Chapter 1: Beginnings and Sutton Place

Mott Brooshovft Schmidt was born in Middletown, New York, on September 2, 1889. A fourth-generation American of German and Irish ancestry, he was one of three children born to Frances Jennette (1864-1940), third wife of Edward Mott Schmidt (1837-1910). After emigrating from Prussia in the early 19th century, the Schmidt family landed first in Charleston, South Carolina, settling some years later in New York. The first family member for whom we have records is Schmidt's great-grandfather, the physician John William Schmidt (1768-1853). His son, John W. Schmidt, Jr. (1811-1858), followed his father in medicine. He became the first visiting surgeon at St. Vincent's hospital, was a founding member of the New York Academy of Medicine and had a flourishing practice on 12th Street in Manhattan. Another member of the Academy was Valentine Mott (1785-1865), one of the fathers of modern vascular surgery and a professor at Columbia University. He was a friend of the Schmidt family. Mott Schmidt's unusual first name derives from this famous name in the annals of American medicine.

Schmidt's father was a veteran of the United States Army. His draft records indicate that he was a salesman before enlisting at the age of 37, in 1875, serving for 5 years. It is said that he had artistic inclinations, but no occupation is listed for  him in the 1900 Census. The Schmidt family lived on a gentleman's income, and Mott attended public schools in Brooklyn with his brother (Girard b. 1891) and sister (Gladys b.1894). He grew up in a bourgeois environment, in a brownstone at 671 Park Place, near Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza. His family was one of many to flock to the boroughs surrounding crowded Manhattan during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Brooklyn's cheaper and more spacious houses and other suburban advantages caused the city to grow from half a million to 806,343 residents between 1880 and 1890 alone. As a boy, Schmidt saw a city blossom around him, filled with handsome townhouses on neat tree-lined streets, so it is no surprise to find that he decided on a career in architecture at a very early age. He boasted that from age 9 he knew that he was to become an architect.

From 1904 to 1906 he attended Pratt Institute of Technology on nearby Willoughby Avenue, graduating with a Certificate in Architecture at the age of only 17. Although Pratt Institute (founded in 1887) was then mainly a trade and industrial design school, Schmidt took an interest in the Beaux Arts method of architecture which was being taught at most of the leading architectural schools. Like other Beaux Arts followers, Schmidt went on a two-year Grand Tour of Europe after completing his studies, visiting the continent's great monuments and producing skillful travel sketches in soft pencil. He was a talented draftsman and renderer, as his early drawings confirm, and this technique served him well in his later work. A portrait of him as a young man by Albert Sterner (1922) shows a handsome, sensitive face with delicate features and penetrating eyes.

Unlike many academically trained architects of his time, Mott Schmidt was not interested in an extensive education and appren­ticeship, merely the most expedient path to an architectural career. After his Grand Tour he spent four years working in a New York architecture firm as an apprentice to learn the technical side of the profession. He refused to name the firm, stating only that it was an office known mainly for its business prowess, not for design. "Business has always been one of the most romantic things in the world to me;" he said in an interview with the New York Herald in 1921, "So I went into architecture, where art and business are linked." By 1912 he had learned what he needed to know and struck out on his own.

During his first years in practice he busied himself with remodeling townhouses in Brooklyn and Manhattan, small residential jobs, and some commercial work. Among his earliest projects to be exhibited at the Architectural League of New York in 1915 was a tiny decorating shop (Figure 1) for Miss Alice Swift on East 55th Street which contained a delicate curved stairway. He also designed two groups of townhouses on sites near his family's home. At 40 and 42 Monroe Place (Figure 2) on one of Brooklyn Heights' most elegant streets, Schmidt built two Georgian duplex townhouses for the family of a prominent banker. Using the unusual width of the sites, Schmidt designed each house to accommodate two large apartments - each with a separate door - stacked one above the other. The upper floor was accessed by a stair from one of the front doors. Though the facade composition is clearly the work of a novice architect, the houses are nicely matched in scale and texture to the brownstones along the rest of the street. The young designer had obviously studied both the Victorian houses of the immediate context and some examples of classical, Georgian rowhouses. In these early works Schmidt showed sensitivity to historical details and building types that would become the hallmark of his architecture.

Schmidt's incipient practice was slowed during the war years. He served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during 1917 and 1918, but did not see action in Europe. Instead he used his technical skills to supervise construction on military installations at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and at Hastings-On-Hudson, New York. He was apparently able to watch over his own architectural practice in Manhattan while in the service, completing a townhouse for Herbert J. Johnson on East 66th Street (Figure 3). Meanwhile, Schmidt finished his first important commission in 1917,the alteration of a 19th-century townhouse at 39 East 63rd Street for Grenville T. Emmet. Its publication two years later in the Architectural Record seems to have brought Schmidt professional recognition and attracted a major patron too.

Schmidt's client, Grenville T. Emmet, was a prominent attorney and a well-known member of New York's Social Register. Emmet's wife, Pauline, was a popular hostess, and it was she who saw Schmidt's published work and decided to hire him. Schmidt's charge from the Emmets, which he inherited after another architect was fired, was to create a trim, modern house out of an outdated brownstone, a common practice on the Upper East Side during those years. The original row of Neo-Grec houses, Nos. 37-49, were built in 1882-4 for William H. Browning, and designed by the firm of Thom & Wilson. Schmidt removed the elaborate ornament at the cornice, door and window surrounds and replaced it with simple, flat bands and abstract mouldings. The doorway and modillion cornice were adapted from Italian Renaissance models, but the effect, as in many Schmidt works, was very planar and crisp. The interiors were smart and urbane -- a conscious simplification which clients were demanding in repudiation of the tastes of the "Brown Decades." The Emmets lived in the house for only two years before moving to East 94th Street where Schmidt remodeled another house for them. In 1919 it was sold to George B. Post's son, an architect. It was a compliment that the son of one of New York's most suc­cessful architects should have chosen to live in a Schmidt house.

Schmidt's major projects on Sutton Place - the Morgan and Vanderbilt townhouses - were distinguished from earlier Georgian Revival houses of eclectic predecessors such as McKim, Mead & White and Delano & Aldrich by their extreme modesty and strict use of English and American precedents. Indeed, Schmidt's simple brick townhouses have often been mistaken for the original 19th-century rowhouses at Sutton Place. Unlike the lavish East Side houses of the prewar years, these buildings were meant to suggest the anonymous, plain-speaking qualities of early New York dwellings.

The corner Vanderbilt house (Figure 5), with its red brick facade modulated only by cornice and windows, is extremely restrained. So as not to interrupt the texture and monochrome quality of the facade, the pilasters and pediment of the front door are of brick. This doorway recalls the frugality of early Virginia houses and churches, which were very sparing in their use of classical ornament; its direct precedent was a doorway from King's Bench Walk, Temple, in London. Using salvage brick left over from the previous rowhouse on the site (that of Effingham Sutton, c. 1875), the house appeared well established even when it was brand new. Stylistically, these houses appealed to their clients on two fronts: authentic-looking American Colonial reminded them of their long standing tenure in this country, and the English touches harkened back to even deeper roots. The Vanderbilt house, nestled against the East River, turns its face toward the flank elevation on 57th Street. In so doing it makes a strong corner for the entire ensemble of townhouses on the block -- a gesture Schmidt could plan since he was the architect for most of its houses.

The Morgan House next door at No. 3 (Figure 6) was inspired by Philadelphia's 1765 Samuel Powel house (Figure 7), and by the Benjamin Wister Morris house nearby on South 8th Street. Schmidt's transformations of the model are subtle but crucial. He increased its height by adding another floor and its width by add­ing a bay. His detail is also more elaborate, with fluting, a fretwork frieze, and a sensuous capital added to the front door. However, the facade is flatter and more abstract than that of the Powel house. The grid formed by the limestone lintels, the voids of windows and doorways, and the horizontal string courses create an insistent framework which reduces the significance of individual detail. The river facade of the house was a bit more lively, using shutters at all three floors and employing a swan's neck pediment over the doorway. According to one critic at the time, "No more valuable or successful examples of the consistent and intelligent use of English architectural precedent in the designing of American houses are to be found than these two houses on Sutton Place."

Schmidt's most original stroke in the design of these two houses is the spatial organization. The circulation is deliberately calculated to mark and enhance the social ritual of entering the building on formal occasions or for the daily business of receiving guests. As in most of the city's twentieth-century townhouses, circulation and services are located at the center of the plan. Schmidt carefully defines the transition from room to room to establish gradations of private space. On the ground floor the Morgan house is divided into a slot of servants' rooms, kitchen and other secondary spaces (with their own entry off the street), and a parallel series of halls and vestibules leading to the dining room, outdoor terrace and garden beyond. Each large room, even the boudoir, has its own distinctly shaped vestibule intended as a caesura in the procession from one room to the next. For instance, a niche turns the visitor from the stairhall toward the gracious rectangular stair. On the second floor a hall leads into either a reception room or the large drawing room which stretches across the entire street front. For the less formal visitor who wishes to proceed directly into the private zone upstairs, there is another grand staircase, this one oval, linking only the second and third floors. Employing two stairs, laterally juxtaposed, was a favorite Schmidt touch, one that he may have borrowed from formal townhouses of the previous century. There is a sense of both stateliness and economy in the circulation of these houses, making them function well for both large formal gatherings and everyday life.

New York City had a flourishing architectural culture during Schmidt's second decade in practice. The Armistice had ushered in a new wave of building and society activity in New York, led by, among others, the colorful actress, decorator and tastemaker Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950). DeWolfe's career as a decorator began with the interiors for New York's Colony Club in 1905. Her use of chintz, fresh light colors, English antiques and garden trellises indoors revolutionized the decorative arts of her day; she virtually created the profession of interior design in the United States. She and her powerful women friends at the Colony Club established a network of influential tastemakers in the arts. These included Elizabeth Marbury, the theatrical and literary agent, Anne Tracy Morgan, the youngest daughter of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, and Anne Vanderbilt, second wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, Jr. Mott Schmidt's career is inextricably linked with this set of New York women. Pauline Emmet was a member of the Colony Club, and undoubtedly brought his name to the attention of de Wolfe. Upon her return from Europe in 1919, de Wolfe and Schmidt collaborated in the creation of what was to become one of the city's most prestigious addresses: Sutton Place (Figure 4) -- the platform upon which Schmidt would build his career.

Following the war, Elizabeth Marbury decided to leave the house which she and Elsie de Wolfe had established for themselves in the late 1890s on Irving Place and 17th Street. She discovered a row of 19th-century brownstone townhouses on an isolated block of what was then known as Avenue A, between 57th and 58th Streets, overlooking the East River. The district was mainly industrial, occupied by breweries, furniture manufacturers, and cigar makers. Marbury decided to remodel one of the houses, at No. 13, using de Wolfe as her decorator. However, she made an unusual choice of architect -- the little-known Mott Schmidt, who prepared drawings for the minor alteration work. In a bold piece of "urban pioneering" she then persuaded several of her friends to buy other parcels along the block. Anne Vanderbilt, who had just concluded the settling of her husband's estate, sold the grand family house on Fifth Avenue and wanted a smaller place. Anne Morgan had been liv­ing with her mother, and wished like Marbury to establish an independent home which could serve her many philanthropic and social activities. Morgan and Vanderbilt bought and cleared the two lots at the 57th Street corner. Again, Mott Schmidt joined with de Wolfe in their design and decoration, but this time the young architect was given a real chance to demonstrate his talent and ideas.

The understated elegance of the Sutton Place houses, with picturesque private gardens on the river front and their spectacular views, recalls somewhat the Cheyne Walk gardens and houses of Chelsea Embankment on the Thames River in London -- just the kind of reference Schmidt's clients wanted. Marbury had helped to foster a wave of Anglophilia in New York through her sponsorship of the English-style P.G. Wodehouse/Guy Bolton/Jerome Kernmusicals at the Princess Theatre in 1919. Before long, Vanderbilt, Marbury and Morgan were joined by Mrs. Stephen Olin (Anne Vanderbilt's sister), Mrs. Lorillard Cammann, Mrs. Francis B. Griswold, and Mrs. Chauncey Olcott (wife of a famous musical hall actor and singer) as residents of the new enclave. Such a mass migration created quite a stir in New York society circles, causing Ralph Waldo Emerson Joyce to quip in the pages of Gossip: "this demonstration of ultra prominent society people banding in one locality (a most unfashionable district of town, at that) is creating an avalan­che of controversy of a racy variety." However titillating, such rumors only hastened the renown of the neighborhood -- within two years the new "Sutton Place" enclave achieved a pedigree, as did young Mott Schmidt, among members of New York's social elite.

At the same time Schmidt also won the affection of a decorator in the deWolfe office, Elena Bachman, further strengthening his ties to the women's network. The daughter of a Swiss businessman, Miss Bachman was raised in Colombia. Her cosmopolitan back­ground complemented Schmidt's New York parochialism and helped him cultivate new clients. They were married in June 1922. As Elena Schmidt she became a success in her own right, designing the decor and furnishings for Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room in 1934, among other interiors.

For Anne Morgan, who devoted much of her time to women's causes and took in callers on a daily basis, the degrees of privacy provided by Schmidt's plan were welcome. For Vanderbilt, a busy hostess in her own right and widow of one of the richest men in America, the decor of the rooms was crucial in establishing the taste and distinction which were expected of her.

The interiors of the Morgan and Vanderbilt houses reflect the clients' desire for city houses which were both comfortable to live in and elegant places in which to entertain. Their character was delicate, even feminine, in keeping with Elsie de Wolfe's concept that "the American home is always the woman's home ... men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there". The Vanderbilt house was planned around Anne Vanderbilt's collection of antique furniture and a few treasured objects, such as the deal paneling from an old English room in the "little Georgian parlor;" and a set of Dutch decorative paintings which established the color scheme of the dining room. The muralist Allyn Cox painted the walls of the circular stairway specifically to harmonize with the two Chinoiserie pagodas which were originally part of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (Figure 8). American though the architecture is, the interiors of both houses evoke a distinctly English feeling, especially the imported Georgian panelling used in Miss Morgan's office (Figure 9).

Schmidt learned important lessons on the planning and decoration of houses from Elsie de Wolfe, and through her found his own style. The two designers balanced each other as artists -- the architect provided a disciplined handling of space, proportion and a sense of historical accuracy, the decorator injected a sense of flair, surprise and wit. The Sutton Place townhouses demonstrated that Schmidt was more than just a capable practitioner from Brooklyn. He was an architect with a strong eye, a sense of refinement, and a clear understanding of what constituted elegant living. With this commission, he earned a place among the distinguished group of New York society architects who were designing houses for the Jazz Age. This initial success led to more residential work, including country houses and large-scale apartment blocks.