Warehouse and Stores for Jacob Amos & Sons

Practically in the shadow of his Syracuse Savings Bank Building, sits Joseph Silsbee's Amos Block.  It was part of the massive complex of buildings that stretched another three blocks west, forming the Jacob Amos & Sons mills.  It was designed in 1877 and constructed the following year.  The 1878 structure incorporates an older structure with an addition and a new facade to create a series of stores and warehouse for the milling company.  It was constructed for the Amos family and was likely overseen by Charles Amos, a son of Jacob Amos Sr. who oversaw operations of the Syracuse mill.      

The Amos Building has one of the most varied and intricately detailed facades of any Silsbee building I know.  Stylistically, with it's Romanesque and Moorish influences, it is a departure from the High Victorian Gothic business blocks that he designed elsewhere in the city of Syracuse.

The facade boasts a dictionary-full of masonry details and motifs. The masonry surface is accented with a series of masonry piers. Fields of wall are composed of bricks that are turned at forty-five degrees to create a serrated pattern. Others are accented in a checkerboard pattern with every other brick recessed.

Almost every window head has a different type of arch. Some are Moorish or horseshoe arches. Others have simple round arches with stone accents and others are grouped under shallow segmental arches.  Tiny Romanesque arches support a shallow coping at the roof-line.  Carved lintels and stone accents provide additional variety to the lively facade.  The variety is a rare example of Silsbee's affinity for exotic styles and motifs.

The overall composition on the Water St. side of the building serves to break up the building in a series smaller hospitable parts while incorporating the three buildings behind it into a discernible whole.  It is not as refined, in rich material or design, as some of his other commercial structures but given it's function as a store, it certainly would have garnered a lot of attention for the Amos Company.

Addition to the Coulter Block

Not all architectural commissions are large new marquis buildings.  In fact, a majority of an architect's practice typically consists of minor additions, alterations and miscellaneous design consulting work.  Typically absent from architectural monographs, these works are usually the bread and butter for most firms.

In 1891, Silsbee was commissioned by a drygoods store owner to add a new floor and complete renovations for this store in Aurora, Illinois.  The addition almost seamlessly blends with the previous building, a 3-story Italianate commercial block built in 1874.

The Chicago Telephone Building

In 1888, Silsbee designed a building for the Chicago Telephone Company.  Now demolished, it housed offices for the company, control and switch rooms, and telephone apparatus. Joseph Silsbee is not the first architect that comes to mind when you think of the design of Chicago office buildings.  He is more commonly discussed in relation to the homes he designed, particularly those that he did while Frank Lloyd Wright and George Maher were employed in his office. 

Stylistically, the building is a departure from the Gothic structures he designed about a decade earlier in Syracuse, NY but the quality of design and attention to detail are the same. It was a seven-story iron structure with interior decorative ironwork clad in brick and terra cotta.  The building had Romanesque and Queen Anne elements and a clarity of design that can easily be compared with the finest buildings designed at the same time by Sullivan, Root, and others. A drawing of the building appeared in the local building journal, the Building Budget, and was signed by Geo. W. Maher.