Many Mansions

Stretched eastward from Manhattan in the shape of a candle-flame, lies Long Island. Here, in a country made for pleasure, live socially-minded persons who dart to their diversions along concealed and crooked trails, inserted through the woods or strewn upon the shore. Their houses, lying between hills or built above bright beaches, are walled with forests and reticent behind curling drives. Who builds them and makes them beautiful?

There occurred in Manhattan last week a party which partially answered both questions. The party was given to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their partnership, by the firm of Delano and Aldrich, architects, to their clients. Since Delano and Aldrich are architects who have made the kind of houses which rich people like to live in, their clients came to the party gratefully and bearing gifts; Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow sent by airplane from Mexico two silver bowls.

Other clients, who desired to make ambitious and tangible presents, were dissuaded by the architects who suggested a more practical scheme. In pursuance of this scheme Mrs. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, poet and sister to the late Theodore Roosevelt, presented "a sum of money [contributed by the guests at the party] to the American Institute of Architects to establish a fund to enable French students of architecture to visit the United States to study the work done here, which will help to repay in a small way the generosity of the French Government to the many American students who have received their education, free of charge, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris."

Good architects, like good doctors, resent publicity. There is nothing pretentious about the firm of Delano and Aldrich. The building in which they work, designing perhaps 30 mansions every year, as well as office buildings, schools and churches, is an old stable neatly rebuilt into studios and little rooms. At its front are some of the little round windows which, erroneously enough, have come to be regarded as identification discs upon the works of Delano and Aldrich.

Actually, there is no way in which an architect who designs country houses can sign his work with his style. Every patron has some notion of his own, every site is different. Yet Delano and Aldrich, now that they are to their branch of the profession what Cram and Ferguson or McKim, Mead and White are to theirs, are generally allowed a fairly free hand in their designs. They prefer to arrange, not the house alone, but the grounds and gardens which go with it.

William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich have always been bracketed together. They went to the Beaux Arts together in Paris in 1896; both started to work with Carrere and Hastings ; their partnership has been free from squabbles and disagreements.

When the Prince of Wales came to Long Island he stayed at J. A. Burden's house, which Delano and Aldrich built; they were consultant architects when the roof of the White House needed fixing. The Colony Club in Manhattan is some of their work, as is the institution where girls prepare for membership, Miss Chapin's School which has just opened; likewise St. Bernard's School, and the Knickerbocker Club, where good St. Bernard boys will go if they are lucky. Even Otto Kahn, when he decreed his stately pleasure dome at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I., called upon Delano and Aldrich; they built it for him.