these files. I have also had the great fortune to meet many remarkable building owners and historians that have helped contribute to my work. My interests in relation to Silsbee's career have changed over time but I am still guided by those elements that drew me in when I first saw the Bemis house: the incredible craftsmanship and beautiful detail.