A.D. Taylor
Prominent Cleveland landscape architect who designed a number of estates in Indian Hill and elsewhere in the Cincinnati area. Educated at Cornell University and Massachusetts College (1905); trained in the office of Warren H. Manning (not of Manning & Howe) in Boston, where he prepared the topographic survey for the new campus of what is now Kent State University in 1911. He accompanied Manning to Cleveland in 1914, but immediately established his own office there.
"He is credited with introducing many principles of European landscape design to the U.S.... He used both formal and informal planning principles.... Like other architects of the period, Taylor found sources and inspiration for his work in European precedents such as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and English estates and gardens." His articles in Landscape Architecture and more popular periodicals contributed to the profession’s and the public’s understanding of landscape architecture. He served as a non-resident professor in the landscape architecture program he helped establish at the Ohio State University, Columbus (1916-1926).
Taylor’s and his firm’s work included many residential, institutional, and public gardens in the Cleveland area and elsewhere. Perhaps most interestingly, he was the landscape architect for the Pentagon, the huge office building of the War Department near Washington, D.C., completed in 1943.
Taylor served as a consultant for the Cincinnati Park Board 1927-1941, designing the original landscaped approach to Union Terminal, Fleischmann Gardens, and Alms, Ault, and Mt. Echo parks, as well as a group of playing fields. He prepared a plan for the original garden court in the Cincinnati Art Museum for the Garden Club of America in 1930. Among Taylor’s private works in the Cincinnati area were the estates of Julius Fleischmann, “Winding Creek Farm” (1926); John J. Emery, “Peterloon”; E. Lawrence Jones; William H. Albers, “Alberly Manor” (1929); and Ethan B. Stanley, “Beresford Dale,” all in Indian Hill. He may have laid out the Rookwood Subdivision in Hyde Park for Alice Roosevelt Longworth.
Charles C. Taylor
Descendant of early settlers of Cincinnati; C.C. Taylor's father, Charles W. Taylor (born in 1830), "walked across the plains to California in 1850," staying for four years and later for ten years. C.C. Taylor was educated at the Ohio Mechanics' Institute; worked for William M. Aiken, then A.O. Elzner, until 1889; with (John H.) Boll as Boll & Taylor, 1889-1908 (although he opened his own office in 1892); Taylor continued the firm, joined by Benjamin C. DeCamp, 1909-1912. Boll & Taylor "designed and constructed many structures, both public and private, among the former being a number of theaters, libraries, commercial and manufacturing buildings." Their earliest work is displayed in a brochure, a copy of which is preserved at the Cincinnati Historical Society.
Taylor and DeCamp "are both competent and practical engineers, in addition to which they have artistic ability which enables them to design and construct buildings which meet the requirements of utility, and are consistent architecturally."
The handsome Beaux-Arts Market House at Mills and Main avenues in Norwood (1908) was designed by Taylor.
William Watts Taylor
Rookwood Pottery founder Maria Longworth Nichols hired Taylor as business manager in 1883. When she retired in 1890, he became the manager and an owner of the company. A designer as well as a businessperson, Taylor was widely respected by Cincinnati’s business elite. He was involved with architect H. Neil Wilson in the design of the Rookwood Pottery building (1891-92). Taylor wanted an artistic structure that matched the industry within.
Willis P. Tharp
Civil and mechanical engineer, architect, and builder; educated in the Cincinnati schools; began study of engineering ca. 1868. Involved with railroad and bridge construction in Cincinnati after working in Chicago, where he "he had a wide experience in the science of architecture after the great fire" of 1871. Tharp was associated with the construction and perhaps the design of the former Grand Central Passenger Station, Third and Central avenues (1884; $1,130,000); the Little Miami Depot; the Pennsylvania Passenger Station at the Cincinnati end of the Cincinnati & Newport Railroad Bridge; the Kentucky Central Railroad shops in Covington, Ky.; and the C&O Bridge. He was the constructing engineer for several large manufacturing plants in the area. He is also believed to have been superintendent and engineer for the Hannafords' Eden Park Water Tower, serving as Engineer of the City Water Works (1891). Drawings survive (rather unusually) for a fairly modest suburban residence by Tharp at 3547 Observatory Place, Mt. Lookout.
William A. Thien
Fresco artist and carriage-painter, active in Cincinnati 1872-1878 and ca. 1883-1895; in Toledo, Oh., during the early 1880s. The 1874 Cincinnati Enquirer called Thien’s wall-decorations in the Gibson House Hotel “the most beautiful specimens of frescoing work we have ever seen.” Northern Kentucky scholar Paul Tenkotte also attributes the stenciled interiors of Mother-of-God Roman Catholic Church in Covington and the early 1870s original scheme of the Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati to Wenceslaus Thien (see Charles and Raphael Pedretti for the 1890-1891 re-stenciling of the Temple).
Joesph W. Thwaites
Advertised as an architect in Covington, Ky., in 1843; according to Goss (1912), he was a partner of Henry Walter and completed (with William Walter) the "Norman-Gothic" House of Refuge, formerly on Colerain Avenue in Camp Washington, north of/beyond Anderson & Hannaford's Cincinnati Workhouse.
Rudolph Tietig
Like his partner from 1903 until 1956, Walter H. Lee, Tietig was educated at the Cincinnati Technical School and M.I.T. (1898). While Lee returned immediately to Cincinnati, however, Tietig gained experience in N.Y. with Robert Maynicke and G.K. Thompson.
According to Brunk, whose invaluable study of Cincinnati and Detroit architect Leonard B. Willeke has thrown light on the early 20th-century architectural scene in Cincinnati, Willeke not only served as chief designer, especially of residences, for the firm in 1911, but even co-designed Tietig's own house, a fairly modest but interesting Arts & Crafts adaptation of a Lutyens design, on SWC of Observatory Rd. and Stettinius Ave., Hyde Park (1905); this residence was published in the important German periodical, Moderne Bauformen, in 1911. Willeke remained with the firm only a short time, however, and other designers continued to be responsible for residential work.
The firm was prolific and long-lived, although only a limited amount of its work has yet been documented. Like Albert Kahn of Detroit, whose career theirs somewhat parallels, although they were a decade younger, Tietig & Lee worked basically in Beaux-Arts Classical and other Traditional styles for institutional, commercial, and residential buildings, although sometimes preferring Arts & Crafts attitudes; on the other hand, their industrial structures could be boldly functional and unadorned, as is shown in at least one factory published by the Ferro Concrete Construction Company in their ca. 1940 monograph. Brunk has a copy of a T&L promotional brochure, perhaps published ca. 1912 (see his book on Willeke), which includes superb photographs and drawings of their earlier work.
Among T&L’s better-known works in the area are several buildings (some with Garber & Woodward) for the University of Cincinnati campus; the former Rockdale Temple (K.K. Bene Israel), on Rockdale Avenue in Avondale (illustrated by Montgomery Schuyler in 1908); the striking former Jewish Synagogue (Temple S.I.A.A.) on Reading Rd in Avondale; the former Western German Bank, SEC 12th and Vine streets, Over-the-Rhine, which replaced (or supplemented) one of Elzner's earliest works; the Cincinnati Tennis Club, Wold and Dexter Aves, E. Walnut Hills (1906); a number of public schools, including Stowe, Sands, and Sayler Park, several of them in an Arts & Crafts manner and later in American Colonial Revival; and the North side (Cumminsville) Public Library (1906).
Most of the early 20th-century Cincinnati Bell Telephone suburban branch exchanges were designed by T&L, in a variety of Beaux-Arts adaptations. Tietig’s 1927 biographical notice credit’s the firm with Hughes High School, “nationally known for the beauty of its location and the artistic adaptation of style to setting,” although the original building was designed by J. Walter Stevens of St. Paul, Minn., after a national competition; possibly T&L were the local architects for that ca. 1904 phase, but in any case they designed a substantial addition. The Medical Arts Building in Memphis, Tenn., is given special notice in Leonard, who also lists the Doctors‘ Building on Garfield Place, the Garfield Hotel, the Atlas National Bank Building, and the Strand Theatre. T&L collaborated with Harry Hake on the design of the fine Beaux-Arts (3rd) Chamber of Commerce Building on the SWC of Fourth and Race streets.
Among numerous residences were those of prominent citizens such as Simon Kuhn, A.G. Brunsman, and A.H. Mitchell, in Avondale, and later estates in Indian Hill; as well as factories and warehouses.
L.B. Willeke was involved with the design of several of these, and also an impressive group of alternatives for the site of Richardson's Chamber of Commerce Building, which burnt in 1911: proposals for another Chamber of Commerce Building, a Businessmen's Club, and for the Union Central Life Insurance Co., which instead commissioned the existing office building from Garber & Woodward with Cass Gilbert of N.Y.
He is said to have been blind in one eye (Nuxhall).
Among those who worked for Tietig & Lee were Leo Townsend, listed there at least in 1906 and 1913.
Louis Comfort Tiffany
Provided and/or designed the spectacular new apse for Henry Walter’s early 1830s Christ Church Episcopal (Cathedral), at Fourth and Sycamore streets in downtown Cincinnati, about 1893-1895, along with William Martin Aiken, L.F. Plympton, and perhaps another local architect. Only fragments of the Tiffany ensemble appear to survive: a small panel of purple-brown gold-foil-backed glass mosaic and two handsome “Byzantine hanging lamps; no doubt others of these lamps survive in other hands.
What appear to be a Tiffany (Studios) fire-screen and at least one table-lamp appear in turn-of-the-century photographs of the Library of what was then the Charles Phelps and Annie Sinton Taft House (“Belmont,“ originally the Martin Baum House; since the Tafts’ deaths about 1930 the Taft Museum, near Christ Church at Fourth and Pike streets); these items appear in photographs that probably show the house as enlarged and perhaps at least partially renovated by W.M. Aiken in the late 1880s. See also Carl Dannenfelser of the Cincinnati Art-Joinery on the woodcarving for this library. George M. Anderson of Elzner & Anderson claimed to have worked for L.C. Tiffany in the late 1880s in New York, as did interior decorator William F. Behrens, who later occupied Plympton’s own residence on Upland Place, East Walnut Hills (see biographies of both in Representative Men of Ohio [1926]).
Edward L. Tilton
New York architect. Trained with McKim, Mead & White and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Tilton and his partner William A. Boring are best known for designing the Immigration Station on Ellis Island in N.Y. Harbor. Tilton was an authority on the design of libraries, especially smaller Carnegie libraries, and among the numerous examples illustrated in his articles in the Inland Architect and elsewhere is the Mt. Auburn/Corryville (North Cincinnati) Library, 2802 Old Vine St., near the University of Cincinnati (ca. 1907; sensitively renovated in 1997); he also designed the Hyde Park Carnegie Library on Erie Avenue (1910; "Colonialized" most inappropriately). Tilton also referred to McLaughlin's ca. 1870 Cincinnati Public Library as an example of the "old conventional plan [featuring a] large central reading room with top light surrounded by several tiers of stacks... a weak echo of some of the beautiful old libraries of Europe."
Boring & Tilton exhibited at the 3rd CAIA/CAM (1903); his later partner A.M. Hithens also exhibited at the 2nd CAIA/CAM (1902).
Mr. Tilton
Goss refers to a "Mr. Tilton" as the architect of the U.S. Branch Bank of Cincinnati, a fine Federal building "just above 3rd St. on Main"; Gorham A. Worth, whose country seat survives on Mt. Auburn, was the Cashier of this short-lived but important early Cincinnati institution. Conceivably, Tilton was the first architect to work in Cincinnati.
William Tinsley
The subject of the first book-length biography of an architect who worked principally in Cincinnati (ironically by a scholar from Indianapolis), Tinsley was among a group of mid-19th-century Cincinnati architects born and/or trained in Britain and Ireland. See Forbes for additional information on this important architect, who presumably designed far more buildings than have so far been recognized.
He worked with (E.) Anderson & Hannaford in 1857-1858, at the beginning of the latter's career, apparently to compete for the Cincinnati Masonic Temple, which was designed by Hamilton & McLaughlin (who had lost out to Tinsley on the Probasco House).
Tinsley served as the second president of the Cincinnati Chapter of the AIA in 1871. The charming Gothic Revival Tinsley cottage (and a matching neighbor) survive at 1902 and 1906 Bigelow St., Mt. Auburn.
From BEO (1876; a contemporary source based on Tinsley‘s own autobiographical notes according to Forbes, in full): “Tinsley, William, Architect, was born, February 7th, 1804, at Clonmel, in the county of Tipperary, Ireland, and is the son of Thomas Tinsley, a master builder by profession. He is of English extraction, the Tinsleys having left England about the time of Cromwell [mid-17th century]; and his father’s maternal ancestry were Irish—the Mocklers of Mocklerstown—who left the country when James the Second fled. William was educated in the day schools of his native town until he was about sixteen [ca. 1820], and he was then received into his elder brothers John’s establishment. Where he was placed under the various foremen of the different divisions of house and church construction. He received instruction from his brother in architectural drawing, and also in mathematical and landscape drawing from the professors at the endowed school.
“When he was about twenty-one years old his brother John died, and he took his place and turned to account the knowledge and experience he had acquired. The first work he undertook was a design for a large linen hall; then followed frame offices and houses, cottage residences and country churches. Some of the latter he built on the plan of the Diocesan architect. Soon, however, he was employed on more important works, e.g., mansions for the gentry in the old English castellated and Italian styles. Among these, Tulamane Castle, Lakefield House, etc. He occasionally submitted his design to the Diocesan architect, and had the benefit of his instruction. He also frequently visited and made sketches of ecclesiastical and castellated remains so plentiful in every part of the country. When he was thirty-eight years old [ca. 1842] he was appointed by Right Rev. Robert Daly, Bishop of Cashel, etc., to the position of Diocesan Architect (which post he filled acceptably until his emigration to the United States); shortly afterwards Architect to the Marquis of Waterford; and about the same time a position was tendered him by the Earl of Glengale, to rebuild a large portion of the town of Cahir, a few miles from Clonmel.
“The general stagnation in business succeeding the failure of the crops in 1847, and the attempted rebellion in 1848, caused these noblemen, with others of his patrons, to cease improvements and this led him to turn his attention to America. With his large family he left Ireland, and reached the United States in the autumn of 1841, settling in Cincinnati. He found, however, the style and character of building so entirely different from that which obtains in the British isles, that he could not be prevailed to conform to the then American style of false and flimsy construction.
“When soon after he had an opportunity of submitting a design for the Northwestern Christian University, at Indianapolis, which was the successful one in the competition, he removed thither, and while a resident of that city was employed as architect and builder of several universities, colleges, churches, and residences, for the period of five years [ca. 1852-1857].
“He then returned to Cincinnati, where he has since resided. Among his late professional works may be mentioned St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church, Cincinnati; the Institution for the Blind, at Columbus; the Know County Infirmary; beside numbers of churches, residences, etc.
“While a resident of Ireland his political views were of the liberal conservative party, while in the United States very decidedly Union. Three of his sons aided in the restoration of the Union authorities during the late civil war, two of them as belligerents, and one—Rev. Charles Tinsley—in the hospital service.
“His religious belief is that taught by the Methodist Episcopal Church, although his children were all brought up in the United Church of England and Ireland.
“He has been thrice married. When about twenty-three years of age [ca. 1827] he was united to a lady of his own age; in two years he was a childless widower, her child and herself were interred on the second anniversary of their union. The following year he married the cousin of his first wife, and during the twenty-seven years of this married life thirteen children were born to him. She died in Indianapolis, leaving ten children living, two only of whom were capable of helping themselves. Shortly prior his return to Cincinnati [ca. 1857] he married a third time, as his young family of ten children needed care and aid in their education, especially as the nature of his business required him to be frequently absent from home. Three other children have been born to him from this union.
“He has had the assistance of several of his sons in his office. Among these, Rev. Charles Tinsley aided him until he entered the ministry. His second son gave promise of taste and ability; but while engaged on a model of the Probasco House [“Oakwood,” Clifton, Cincinnati], died after a few days’ illness on the day after he attained his majority. Five other sons were for some time in his office under instructions, of whom four went into other occupations; one only, Thomas Richard, the sixth son (whose biographical sketch appears in this volume), persevered in the study of architecture, and is now Architect to the Commissioners of the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum, and of other buildings in Columbus, Ohio.
“Of his daughters, one is the wife of the Vicar of Kilronan, Ireland; a second is married to a lawyer in Indiana; while the third has been for the three years past laboring as a missionary in Lucknow, in the East Indies. Three other daughters and one son are at their father’s house [on Bigelow Avenue] on Mt. Auburn, Cincinnati. Although he has entered upon his seventy-third year, he is yet capable of producing original designs, the offspring of his brain and the handiwork of his pencil.”
John M. Trimble
New York City architect, builder, and superintendent of construction, listed there 1851-1859. Designed Cincinnati Opera Hall (1857; Pike's Opera House), which was ironically one of the few commercial buildings on Third or Fourth Streets criticized in an 1859 article in the Architects' & Builders.'
Trimble, described as “New York’s leading theater architect,” is considered the original designer of the spectacular Italianate Baroque City Hall-Thalian Hall in Wilmington, N.C. (1854-1858), although the grand Corinthian portico and other features were altered during construction by the superintending architect James F. Post, and the masonry contractors John C. and Robert Wood (especially the latter).
James Sims Trowbridge
Like his partner, Lucian F. Plympton, J.S. Trowbridge (not to be confused with Samuel B.P. Trowbridge (1862-1926) of the prominent early 20th-century N.Y. firm, Trowbridge & Livingston) was educated abroad, but also in Boston, where he sketched "Scraps of Ironwork from about Boston" published in the AA&BN in 1884; in that year he was also delineating buildings by Edwin Anderson of Cincinnati (the early partner of Samuel Hannaford).
Trowbridge contributed architectural design(s) to the 1883 Cincinnati Exposition. He may have practiced for part of 1885 on his own, but soon joined Plympton, who was equally accomplished as a draftsman. They had hardly been joined in turn by Edwin Buddemeyer when a note appeared in the Inland Architect (12/1887): "Architect James Trowbridge (Jimmey), as he is called, is lying very low with the typhoid fever. The Craft cannot afford to lose him, for he is a brilliant architect." Within a few weeks his obituary and a tribute appeared. Nevertheless, Trowbridge seems to have participated in the firm's output, especially as rendered in their 1888 New Year's greeting booklet. His sketch of a "Gateway to Roman Gardens" was included in the 1889 Cincinnati Architectural Club exhibit.
Michels (see Buddemeyer) includes one of Trowbridge's 1887 Inland Architect drawings as an example of the high caliber of drawings in comparison to Frank Lloyd Wright's first published drawings in that year; but see also Besinger's "Comment," JSAH, XXXI, 3 (10/1972), 216-20.
Judge George Turner
According to Dr. Daniel Drake, in his 1815 Picture of Cincinnati (p. 135), Judge Turner "furnished a plan" for the first Hamilton County Court House, probably located on the west side of Main Street south of Fifth (north of the First Presbyterian Church). "It was erected in the year 1802, and burned down early in 1814, while a company of soldiers were using it as a barrack," presumably during the War of 1812, although perhaps while the Newport (Kentucky) Barracks were being constructed to replace Fort Washington. Drake also describes the building as built of limestone with a wooden cupola, concluding: "A couple of two story wings, to be made fireproof, for the purpose of public offices, and connected with the body by corridors, formed a part of the design which remained to be executed."
William Burnet Tuthill
A notable New York architect and engineer, Tuthill is said to have been associated in the design of Hannaford & Procter's Cincinnati Music Hall; if so, possibly the original building, while Tuthill was working for the important New York architect and teacher Richard M. Hunt before 1878; or, much more likely, during the remodeling of the hall ca. 1895 by Samuel Hannaford & Sons, when the proscenium was added and the original High Victorian Gothic interior altered to a small-scaled Beaux-Arts effect, not unlike that of Carnegie Hall. Tuthill (along with Adler & Sullivan of Chicago, who also designed a proposed addition to the Burnet House Hotel in Cincinnati in the early 1890s) was responsible for Carnegie Hall's highly successful acoustics of Carnegie Hall, N.Y. (opened in 1895).
Tuthill also signed a fine perspective of extensive proposed additions to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, along with the Hannaford firm, probably shortly after the turn of the century, when the Conservatory moved from the downtown area to the former Handy/Shillito mansion (designed originally by J.W. McLaughlin, ca. 1860s) in Mt. Auburn. This collaboration, only partially realized, strengthens the likelihood of the Music Hall connection.
Also, Tuthill apparently spelled his middle name like the prominent early Burnet family of Cincinnati (and, of course, the hotel by Isaiah Rogers named for their founder, Judge Jacob Burnet); and his father, a musician, is said to have been associated with the Conservatory before the turn of the century: probably the Burnet C. Tuthill as listed as general manager of the conservatory in Menefee (1926), p. 190.
Bloodgood Tuttle
According to an undated volume of Who Was Who, Tuttle was born in New York City on January 23, 1889, although other sources indicate that he was born in 1880. Trained at the Chicago (Ill.) Manual Training High School; studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (although not listed in the 1907 EBA); he began practice in New York in 1914, and was listed as practicing there 1915-1922, and later in Cleveland, Ohio, and perhaps Detroit, Michigan. His major known works are the Gates of Heaven Cemetery of St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral in N.Y.; the Midland County Courthouse in Midland, Mich. (1925-1926, with a 1958 addition by the individualistic Wrightian Alden B. Dow); and a Kroger Building in Cleveland, Oh. Between 1923 and 1925, and again in 1935, Tuttle designed 36 houses in the admirably planned and developed Shaker Heights sub-division of Cleveland, virtually all of architectural interest. Tuttle was inducted into the Cleveland Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1920.
This brilliant, if (perhaps deliberately) obscure architect designed at least two spectacular mansions in Cincinnati: the Otto and Catherine Holabird Luedeking house on Keys Crescent, E. Walnut Hills (1928-1930; one of the last important Cincinnati residences built before the Depression), and the William H. Albers estate, "Alberly Manor," Indian Hill (1926-1928), with grounds by noted Cleveland landscape architect Albert D. Taylor, like many places in Indian Hill in the 1920s. Photographs of the Albers house and gardens by Margaret Bourke-White were published in The Architect in July 1929; unfortunately, only the second-floor plan is included.
Edgar D. Tyler
Educated at the Swarthmore (Pa.) Prep School; the University of Pennsylvania, B.S. Arch. and M. Arch., 1923; traveled in England and the European continent, 1924. Worked for A.G. Tafel, Louisville, Ky., 1920-1921; Charles A. Platt, N.Y., 1923-1924 and 1925; for Mott B. Schmidt, N.Y, 1925; S. Merrill Clement, N.Y., 1927: superb qualifications for Traditional 20th-century design.
Tyler served as the Cincinnati Union Terminal Staff Architect (for Fellheimer & Wagner), 1928-1933; listed with (Russell S.) Potter, Tyler & (G. Marshall) Martin 1933-1967; with various permutations, the firm still exists (as Roth Associates).
T - Architects
A.D. Taylor | Charles C. Taylor | William Watts Taylor | Willis P. Tharp | William A. Thien | Joseph W. Thwaites | Rudolph Tietig | Louis Comfort Tiffany | Edward L. Tilton | Mr. Tilton | William Tinsley | John M. Trimble | James Sims Trowbridge | Judge George Turner | William Burnet Tuthill | Bloodgood Tuttle | Edgar D. Tyler