Sidney V. Stratton

Sidney V [anuxem] Stratton (August 8, 1845Edward Carpenter, and Louis Henry Carpenter, "Samuel Carpenter and His Descendants" (1912:71).] – June 17, 1921 [ [http://www.natchezbelle.org/adams-ind/ncc-db-s.htm Natchez City Cemetery Tombstone Transcriptions] ] ) was a well-connected American architect born in Natchez, Mississippi, but whose practice was entirely in New York City. Stratton is now scarcely known, but he was one of the first American architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, along with H. H. Richardson and Richard Morris Hunt, in whose office he worked in the 1870s before establishing his own practice.

In his picturesque structure for the New York House and School, 120 West 16th Street, New York (1878), a charitable institution teaching sewing skills to poor women, he introduced Queen Anne architecture to the United States.At the Seventh Regiment Armory, where the individual companies competed with one another in the finishing of their upper-floor quarters, often spending much more than the six thousand dollars allotted from the proceeds of a fund-raising fair held in 1879, Stratton's Queen Anne-style room [ [http://www.armoryonpark.org/armory_history/more.php Expanded Armory History: Company K] ] for the affluent and socially prominent Company K, of which he was a member, is among the best-preserved; [ [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_1_155/ai_53590433/pg_7 Mary Anne Hunting, "The Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City: restoration of the historic site in New York", "The Magazine Antiques," January 1999] ]

At the École he met Charles Follen McKim; he collaborated with McKim, Mead, and White, from whom he sublet space from 1877 as an independent contractor, on several projects, a church in Quogue, New York, (1884), and on the redesign of the Elliott Roosevelt town house in New York City the same year [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE1DB1E3BF93AA25750C0A9669C8B63 David Garrard Lowe, " 19 Gramercy Park S. and Stanford White", "New York Times", March 19, 2000] Accessed 19 August 2008.] and in redesigned interiors in an early classicizing style, for Mr and Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, 19 Gramercy Park South (1887).

*Blair Eyrie, Bar Harbor, Maine, for Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt Clinton Blair. (1894, demolished). [ [http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!246644!0 Blair Eyrie, 1894-1917)] ]
*Carriage House, 150 East 22nd Street, for Miss E.L. Breese (1901); Flemish Renaissance, of Roman brick and limestone, with a stepped gable. [ [http://www.preserve2.org/gramercy/proposes/ext/ension/150e22.htm Miss E.L. Breese Carriage House] ]

Stratton was a member of the Architectural League of New York. ["Year Book of the Architectural League of New York," (1887) listed him at 57, Broadway.] He seems to have reired to Natchez, where he had been born and where his father had married his second wife, Miss Caroline Matilda Williams, daughter of Austin Williams of Natchez. [Sidney V. Stratton's "Stratton genealogy of Long Island, N.Y.,"; was published at Natchez, Mississippi, in 1901.]

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