Sidney V. Stratton Explained

Sidney Vanuxem Stratton (August 8, 1845^[1] – June 17, 1921^[2]) was an 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 at 120 West 16th Street (1878), a charitable institution teaching sewing skills to poor women, he introduced the Queen Anne style to the United States. This building was designated a New York City landmark in 1990.^[3] At the Seventh Regiment Armory, Stratton's Queen Anne-style room^[4] for the affluent and socially prominent Company K, of which he was a member, is among the best-preserved.^[5]

He met Charles Follen McKim at the École, and later 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), the redesign of the Elliott Roosevelt town house in New York City the same year,^[6] and in redesigned interiors in an early classicizing style, for Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's town house at 19 Gramercy Park South (1887).^[7]

Other works include:

• Avamaya, Bar Harbor, Maine, for Maj. George Montague Wheeler (Later known as Blair Eyrie for second owner D.C. Blair)^[8] (1894, demolished).^[9]
• Carriage House, 150 East 22nd Street, for Miss E.L. Breese (1901); Flemish Renaissance, of Roman brick and limestone, with a stepped gable.^[10]

Stratton was a member of the Architectural League of New York.^[11] He seems to have retired 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.^[12]

Notes and References

1. Edward Carpenter, and Louis Henry Carpenter, Samuel Carpenter and His Descendants (1912:71).
2. http://www.natchezbelle.org/adams-ind/ncc-db-s.htm Natchez City Cemetery Tombstone Transcriptions
3. , p.75
4. http://www.armoryonpark.org/armory_history/more.php Expanded Armory History: Company K
5. 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
6. Lowe, David Gerard. "19 Gramercy Park S. and Stanford White", New York Times (March 19, 2000) Accessed 19 August 2008.
7. Gray, Christopher "Streetscapes/19 Gramercy Park South; An 1880s House That Asks, 'What's In a Name?'" New York Times (February 20, 2000)
8. Maine Cottages: Fred L. Savage and the Architecture of Mount Desert
9. http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!246644!0 Blair Eyrie, 1894-1917)
10. http://www.preserve2.org/gramercy/proposes/ext/ension/150e22.htm Miss E.L. Breese Carriage House
11. Year Book of the Architectural League of New York, (1887) listed him at 57, Broadway.
12. Sidney V. Stratton's Stratton genealogy of Long Island, N.Y.,; was published at Natchez, Mississippi, in 1901.