Two architecturally notable Kingston residences fading fast

17 East Chestnut Street today.

That July the doctor let it be known that he would be moving to Syracuse to practice surgery in “a larger field.” However, his plans changed again, and in December 1904 he was “having plans drawn for a handsome residence” on East Chestnut. By June 1905 the masonry contract had been awarded to Van Aken and Doyle and the carpentry to Sylvester Weeks. In November the house was nearing completion, and by early January 1906 the Chandlers had moved into their new quarters.

The architectural style adopted by Teller for the Chandlers, the English Tudor, is evident in the half-timbered walls of the upper stories which overhang the first story (here of wide boards), in the variety of steeply gabled roofs, and in the grouping of windows in twos and threes. The late medieval flavor of the design is enhanced by the low pointed arch over the front door and curved brackets supporting overhangs.

English Tudor had not been widely adopted in Kingston or elsewhere in America in 1905. (Later Teller would turn again to the half-timbered Tudor for the William Fuller House near St. John’s Episcopal Church on Albany Avenue.)  In fact, Joy Wheeler Dow, architect of Tudor and Colonial residences in northern New Jersey, acknowledged in 1902 that a Tudor (or Elizabethan) half-timbered house had “stirred up … a fierce sentiment of hatred and malicious satire … ” It was, Dow wrote, “something fit only to be quickly destroyed by dynamite.”

There is no evidence that Teller’s design was controversial. Why did Teller use the Tudor?  No records survive to explain the choice, but there is evidence that the culturally sophisticated Chandler and his wife may have chosen the style.

The doctor’s mother, Izora Schwartz Chandler, who died in 1906, was a painter of miniatures, chairman of the art committee of the Women’s Press Club of New York, and had been instructor in painting at Syracuse University. Chandler himself was an accomplished amateur violinist, and took a keen interest in the art of George Inness Jr., the landscape painter with a country home and studio at Cragsmoor who was friendly with the Elks Club of Kingston.

Martha Chandler, a daughter of George Chandler’s violin teacher, was also culturally aware. Before her marriage in 1900 she had been a high school teacher in Syracuse and a member of the editorial staff of the Syracuse Herald & Post Standard. In Kingston she acquired a reputation for delivering “clever monologues.” She appeared as Portia in “The Ladies Speak Last,” a program she directed in 1910 for the amusement of the Daughters of the American Revolution.  In this “entertaining farce … laid at a water cure establishment in the south of England,” Mrs. Chandler appeared as Portia, one of “Shakespeare’s heroines.” Might not this lover of Shakespeare have wanted to live in a house whose half-timbered walls were reminiscent of Shakespeare’s home at Stratford-upon-Avon?

There may have been another factor leading the Chandlers to choose Tudor half-timbering:  the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. The Tudor was among the styles embraced by the movement, and the interior moldings and chestnut staircase of the Chandler house reveal the careful carpentry insisted on by the movement. Both Chandlers had ties to Syracuse where Gustav Stickley, who produced high-quality furniture according to arts-and-crafts principle. Stickley was also a key advocate of the movement in house design and furnishing through his Craftsman Magazine, whose pages included house plans with decorative (false, non-structural) half-timbering of the sort found in the Chandler house. (It is surprising that Stickley would endorse false half-timbering, when the Arts and Crafts philosophy emphasized “honest” construction.)

The evidence is strong for the influence of another important figure in the arts-and-crafts movement on the Chandlers. In August 1906 the Daily Freeman reported that the Chandlers were on a two-week trip to western New York, including a visit to East Aurora, outside Buffalo, where Elbert Hubbard presided over the Roycroft colony of craftspeople and published inexpensive but finely designed books and pamphlets. So many visitors flocked to East Aurora to imbibe the spirit of the enterprise and meet Hubbard that he opened the Roycroft Inn to meet their needs. Across the street from the inn was the Roycroft print shop, completed in 1901 with its upper walls half-timbered. Hubbard had come to Kingston in December 1905 and lectured on “The Roycroft Ideals” in Burgevin’s Hall, in the Burgevin Building designed by Teller. Might the Chandlers have been in the audience?

The Webster house

Teller was part of an architectural era when eclecticism ruled and architects felt free to pick and choose from among a variety of architectural styles originating in past centuries in various parts of the world. Like many American architects of the early 20th century, Teller preferred American Colonial to other historical sources, including the English Tudor. (Did Teller slip in a bit of Colonial with the three strap hinges of Dr. Chandler’s side doorway?) Teller’s design for Grove Webster at 17 East Chestnut is firmly in the Colonial or Colonial Revival style, harking back to the vastly influential Taylor House in Newport designed in the 1880s by New York architects McKim, Mead & White, who were inspired by American 18th-century houses.