A FaceBook friend just posted an image of J. Lyman Silsbee’s 1906 building for the Gary Land Company, in Gary, Indiana. I invoked Silsbee’s name here long, long ago as someone who had designed one of his signature Shingle Style houses in Agincourt for the Tennant family. And who also influenced the choice of career for young Anson Tennant, who went on to design the Agincourt Public Library. I hadn’t thought about Silsbee’s non-Shingle Style work until Gregory Jenkins, AIA, posted this image from a Silsbee focused website:

What struck me immediately was the configuration: 1) two commercial fronts on the building’s short side, facing what is presumably a major thoroughfaire, are prime rental; 2) a public entrance to what is presumably a lobby giving access to office suites on the second floor is located half way along the “side” elevation; and 3) tertiary rental space is situated at the far end of the long elevation, again presumably of lesser rental value. I only point this out because the Anson Tennant design for the 1915 APL has exactly the same organization. Notice how Tennant’s plan (i.e., mine) coincides:

Not certain whether to feel validated, vindicated, or embarrassed.

And then I remembered a building here in Fargo, one that I walk past several times a week, which was one of the first rebuilt after the Great Fargo Fire of 1894: the I.O.O.F. building, better know today as the Hotel Donaldson. The HoDo was designed by Minneapolis architects Orff & Joralemon. But the more likely culprit was a the person whose name appears on the rendering: Albert Levering.

Levering is a curious character in regional architectural history, someone who was for a brief period thought to have been merely the pseudonym for another better-known architect-designer Harvey Ellis. [That’s a story in an of itself and deserves to be told here another time.] What few people know is that the Neo-Classical design that was constructed wasn’t the only proposal; the client had a choice of two and, frankly, I wish they’d chosen the other. You decide:

I.O.O.F. Building, Fargo, ND (scheme A) / Orff & Joralemon (Albert Levering) / 1894

I.O.O.F. Building, Fargo, ND (scheme B) / Orff & Joralemon (Albert Levering) / 1894

So you see what I mean. Fargo’s I.O.O.F. is, like the Silsbee design in Gary, IN of twelve years later, a two-story 50-by-140 box with exactly the same composition, which, I submit, is a very typical configuration for a mixed use building on a prominent street corner. The bottom line for me is that Anson Tennant’s scheme for the APL of 1914-1915 may have been unorthodox for a Carnegie-era library, but it was old hat for the hybrid type it represents.