Trinity

Members of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects held a quiet meeting last week to elect a successor to President Ralph Walker of Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker. There would have been nothing newsworthy about the affair but for the name of the new president: Hobart Brown Upjohn.

Not the greatest, but certainly the most long-lived name in U. S. architecture is Upjohn. Richard Upjohn was a co-founder (1857) and first president of the American Institute of Architects. By the time A. I. A. had grown large enough to become a national institution, his Son Richard Michell Upjohn was twice elected president of the New York Chapter, a title to which Grandson Hobart Upjohn succeeded last week.

Richard Upjohn, a bearded, sanctimonious Briton, was a carpenter & cabinet maker with a nice appreciation of Perpendicular Gothic, who settled in New Bedford, Mass, in the late 1820's. A contractor friend one day passed his shop with a roll of drawings for a New England courthouse. Each one was labeled, "Alexander Harris, architect."

''If that's architecture," said blunt Richard Upjohn, "then I'm an architect."

Promptly he published an advertisement in the New Bedford Mercury:

Architectural Plans and Elevations Neatly Executed On Short Notice by Richard Upjohn Orders Left at Mechanics Hall New Bedford

It happened that a good friend of Richard Upjohn was the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew Wainright, assistant rector of Manhattan's Trinity Church. At the time that pious pile's walls were sagging badly, the whole structure in need of repair. Richard Upjohn went down from New Bedford, persuaded the Trinity Corporation to rebuild its church entirely in the Gothic style, to move the site nine feet northward so that it would face squarely down the centre of dusty, willow-shaded Wall Street.

By the time the building was completed in 1840, the dazed Corporation of Trinity found itself possessed of a brownstone building embracing such popish symbols as a cross on the steeple and a deep chancel, and Richard Upjohn was the most famed architect in the U. S. Such a business in parish churches did Richard Upjohn & sons do that it has been said that if all the Upjohn churches from New York to Buffalo should be simultaneously fired at no point between the two cities would the smoke of the steeples be out of sight.

The beard and the talent of Richard Michell Upjohn were both shorter than those of his illustrious father, but he had a burning pride in his firm, inherited his father's deep devotion to the Episcopal Church and the Gothic style. Buildings by Upjohn II include the Connecticut Capitol at Hartford, Boston's Central Congregational Church, St. Paul's Church in Brooklyn, Manhattan's Trinity School.

Hobart Upjohn, taking heed from his brothers, for years refused to be an architect, practiced as a civil engineer. In 1902 a letter intended for his father reached him, asking him to design a church for Watertown, N. Y. Before Hobart Upjohn could explain the mistake, he found himself awarded the contract. Watertown's vestry was quite satisfied when the church was finished, and in 1905 Hobart Upjohn found himself head of the House of Upjohn.

The services of the three Upjohns to the Episcopal clergy did not end with designing churches for them. All three married clergymen's daughters. Hobart Upjohn's Trinity Church. Geneva. N. Y., is practically a copy of Grandfather Upjohn's own Trinity Church in Manhattan. Grandson Upjohn is perhaps best known as the author of the International Correspondence School textbooks on architecture.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.