Walker & Gillette

The New York-based architectural firm of Walker & Gillette, the partnership of A. Stewart Walker [Obituary, "The New York Times", 6 November 1952.] and Leon N. Gillette [ [http://www.sah.org/oldsite06012004/aame/biog.html#12 Leon N. Gillette] , "Brief Biographies of American Architects Who Died Between 1897 and 1947", "Society of Architectural Historians". Retrieved 3 April 2007] designed and built numerous commercial and residential buildings in the city. Their most prominence commission was the seamless extension, to north and south, of the New-York Historical Society building on Central Park West between 76th and 77th Streets, carried out in 1938, [http://www.oprhp.state.ny.us/hpimaging/hp_view.asp?GroupView=5590 Central Park West Historic District] , (Java), National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, New York'sState and National Registers of Historic Places Document Imaging Project [http://www.oprhp.state.ny.us/hpimaging/default.asp] , New York State Historic Preservation Office. Retrieved 2 April 2007.] almost the last Beaux-Arts architecture in the city or elsewhere in the United States. York and Sawyer's central block was extended and sympathetically completed by pavilions on either end. Their most dramatic modernist building was the Electrical Products Building for the 1939 New York World's Fair, in which an arch-headed blue slab tower intersected with a stepped curved structure, to house products that demonstrated electricity applied in radical new ways: shaving, mixing cake batter, and home sewing. [Andrew F. Wood, "New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair", 2004, illus. p. 88.]

An early commission for the partners was the English Gothic commemorative church of St. George’s, Rumson, New Jersey (1907-08), for Mrs. Alice C. Strong as a memorial to her late husband. A late addition to the scheme was the cloister added in 1945. [ [http://www.rumsonnj.gov/downloads/bulletins/2008-RBB-2.pdf "Rumson Borough Bulletin" Spring 2008] .]

Commercial buildings

*East River Savings Bank (1927), Amsterdam Avenue and 96th Street. Reused as a CVS Phramacy, its classical details earned it the name "The Aspirineum".
*Industrial Trust Tower (1927) Providence, Rhode Island. Now Bank of America Building (Providence).
*Fuller Building (1929), 41-45 East 57th Street. Moderne facade with Art Deco details.
*Westchester County Center, White Plains, New York

Residential buildings

*35 East 69th Street (1910)
*52 East 69th Street (1917)
*Henry P. Davison house (1917), 690 Park Avenue. Davison was the founder of Bankers Trust Company. In Neo-Georgian taste. Now the Italian Consulate.
*Coe Hall, Planting Fields Arboretum (1918-21) for W.R. Coe. In Tudor style
*Thomas W. Lamont house (1921), 107 East 70th Street. Now the Visiting Nurse Service of New york.
*French Consulate (1926), 934 Fifth Avenue
*William G. Loew house (1931), 56 East 93rd Street. Later occupied by Billy Rose, it was "the last great mansion" in New York City, with "the manners of John Soane". ["AIA Guide to New York City" 1968:179f.] Soanian details include the three great arch-headed windows in very shallow reveals of the main floor and the windows cut out of the frieze below the cornice.

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