Teamwork at McKim, Mead & White

In the spring of 1892, Egerton Swartwout arrived in New York looking for a job. He had not learned much about architecture as a student at Yale University, but he felt a calling to enter the profession after working as a draftsman during his summer vacations. He was especially eager to join the most famous architectural office in the city. Holding on to a letter of introduction to Stanford White, he steeled himself before calling on the architect. Arriving in the city early in the morning, he later recalled, he was “nervous as the devil” and “walked around Madison Square for an hour or so” before he made his way to a brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twentieth Street. After struggling to locate the entrance to the office, he found it on the side street and saw “on the door the magical words McKim, Mead & White.”¹

Swartwout had never set foot in a big New York office and was surprised by what he saw. Expecting to find smartly dressed architects quietly conjuring the spirit of antiquity, he encountered a scene of frenetic activity. Taking an elevator to the top floor, he met the receptionist, who skeptically examined his letter, fearing that he was another salesman. Crowding around him were young draftsmen in shirtsleeves arguing with contractors as others ran through the hall. The receptionist passed his letter to one of these draftsmen, and Swartwout was led to an adjoining room to wait. Half an hour later, the office manager told him that White was busy and he should come back another day.

He returned a few days later and was left to languish again in the reception room. Suddenly, Swartwout saw a “terrifying figure” burst through saloon-style doors. Although he did not actually know what White looked like, he knew this was the architect: “Well over six feet, big boned . . . with very long legs, rather like a bull frog I thought.” White exclaimed, “Come with me!” and pulled the young man by the arm into the drafting room, where he told him to take a seat next to Richard “Dicky” Hunter, one of the senior draftsmen. After Hunter gave him some tracing work to do, let him borrow his drafting tools, and told him to light a pipe if he wished, Swartwout realized he was hired. “That was the last and only time I was ever spoken to by Stanford White in the ten years I was in the office,” he later recalled.²

Swartwout was one of nearly seven hundred individuals employed at McKim, Mead & White between its founding in 1879 and the end of World War I. Working with the three original partners and their successors, they produced nearly a thousand commissions. At a time when an office with ten employees was considered large, the firm’s huge portfolio and payroll were shocking. What was even more impressive was that much of its work was of exceptionally fine quality. Projects like the Villard Houses, the Judson Memorial Church, Madison Square Garden, the Century Club, Columbia University, the Bowery Savings Bank, Pennsylvania Station, and the Manhattan Municipal Building did not roll off an assembly line—rather, they were the products of intensive study and creative effort. The polished quality of the firm’s work, the range of buildings it handled, and the volume of projects it executed all earned McKim, Mead & White a leading place in the profession.³

Though the public and some of the firm’s clients believed that the partners personally designed all this work, it was well understood within professional circles that they depended on their office staff to generate ideas, develop projects, and maintain the high quality of the firm’s output. Even in the early days of the firm, architectural critics emphasized that its work was the product of a team effort. In 1892, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer argued that the work of McKim, Mead & White “should be publicly credited to that firm, to that office,” for the partners relied on “many unnamed subordinates” who were “responsible in undertakings which redound only to the honor of their chiefs.”⁴ Champions of the firm developed this theme further, arguing that the genius of the firm lay in its ability to mobilize talent. In the estimation of the British architect Charles H. Reilly, the firm’s working methods married well with its interest in Roman, Renaissance, and American colonial architecture, for these buildings conjured up an age rather than the work of any single designer. As he noted, the “sublime quality which makes buildings akin to the permanent works of nature . . . is one which is more likely to arise in work to which no definite name and no definite personality can be attached.”⁵

While old-fashioned notions of individual authorship were unsuited to describing such a practice, the idea that the firm’s work was the product of an anonymous team effort also crumbled at closer inspection. The first biographical studies of the partners published in the early twentieth century portrayed them as the primary creative forces in the firm but also emphasized their role as mentors to their staff and shone a spotlight on important individuals in the office.⁶ In the wake of World War II, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, William H. Jordy, and others went one step further and argued that senior draftsmen could be credited with some projects.⁷ More recently, Leland M. Roth, Richard Guy Wilson, and Mosette Broderick have all published major monographic studies that provide essential information about the growth of the practice, how the office was organized, and its collaborative working methods.⁸

Using the records of the firm and the memoirs of employees, this article offers a more focused look at how the office operated, whom it employed, and what it was like to work there. McKim, Mead & White was organized as a traditional partnership, and the partners determined the direction of the practice, generated commissions, and were involved in preliminary design work. But to understand how their sketches were developed into fully realized projects, it is necessary to look closely at the day-to-day life of the office. By adopting a common architectural vocabulary based on historical precedent, the partners, the senior designers, and the rest of the workforce could collaborate fluidly at every stage of design. Whether they worked as designers, draftsmen, or construction specialists, staff members played critical roles in every phase of production and were largely responsible for the finished output. Having established a culture of teamwork in the office, the firm was able to channel the creative labor of an enormous number of talented individuals who proved essential to its success.

By examining the culture of work at McKim, Mead & White, this article also considers how the large firm created a new kind of environment where people with different goals, skills, and backgrounds worked together. While the office offered excellent opportunities to aspiring architects and was recognized for its esprit de corps, it was a punishing place to work as well. The frantic pace of work bred camaraderie between employees who spent long days together in the drafting room, but the pressures of the office also created conflicts over authority, wages, and working conditions. Over the course of nearly half a century, the firm nevertheless proved successful in attracting talented young people who were willing to throw themselves into the fire, work long hours, and accept meager pay for their efforts.

Founded in New York City in 1879, McKim, Mead & White quickly became one of the nation’s leading architectural firms, specializing in lavish civic, residential, and commercial buildings for an upper-class clientele. In its early years, Charles F. McKim, William R. Mead, and Stanford White collaborated on many of the firm’s projects and established its artistic mission. The firm was at the forefront of a movement—variously described by historians as “creative eclecticism,” “academic eclecticism,” and “scientific eclecticism”—to rejuvenate American architecture through a systematic study of the past.⁹ The idea of mining architectural history for inspiration was not new, but the firm expanded the range of sources it drew upon and went to great lengths to re-create the spirit of historic building traditions. The firm was also known for its freewheeling use of precedent. Draftsmen in the office cultivated an encyclopedic knowledge of styles, motifs, and details, so that they could modify, combine, and adapt them as they wished. Clients flocked to a firm that was celebrated for creating architecture that was monumental and sophisticated, and that elevated the standards of construction.

The three founding partners organized the firm like most architectural practices at the time, as a traditional business partnership that they jointly owned, operated, and managed (Figure 1). Under the terms of their partnership, they agreed to credit all work to the firm, split profits according to a formula revised each year, and conduct all of their business through the office. In addition, the partners were responsible for making the key decisions that shaped the direction of the practice: generating commissions, hiring the workforce, and organizing production. Drawing substantial monthly salaries, they split the annual profits that made each of them rich.¹⁰ In many respects, the culture of McKim, Mead & White was similar to that of a Wall Street investment bank or a white-shoe law firm; it remained closely associated with the reputations of the partners even as the practice grew in size and depended increasingly on associates, assistants, and staff.¹¹

From the beginning the partners established a collaborative style of practice in which they worked with a revolving cast of young architects to generate ideas, make drawings, and execute projects. Modeling their firm on a studio in which the partners served as leaders of a team, they ensured that their office kept its artistic edge and could handle a growing volume of work (Figure 2). Inspired by the example of the ateliers of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris as well as the home studio of H. H. Richardson in Brookline, Massachusetts, where McKim and White had worked in the 1870s, they set up their architectural workshop in the dynamic commercial environment of Manhattan. Throughout the firm’s existence, the office was physically located in the business district and close to its clients. Originally located on the fifth floor of 57 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, the firm shifted uptown following the trail of commerce. In the spring of 1891, it moved to the top floor of a brownstone at 1 West Twentieth Street owned by the decorative arts firm of Herter Brothers. In 1894, seeking more modern accommodations, the firm moved again, to 160 Fifth Avenue. In the spring of 1913, it moved into 101 Park Avenue, the so-called Architects’ Building, erected as part of the new Grand Central Terminal zone, where it remained until the Great Depression.

The basic working methods of the firm remained remarkably consistent over the course of nearly half a century. Serving as the creative directors, the original partners and their successors made sketches to establish the direction of projects, suggested precedents for study, and provided guidance as needed (Figure 3). Yet the partners also depended heavily on the office workforce to develop, coordinate, and supervise the construction of projects. To some observers, the true source of the partners’ achievement lay in their ability to harness this talent. As one journalist wrote of McKim in 1909, “The same knowledge and diplomacy and force which enabled him to direct a client’s mind went to organizing this group [of ambitious young assistants] into a tremendous force, an artistic machine which might serve as a model for a ‘captain of industry.’”¹²

By the late 1880s the firm had honed a collaborative approach to design that began in the earliest stages. For the largest, most complex, and most prestigious commissions—such as the Boston Public Library, Columbia University, and Pennsylvania Station—the partners held charettes that mobilized much of the office in furious bursts of activity. “There was a council of war, or rather a council of architecture, and often they are the same,” recalled Thomas A. Fox, a draftsman who worked on the Boston Public Library.¹³ For more modest projects, such as an elite New York social club, one of the partners worked with a smaller group of draftsmen to develop a scheme. Though the partners considered many of the firm’s residential projects important depending on the stature of the client, they evidently gave less important commissions directly to their staff, instructing them to “work something up.”¹⁴ During a visit to Kansas City in the early fall of 1887, for example, Mead met some wealthy figures in the meatpacking industry who wanted fancy houses but did not know much about architecture. “If we can only work it so that some of the young fellows in the office can earn us some money without too much bother to ourselves it would be a great scheme,” he enthused to White.¹⁵

The firm’s library played an important role in the intellectual life of the office, and it was put to intensive use in the initial stages of design work. Though the partners and many of their staff had surveyed works of historic American and European architecture, they drew much of their inspiration from the library’s collection, which they consulted frequently. Of particular value were the large folios of carefully measured drawings and large-scale photographs, which they examined in their search for precedents appropriate to the projects at hand. “They are Roman when they want to express power, as in their great railway stations,” noted Charles H. Reilly, “Greek when they want to express refinement, as in their art galleries and museums, Italian or Georgian when they want to express the domestic comforts or virtues.”¹⁶ While many of their buildings were based on single precedents, these were typically combined with other models, cleverly manipulated, or paired with different details, creating in effect an esoteric language that was understood only by the initiated. Given the importance of books to the firm’s design process, Reilly suggested that they “centered their office round a library.”¹⁷

While the partners developed close relationships with particular designers who remained with the firm for long stretches, project teams were assembled in a hurry. In an 1889 letter to White while he was in Europe, Mead updated his partner on the Madison Square Garden project and gave him an accounting of the staff assembled for the job. “I have got a bully of men for you once you return,” Mead beamed. Richard Hunter, William Kendall, and Hobart Weekes, he reported, “are working on the elevations.” “[Teunis] Van der Bent is running the job,” he added, “and he is a treasure, you don’t half know how good he is on plans. He has under him [Frank] Parker whom you know, [Charles E.] Willoughby a draughtsman who has been six years with the Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Co., and a bully draughtsman, [John Galen] Howard.”¹⁸

If teamwork helped to inspire the creation of distinctive architectural designs, the partners also established a system of production for realizing those designs to their exacting standards. By common consent the partners divided commissions among themselves and then, for each project, assembled a group of senior draftsmen, junior draftsmen, and superintendents to develop it and see it through to completion.¹⁹ Projects were thus produced in a linear fashion, moving from the first sketches made by the partners to the working drawings made by senior draftsmen and finally to the construction drawings produced by junior draftsmen. The high quality of the firm’s built work was a product of the careful development of its designs at progressively larger scales at each stage of production. The key challenge for the draftsmen, according to Swartwout, was translating, enlarging, and refining the ideas contained in the sketches without making “caricatures” of them.²⁰ Even when the partners prowled around the office, one employee later recalled, they did not “interfere during the intermediate steps of the work.”²¹ In a discussion of how the office developed a “tradition” of making full-size details, Swartwout made a similar observation, noting that “[McKim] relied to a great extent on that office tradition and did not often bother to look over the full sizes.”²²

By the early 1890s, the firm employed individuals in three broad classes of work corresponding to the creative, technical, and administrative sides of the practice.²³ The most important members in the office were the senior draftsmen, who served as the partners’ assistants and worked as job captains. Many of the firm’s best-known employees were senior draftsmen, including Joseph M. Wells, John Merven Carrère, Cass Gilbert, Henry Bacon, William M. Kendall, Edward L. Tilton, Edward York, Philip Sawyer, and Arthur Loomis Harmon. They worked closely with the partners to translate the partners’ sketches into working drawings, took charge of the development of elevations, plans, and details, and supervised the making of construction drawings. In the rush of production, senior draftsmen often enjoyed considerable freedom to rework the partners’ sketches. During the design of the University Club in 1898, for example, McKim instructed Hobart Weekes and Philip Sawyer to make it look like the Greek revival Astor House on Broadway. However, as Swartwout recalled, in their enthusiasm they transformed it into “a Florentine palace” (Figure 4).²⁴

Given their close working relationship with the partners, senior draftsmen felt they were equal participants in a creative enterprise. Harold Van Buren Magonigle, a talented designer, draftsman, and watercolorist who worked in the office from 1888 to 1891, described the firm as “an association of artists working in architecture as our principal medium.”²⁵ His colleague Swartwout agreed, and emphasized the senior draftsmen’s role in production. “The draftsmen who had charge of important work were not mere machines,” he wrote, “they had a surprising amount of responsibility thrust on them, and the high quality of the work done by the firm was a reflection of the seriousness with which they accepted this responsibility.”²⁶ Although senior draftsmen worked primarily with pencil, ink, and watercolor, they also oversaw the making of models by plaster artisans (Figure 5).

While some senior draftsmen worked on every aspect of design, others were specialists. The firm was particularly well known for employing gifted renderers who made its polished presentation drawings, including Francis V. L. Hoppin, Jules T. Crow, and Thomas E. King (Figure 6).²⁷ Hoppin, a coworker sarcastically observed, was talented at making “big perspectives, colored, blue sky and trees where there aren’t any, and flying clouds . . . a real snappy piece of work.”²⁸ McKim, Mead & White also hired specialists who advanced its particular brand of eclecticism. For many years, for example, the German architect Philip Merz was in charge of designing the firm’s ornament and ensuring that its detailing remained consistent. During his time in the office from 1897 to 1908, the firm paid for Merz to make research trips to Europe.²⁹ The firm’s lettering work, meanwhile, which involved the making of inscriptions in stone, was handled by a series of draftsmen, including Albert R. Ross, August Reuling Jr., and John O. Vegezzi (Figure 7).³⁰ Ross, one employee recalled, “could draw an ordinary office stool and make it look as if Ictinus might have sat on it, but when it was built it was just a good office stool.”³¹ Entering the firm in 1910, Harold Bush-Brown was amazed to meet a man who “spent all his time designing the handsome Roman lettering that played such an important part on all the major works of the firm.”³²

Senior draftsmen were also responsible for supervising the work of the much larger number of junior draftsmen, who made construction drawings, and tracers, who made copies of all the drawings for contractors. Just as the partners oversaw the senior draftsmen, the senior draftsmen supervised these younger employees in turn, often working side by side with them at long drafting tables (Figure 8). In some cases, senior draftsmen assigned work to their junior associates simply as a trial by fire. “I knew nothing whatever of Gothic but I was doing the best I could,” recalled Swartwout about his work on a New York church a year after he entered the office. “I got along well enough,” he added, “but the pierced balustrade was beyond me, and even Boze [Claude F. Bozeman] said it had no character and he tried to correct it and made it worse.”³³ Senior draftsmen treated junior draftsmen as their protégés, but they often complained of having to oversee the work of the tracers, who made three copies of each drawing on linen paper in India ink. Each drawing had to be dated and signed by both the draftsman and the tracer, a requirement that reinforced the draftsmen’s sense of responsibility.

Design and drafting talent formed the bulk of McKim, Mead & White’s workforce, but the firm employed a considerable number of specialists in construction, including specification writers, construction superintendents, and even a man who handled the firm’s permit work. Despite the enormous volume of work it handled, the firm used general contractors only for its biggest projects, preferring to take divided contracts in the traditional way; this meant that the firm was responsible for supervising upward of thirty separate contracts for every commission. The specification writers the firm employed, including William H. Hoffman, Washington Hull, and Louis R. Holske, thus needed an encyclopedic knowledge of building materials and methods.³⁴ The firm’s first full-time specification writer, the Scottish architect William H. Hoffman, who worked at the firm from 1883 to 1903, passionately shared the firm’s interest in eclecticism. He was noted for filling his specifications with classical architectural nomenclature that confused contractors and “caused trouble often.”³⁵

Some of the highest-paid members of the office were the construction superintendents, and the firm went to considerable lengths to keep these men on the staff. Among the longest-serving superintendents were Gustave E. Wolters, Silas B. Brower, William H. Hornum, Daniel T. Webster, Leland S. Sudlow, and Teunis J. Van Der Bent, who later became a partner; all of them were responsible for making sure that builders, contractors, and foremen followed the firm’s drawings and specifications. Superintendents worked in the field and sent the office regular reports, often accompanied by photographs (Figure 9). The volume of construction in the office was so great that the firm employed George F. Spelman for thirty years as a building permit specialist. His sole job was to file all the necessary drawings, specifications, and related documents with the New York Department of Buildings and to work with its inspectors to iron out any problems that arose in connection with the firm’s jobs.³⁶

As the number of projects swelled, the practice also required the services of specialized clerical workers to manage its accounts and paperwork. Contrary to popular belief, William R. Mead did not serve as the “business manager” of the firm, and in fact the office employed an individual with that exact title. From 1882 to 1919, George F. Martin—a “most disagreeable person,” according to Swartwout—was employed as the business and office manager.³⁷ Over the course of his long tenure, Martin kept the books, managed the payroll, and supervised the stenographers, typists, and clerks. At the bottom of the office hierarchy were the “office boys,” a group of junior male clerks who carried out menial tasks. One of these was Charles “Charlie” Spelman, who worked for the firm from 1891 to 1918. He arrived at the office early each morning to prepare the drafting boards, cut drawing paper, and clean the floors. He also ran the blueprinting machine on the roof, a duty that left his hands chapped and dyed with ink. Other office boys ran errands for the firm and served in the roles of receptionist and timekeeper.

While clients and the public took no special interest in the inner workings of the office, critics understood that the firm’s built work reflected its production methods. Writing in the early 1900s, Henry W. Desmond and Herbert Croly drew attention to the remarkable consistency of the firm’s output. “It is the consistency of purpose, and point of view, almost of a style, but not a personality,” they explained. “It should be added that this consistency of purpose and point of view has been realized, not only through the self-subordination of the individual members of the firm, but in the work which they have succeeded in making their assistants achieve.”³⁸ Responding to curiosity about how the firm produced so much, several articles described the organization of the office. “Since so great a volume of work must have been the product of many minds and the handiwork of many,” argued D. Everett Waid, “the genius and methods of work which could exercise such a unifying influence are naturally of interest to the profession.”³⁹

The firm’s embrace of eclecticism was part of a larger movement to mine the past for inspiration, but it also played a key role in production. By using a historic architectural vocabulary as the foundation of its work, the office developed a common language that the partners, draftsmen, and specialists could all use in a fluid fashion. Basing its work on historical precedent also enabled the firm to take advantage of the growing number of university-trained architects who left school with a decent knowledge of history and often good drafting skills as well. As Charles F. McKim declared in the 1890s, “In architecture the ranks are filling up and the demand is for educated men, who are bound to make their way in advance of those less equipped.”⁴⁰ To a remarkable degree the firm was composed of such “educated men.” Half of the people on the firm’s payroll entered the office with formal training of some kind—from elite architecture programs, public universities, or vocational schools. These relatively privileged employees worked side by side with others who entered the office as apprentices or who began their careers at the bottom of the ladder as office boys (Figure 10).

Only a few employees attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but the partners prioritized hiring architects with formal university educations from programs that were modeled on its pedagogy. The partners particularly valued graduates of MIT, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. Graduates of these five schools constituted a quarter of the firm’s payroll and often became senior draftsmen if they stayed long enough.⁴¹ Some of the firm’s senior designers thus entered the office with training in architectural design, theory, and history and with an ability to translate sketches into designs. Some of the firm’s senior draftsmen had also traveled abroad to study and measure ancient buildings. Joseph Herendeen Clark, for example, studied at Columbia University and took a summer trip to Rome, where he measured triumphal arches, before starting work at the office in 1910, when he was put immediately to work on the Manhattan Municipal Building (Figure 11). In short, the firm built a pipeline from elite schools that provided young architects with the opportunity to dive directly into important work.⁴²

Most of these educated employees were American-born, but the firm employed a substantial number of immigrants who entered the office with formal training of some kind and often with professional experience as well. Some were architects who came to New York specifically to work at the firm, while others found their way to the office after their families immigrated to America. The majority were English, Scottish, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Italian, but at least a dozen nationalities were represented in the office. Prominent German employees included Paul Gmelin, Louis Kamper, Robert A. Raetze, Gustave E. Wolters, and Philip Merz. Scandinavians who worked in the office included the Swede Ernst Osterstrom, the Norwegian Thorsten E. Billquist, and the Dane Carl Otto Olrik, all three of whom had formal architectural education. The firm’s Italian employees included Cesare C. Maldura, Carlo A. Leonardi, Louis Orlandini, Anthony Vendrasco, and John O. Vegezzi, all of whom found their knowledge of Italy in high demand. Maldura, who was employed at the firm from 1888 to 1898, was an architect from Rome who had worked as an archeologist.⁴³ Most foreign-born employees were from Europe, but the firm employed several Issei Japanese.⁴⁴ Jo Tominaga, born in Osaka, worked at the firm from 1915 to 1918 after graduating from the University of Oregon (Figure 12).

While the firm prided itself on its formally trained workforce, half of the office started working for the firm with little more than a public school education. Entering the office as junior draftsmen, tracers, or office boys, many of these young men were from New York’s ethnic working-class communities. To get ahead in the office, they supplemented their on-the-job training with night classes in drafting at the Cooper Union, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, and the YMCA.⁴⁵ August Reuling Jr., for example, who worked at the firm from 1902 until his death in 1961, took classes at the Cooper Union and became a specialist in lettering for the office, doing the lettering of the General Post Office in 1913.⁴⁶ A notable number of these ambitious working-class youths ended up as important construction specialists. Daniel T. Webster, born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, entered the firm in 1894 at the age of seventeen and worked as tracer, draftsman, and assistant superintendent before his promotion to general superintendent, in which position he supervised the construction of Pennsylvania Station (see Figure 9). Frederick J. Adams, a graduate of St. George’s Evening Trade School, was known as White’s “right-hand man” on the building site. George F. Spelman, the firm’s permit specialist, was born into an Irish family of masons on the East Side. While these construction specialists were not involved directly in design, many of them made higher salaries than the senior draftsmen. Commanding great respect in the office and throughout the building industry, they ensured that the firm’s work was built as designed.⁴⁷

From one perspective, the firm was remarkably cosmopolitan—native-born Americans worked side by side with immigrants at every level of the office. The firm was also socially diverse. The drafting room was filled with the sons of bankers, lawyers, and ministers as well as the sons of clerks, masons, and cart drivers. Although it seems that many employees were Anglo-American Protestants, the staff included Irish, German, and Italian Catholics and German and Eastern European Jews. Yet the firm’s ethnic diversity did not fully reflect the city’s population. The sole Black employee, Rufus Irving Charlton, began working in the firm in 1891 at the age of fifteen as one of the office boys. He initially worked as the receptionist, and then as a timekeeper, slowly working his way up as a tracer, before securing a position as a draftsman after World War I. Charlton worked in the firm for more than forty years—making him one the longest-serving employees in McKim, Mead & White’s history.⁴⁸

The firm was also almost exclusively male. Out of 667 employees who worked in the office from 1879 through 1918, only 4 were women. As a matter of policy, the partners did not employ women in creative, technical, or supervisory positions. In 1903, when Christina Darrow, a graduate of Pratt Institute, applied for a position, Mead informed White that “we don’t employ lady draughtsmen!”⁴⁹ The few women employed in the office were clerical workers, and they rarely stayed for long. The first female employee, Mrs. Arthur Boylston Nichols, was hired in 1887 and left five years later. A. M. De Hart worked in the office for only a few months in 1891, while Cleora E. Swift stayed for two years. The first long-standing female employee, Lillie E. Walsh, was hired in 1916 and did not leave the firm until 1942. The small number of female workers suggests that the firm did not participate in the “feminization” of clerical labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵⁰

In addition to revealing a great deal about the composition of the firm’s workforce, the payroll records document the explosive growth of the firm over time (Figure 13). McKim, Mead & White naturally started off with a modest payroll, with just six employees during its first year in existence. Five years later, it had sixteen employees, by 1887 more than thirty, and by the early 1890s more than sixty individuals were on the payroll. The size of the workforce fluctuated based on the volume of projects in the office, but in the early 1900s the firm regularly employed more than one hundred people. Without comparable records from other architectural offices, it is impossible to say whether it was the largest firm in the country, but it was likely the largest in New York. By comparison, George B. Post’s large office employed half as many people during the same period. Seeking to explain the growth of McKim, Mead & White, some historians have suggested that it was equivalent to the big businesses that emerged in the railroad industry and other industrial sectors at this time, but such comparisons are misleading. The firm was huge compared to most architectural practices, but it is best seen as a more substantial version of the traditional kinds of professional firms that were owned and managed by controlling partners.⁵¹

By any definition, the firm was a boys’ club that prided itself on its esprit de corps, which was formed as the employees worked long days together on the drafting boards. The culture of teamwork was further reinforced by celebrations held at the end of competitions and by baseball games at the Polo Grounds with the partners (Figure 14). Much of the fraternization among staff members took place outside the office, as they took meals together in saloons, boxed at local gyms, and roomed together in boardinghouses. According to John Prentiss Benson, draftsmen would get a little drunk at lunch and then take long walks “on South Street under the bowsprits of the square-riggers.”⁵² Probably the best evidence of the clannish mentality of the office is found in how the draftsmen spoke of their competitors. When Carrère and Hastings won the competition for the New York Public Library in 1897, the staff at McKim, Mead & White were outraged that two former employees had upstaged their old bosses and workmates. “If anybody from Carrere & Hastings ever came within gun shot of our office for a month after the award,” Swartwout explained, “he certainly took his life in his hands.”⁵³

Despite the existence of this collective office culture, it would be a mistake to think that all employees shared the same commitment to the firm. While some sought to follow in the footsteps of the partners, others were simply there for a paycheck. One key indication of the potentially radical differences that existed between coworkers is their political activities. In the fall of 1896, all three founding partners joined their associates Clive Newcome Elliot, William H. Hoffman, and Henry Bacon to march in the “Architectural Division” of the Sound Money Parade held in New York in support of the reelection of President William McKinley (Figure 15).⁵⁴ While some of his colleagues were parading in top hats in defense of the gold standard, the draftsman John H. Edelmann was contributing to the anarchist movement. Before he joined the firm in 1896, Edelmann authored an essay eulogizing the Paris Commune on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, served as editor of the important anarchist publication Solidarity, and welcomed the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin on his first lecture tour in the United States.⁵⁵

As the payroll records make clear, McKim, Mead & White employed individuals with a wide variety of skills, abilities, and backgrounds. The firm prioritized hiring people with professional expertise or who had gone to elite architecture schools, but roughly half of its employees were trained on the job. Many of the senior draftsmen, construction superintendents, and specification writers were deeply committed to the firm, but most of the junior draftsmen, tracers, and clerical workers were simply passing through. “For many years the firm name of McKim, Mead & White has stood for the best in all that an architect could possibly hope for in his career,” noted a writer in 1906. “Draughtsmen have used every endeavor just to work, if but one short month, in the office of this firm, to say they have been so honored.”⁵⁶

To all outward appearances, McKim, Mead & White was a model of a productive large firm, but the office was far from harmonious. Like any workplace run by paternalistic bosses, structured by hierarchical relationships, and organized for private gain, it was the site of frequent conflicts over authority, working conditions, and wages. The partners’ paternalism in particular was a double-edged sword, for while it generated loyalty to the firm and camaraderie among the staff, it also created antagonisms between the partners and their workforce as well as rivalries between employees. Although some of the issues experienced by the firm were personal in nature, the firm’s size led to some structural problems that were more difficult to resolve.⁵⁷

Most of the senior draftsmen who later wrote about their time in the office did so in glowing terms, yet some of their recollections suggest that the partners did not always provide the best creative direction. Joseph M. Wells reportedly turned down an offer of partnership because he would not put his name on “so much damned bad work.”⁵⁸ Frederick P. Hill, who worked in the office from 1882 to 1900, argued that the partners were overly focused on making “pictures” and claimed that McKim especially was “totally unable . . . to select the particular materials to be used or direct in detail the progress of the work necessary to make his mental picture a satisfactory reality.”⁵⁹ For White, another employee observed, “architecture meant color first, and form and texture next, and proportion afterward, and plan last of all.”⁶⁰ The partners’ design philosophies, Magonigle asserted, often led to results that were “lamentable and childish.”⁶¹ Sadakichi Hartmann, a German Japanese artist who worked briefly as the office librarian, was more caustic, stating that White’s work was “Rococo in excelsis. To be improved upon only by the pigeons, after the drawings become buildings.”⁶² As these comments suggest, draftsmen often felt responsible for correcting the problems caused by the partners’ design proclivities.

The partners’ reliance on a small group of senior draftsmen also bred resentment, since some of the junior draftsmen did not think highly of their more senior coworkers. Although Swartwout had no idea how the partners divided up commissions among themselves, he and the other junior members of the office became envious when work was doled out to the staff. On one occasion Swartwout became downcast after seeing McKim talking to William M. Kendall, the partner’s favorite designer in the office. It made Swartwout “sore as hell,” he recalled. “Same old story, rank favoritism, Kendall will get out his 6H pencil and take all the juice out of it.”⁶³ While the partners relied on a spirit of rivalry to get the best out of their designers, such competition for the attention of the partners sometimes undermined the camaraderie among employees.

More serious conflicts between the partners and their workforce erupted when the partners attempted to rationalize the production process. In the early 1890s, when the partners attempted to install a manager of the drafting room who would portion out work to the senior draftsmen, the draftsmen rebelled. William M. Kendall told the new drafting manager “to go to hell”; the rest of the senior draftsmen instructed junior draftsmen to ignore his instructions, and everyone ostracized him, before he was let go. When the partners hired another man to take his place, the draftsmen sabotaged him too, and the idea was abandoned.⁶⁴ Around the same time, the firm posted a set of “office rules” in the drafting room that defined the behavior expected of employees.⁶⁵ Responding to the increasingly bureaucratic tenor of the office, senior draftsmen sent the partners a letter protesting the unbearable heat in the office during the summer.⁶⁶

In addition to conflicts between the partners and staff, there were also clashes between employees that reflected class, ethnic, and racial hostilities. Some of the firm’s senior designers, belonging to an Anglo-Protestant elite, looked askance at their working-class colleagues. Attempting to draw a bright line between draftsmen and tracers, Magonigle argued that “draughtsmanship is a man’s job and not to be sniffed at,” and referred to tracers as a “body of wretched beings.”⁶⁷ Swartwout held a similar opinion and recalled that the firm’s tracers were a “motley crew of foreigners.” “These slaves laboriously traced everything there was on the board, ink blots, erasures and all,” he sneered, “and as most of them could read no English the legends were often weird.”⁶⁸ As these comments suggest, there were limits to the famed fraternity of the office. But as Jo Tominaga, a Japanese architect, noted, immigrants often had their own more serious concerns. Although he remembered the firm fondly for “good work and good pay,” he also recalled being beaten in the streets on his first night in New York and later being harassed by the police while he was making sketches of the harbor.⁶⁹

Even when the office was running relatively smoothly, employees were pushed to the limit. In a rather candid description of the way the office worked, Magonigle stated that White liked to “load a job on us youngsters way beyond our powers and force a result out of us if it could be squeezed out—sometimes it couldn’t.”⁷⁰ In another revealing instance, Frederick E. Hill, who was stationed as a superintendent of construction in Kansas City in the late 1880s, sent a letter of complaint to the firm’s business manager, George Martin, seeking more help. Though the work was going as well, Hill was suffering a breakdown. “At one time however including the tenants, the bankers, Mr. Wheeler [Frederick B. Wheeler, a draftsman stationed in Kansas City], and his officers, not to mention Mr. Sickels [Frank Sickels, a specification writer], I had not less than twenty people wanting me to do something,” Hill wrote, “and all in connection with the regular work of the Life Building, and it seemed to me that each one of the twenty five could have employed me continuously, and although I had a competent assistant, it was very depressing work.”⁷¹ The work of superintendents in particular could also be dangerous. One of the firm’s assistant superintendents, David Mitchell Jr., was the only member of the firm known to have perished during his work for the office. In August 1895, he died from injuries he sustained when he fell through the scaffolding on the construction site of Low Library at Columbia University (Figure 16).

One of the most serious rifts that threatened the culture of the office stemmed from issues of pay: the enormous discrepancy in earnings between the partners and staff, the arbitrary wage scales, and the generally low staff pay. Many draftsmen, including the young Cass Gilbert, who worked in the office from 1880 to 1882, felt that the experience they gained at the firm was worth the low pay. In a letter to his son, Gilbert explained that he “preferred to stay with McKim, Mead and White at $20 a week than go to Herter Brothers or Burnham and Root’s for $60 and I had those offers from both.”⁷² But many of his colleagues disagreed. “The good draughtsmen are doing heroic, pioneer work to the best of their ability,” argued draftsman Frederick W. Moore, “and they keep on more from a deep abiding love for their profession than for the inadequate wage they commonly receive.”⁷³ “I was expected to be grateful to be making $10 a week,” recalled Harold Bush-Brown resentfully.⁷⁴ Employees who achieved advancement in the office frequently did so to the detriment of their health and pocketbooks. The firm made the situation much worse with its policy of not paying newly hired novice draftsmen until they had worked at the office for six months or more. On James Brite’s first day of work, he stayed up all night completing a perspective rendering while rats scurried around at his feet. Although the partners were pleased with his work, they evidently forgot about him as he worked without pay for weeks on end. “Things went on and on and on for about eight months,” he recalled. “In the meantime, I was getting more and more ragged.”⁷⁵

Given the desire of many young architects to start their own practices, combined with the grueling pace of work in the office and the low pay, few employees stayed for long. Apart from the three original partners and the five senior draftsmen who were made partners in 1906, only 10 percent of McKim, Mead & White’s workforce stayed with the office for a decade or longer, and only 20 percent remained for three to ten years. Three-quarters of the firm’s employees worked there for three years or less, and a third stayed for only a year or less. As these figures indicate, the firm comprised the partners, a small core of long-term associates, and a large temporary workforce. From 1879 through 1918, the firm averaged an annual turnover rate of 25 percent—a steady churn of talent that kept the office filled with young and ambitious workers until they were ready to strike out on their own, burned out, or were fired.⁷⁶

While many of those who left the firm did so to establish their own practices or pursue other opportunities, the firm frequently purged the payroll in response to the changing needs of the office and volatile economic conditions (Figures 17 and 18). Other than a small number of individuals who earned a percentage of the profits and some senior staff who were salaried, employees worked at will for a weekly wage. Over the course of forty years the firm purged its payroll several times. In the wake of the Panic of 1893, it let go more than thirty draftsmen, and in 1903, another twenty. After completing the Manhattan Municipal Building, the firm discharged half its payroll, but then built it up again over the next few years. In 1918, however, the firm laid off nearly half of its staff once again during the wartime collapse in construction. When times got tough an employee would keep one eye on his work and the other on the mailboxes, awaiting the arrival of a politely worded dismissal.⁷⁷

From 1915 to 1920, McKim, Mead & White published a monograph of the firm’s work in four large volumes. Setting the standard for future vanity monographs, it presented several hundred projects with newly commissioned photographs, plans, and details, in the style of the folios of Roman architecture the partners treasured. Tellingly, the projects were presented as self-sufficient statements of achievement, without commentary or attribution.⁷⁸ What particularly struck contemporaries was the consistency in the firm’s work from the 1880s up to the end of World War I. This was especially remarkable since Stanford White had been dead since 1906, Charles F. McKim passed away three years later, and William R. Mead had taken a step back from the day-to-day business of the firm. For nearly a decade, the office had been in the hands of a second generation of partners, including William M. Kendall, William S. Richardson, Burt L. Fenner, and Teunis Van der Bent, all of whom had started in junior positions.

The realization that a large American practice could thrive without the animating spirit of its founding partners made an enormous impression on the profession at the time. Writing in the 1920s, the architect Clarence H. Blackhall attributed the consistency of the firm’s work to its working methods. “Probably no other one firm has had such influence on the young men as has been exercised by the organization which bears this name,” he wrote, “an organization which was so coherent and united in its aims and methods that the death of two of the principals has not brought any perceptible change in the character of the output.”⁷⁹ As historians have noted, the influence of the firm was magnified by the fact that many of its employees went on to start successful practices of their own that re-created its culture, including Cass Gilbert, Carrère and Hastings, and York and Sawyer.⁸⁰ The remarkable success of many of its former employees compelled a draftsmen to describe the firm as a “nursery of a galaxy of talent that, spreading over the country, leavened the architectural thought of a whole generation.”⁸¹

While large firms like McKim, Mead & White were the exception at the time, by the early twentieth century they represented the vanguard of a professional elite that redefined architectural practice as a collaborative enterprise. Not only did the large elite firms tend to win the best commissions, but they also set stylistic trends, raised the standards of production, and established lasting relationships to schools of architecture that provided them with talent. Firms like McKim, Mead & White, D. H. Burnham and Company, and Albert Kahn and Associates were of course not without precedent. They built upon the success of some of the first large American practices, including that of George B. Post in the post–Civil War era and Richard Upjohn in the antebellum era. They pointed the way for the rise of even larger firms, such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and other “team-based” practices, after World War II.⁸²

In spite of their success, McKim, Mead & White and other large firms were not without critics. Their champions celebrated the corporate character of their work, but some of their contemporaries who clung to an individualist view of artistic creation viewed this as a threat. In 1897, Montgomery Schuyler had McKim, Mead & White in mind when he lightly ridiculed classicism as a time-saving measure. “Since the classic revival has been introduced,” he wrote, “it is possible for an architect to snatch a brief respite from professional cares. As soon as his work is done and he has secured a profitable commission, having laid out and designated the style, he can take a trip to Europe and leave the detail to the boys.”⁸³ Claude Bragdon lambasted such firms more harshly for designing by “card catalogue . . . a system whereby the various details of a building are designed, or more often copied out of a book, by various hands, and without serious loss to the homogeneity of the whole.” Believing this approach to design was “foreign,” Bragdon was equally disturbed by the idea of offices filled with young architects “who are able and willing to merge their own individualities in the large individuality of the firm for which they work, in the same way as a newspaper writer loses his identity in his paper.”⁸⁴

Although Bragdon and critics like him were fighting a losing battle, he touched on a sensitive point. The mystique of an elite architecture firm like McKim, Mead & White was so powerful that it obscured the contributions of any one member of the office. Moreover, the large firm undeniably generated a demand for architectural workers who were willing to channel their creativity into the firm while the partners claimed most of the fame, profit, and credit (Figure 19). Some employees were certainly angered by the fact that the public remained oblivious to their existence. As William E. Chamberlain observed, writing in 1890 about the death of his workmate Joseph M. Wells, there was something unjust about this state of affairs. “In the death of Joseph Morrill Wells,” he wrote, “the profession has suffered a grievous loss. That fame is not a measure of ability, was never more strikingly shown than in the fact that to many, even among architects, the news of his death was perhaps the first knowledge they had that he had lived.”⁸⁵

As the record of McKim, Mead & White shows, the large architecture firm was a world unto itself, with its own traditions, culture, and working methods. The firm exploited its prestige to the full and undoubtedly demanded a great deal from the people who worked there. Yet for many architects, the prospect of joining a great office was irresistibly attractive. By the 1930s, when the heyday of McKim, Mead & White had passed, former employees recalled their years in the office with pride. Compiling his memoirs during the Depression, Swartwout ended his account of his time in the firm on a wistful note. Although he entered the office as a novice, by the time he left to start his own firm he was in charge of thirteen projects. “We were all a happy family there,” he claimed, “we were proud of the office and its work and appreciated our luck in being there.” “Now some are gone and some I’ve lost track of,” he said of his old colleagues, “but the memory of that ten years is still fresh.” He was especially appreciative of the advice an architect in Bridgeport gave him during his studies at Yale: “You won’t learn as much in four years at an architectural school as you will in one year from Mr. McKim.”⁸⁶