Dwight James Baum: The World’s Most Famous Architect from Little Falls

My grandfather, Dwight James Baum (“DJB”), is undoubtedly Little Falls’ most-famous architect ever and one of its most-famous sons.  While I may be partial to that view, it is shared by many experts.  Here, for example, is a summary of DJB’s early career from a noted architectural scholar:

In the 2008 reissue of “The Work of Dwight James Baum” edited by William Morrison in 1927, Ron McCarty, Curator and Keeper of Ca’ d’Zan opined “In 1923, the Architectural League of New York awarded the Gold Medal to Dwight James Baum.  Aged 37 and practicing independently for a mere eight years, Baum was the youngest architect ever to receive the coveted honor.  Nine years later in 1932, the American Institute of Architects similarly honored Baum for designing the best two-story house in the United States between 1926 and 1930.  The gold medal was awarded to Baum by President of the United States Herbert Hoover. These were singular distinctions for any architect, but all the more so when awarded to the Upstate New York son of a shoe salesman and generations of Mohawk Valley farmers.”

Others have heralded him as an architect of choice in The Gilded Age.  Ever admiring of a local son, the Little Falls Evening Times declared him “One of the nation’s greatest architects.”

When the Museum of the City of New York created its 2011 exhibit and book “American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis,” it had the full panoply of NYC architects from which to choose.  Yet, 72 years after his death, the Museum chose to feature the life and prodigious work of DJB. I, along with my husband Hank, and Louie Baum and Terry Tippin were given a private tour of the exhibit.

According to my cousin Louie Baum of Little Falls, the Baum ancestors came to the Little Falls area in the mid-1700s, along with many other Protestant Palatine Germans. Little Falls was the frontier at that time, and the Palatine Germans were invited in to be the “buffer” between the English in eastern New York State and the Iroquois Indians and the French to the west.  Philip Baum I had 3 sons, including Philip F. Baum II (my ancestor), the Rev. John Baum (ancestor to author L. Frank Baum), and Jacob P. Baum (Louie Baum’s ancestor).  My ancestor Philip Baum II had 10 children, 6 of whom were sons. One of the youngest was Fayette Baum, DJB’S father. The only child of Fayette and Alma (Ackerman) Baum, DJB was born on June 24, 1886.  DJB’s actual birthplace was the Baum homestead on the 142-acre farm owned by his father on the Wright Corners-Newville Road just south of Little Falls.   My grandfather DJB always considered Little Falls to be his hometown.  His New York City office and his Fieldston, Riverdale, New York City home included several prints he had collected of Little Falls scenes, particularly images of the town above the Erie Canal locks.

DJB’s father, Fayette, had been born September 10, 1855, in the Newville home of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Philip F. Baum II, descendants of Palatine settlers of the Mohawk Valley.  Philip F. Baum I had come to America through Philadelphia in 1748. Philip F. Baum II was a prominent farmer who was a close friend of Cecil Spooner, a member of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet.  Philip’s grandfather was Captain Philip Baum who served with the New York State militia during the Revolutionary War.

Alma’s maiden name was Ackerman, and she, too, descended from Palatine settlers.  Her father, Levi Ackerman (1826-1907), was the son of Nicholas (1767-1847) and Betsy (Seeber) Ackerman (1787-1849), who are both buried in Little Falls. The Ackermans came to America from Holland in 1662. In honor of his mother, Alma Ackerman, DJB named his third son, my father, Peter Ackerman Baum.

DJB was very proud of his Upstate NY heritage.  He collected many books about the history and settlers of the Mohawk Valley.  In the 1920s, he hired a Wall Street NYC genealogist to further research the family’s history.  That research documented Mohawk Valley ancestors with surnames including Baum, Ackerman, Cramer, Clock/Klock/Kloch, Crouse, Diefendorf, Leach, Mabie, Nellis, and Seeber.   As is well known in Little Falls, men from these families fought the British and their Native American allies at the pivotal Revolutionary War Battle of Oriskany, where so many Mohawk Valley men were killed in an ambush.  In fact, a first-hand report I found transcribed in the NYS military archives states that our ancestor Captain Heinrich Diefendorf was killed in the Oriskany ambush by an “Indian hanging from a tree limb above” who “shot [Captain Diefendorf] in the eye.” (We will likely never know if the Captain was shot with a musket or with an arrow).  DJB was so proud of his Revolutionary War heritage that he and my father both participated in the activities of the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR).  The SAR maintained the Fraunces Tavern in NYC as the historic inn where General George Washington bade farewell to his officers. They and I and my family had lunch there on several occasions.  In the years since, Fraunces Tavern has been turned into a museum.

In 1892, when DJB was 6 years old, Fayette Baum retired from farming in Newville and moved the family into downtown Little Falls where he owned and ran the Rockton Shoe Store at 528 East Main Street.  DJB was educated in Little Falls public schools through his second year of high school.  According to his obituary in the Little Falls Evening Times newspaper, DJB as a schoolboy worked as a carrier for that newspaper “and was one of the most efficient and likeable youngsters who then delivered this newspaper to its customers.”    In 1902 when DJB was 16, DJB’s father Fayette again moved the family, this time from Little Falls to Syracuse.  Following other Baum family members, Fayette took up employment in the lubricating oil business.  It was there that Fayette and DJB might have crossed paths with older Baum cousins including L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz and the other Oz books.  An obituary of Fayette Baum describes his employment in Syracuse: “For 20 years he was eastern representative of the Union Oil Company of Erie, Pa., resigning his position when he was stricken ill two months ago”.  He died at age 77 in 1933 in his home at 204 Onondaga Avenue, Syracuse.

The Syracuse Baum cousins had wide-ranging interests in oil fields, oil products, and real estate.  The patriarch of the Syracuse branch had been Benjamin Ward Baum, who like Fayette, was a grandson of Philip Baum I.  The son of the Rev. John Philip Baum (born 1797), Benjamin Ward Baum was the father of L. Frank Baum. (born 1856). The Syracuse Baums’ highly successful business empire suffered mightily from a series of business and personal disasters.  First and foremost, Benjamin Ward Baum was severely injured while driving a buggy behind a newly trained colt who became startled by paper blowing in the street.  The colt bolted and the buggy in which Benjamin Ward Baum was riding was wrecked against a hitching post. Benjamin Ward Baum was thrown to the street and experienced a severe head injury.  Likely suffering from traumatic brain injury, Benjamin Ward Baum travelled to Germany to seek more advanced medical care.  When he returned from Germany, he found that his assets had been mismanaged in his absence.  As a result, he was forced to sell numerous assets to raise cash.  Among them was a 160-acre commercial farm.  In an amazing coincidence, he sold that farm to the Crouse family of Syracuse.  While no one could have known it at the time, decades later in 1912, Dwight James Baum would marry Katharine Crouse. What no one in my family ever mentioned, and perhaps no one living now ever knew, was that the elder Crouse had bought the Farm from the elder Baum, a transaction that occurred long before Dwight James Baum and Katharine Crouse ever met.  Benjamin Ward Baum died two years after his accident in 1887, when Dwight James Baum was only one year old.

L. Frank Baum continued leadership in the reduced family businesses after his father’s and brother Will’s deaths. However, he became distracted from his sales role when his wife, Maud,almost died after giving birth to their third son. Eventually, L. Frank Baum returned to the road developing sales for Baum’s Castorine axle oil.  While he was traveling, and his wife was recuperating in Fayetteville, the Baums’ Syracuse office and manufacturing were entrusted to Uncle Doc Baum.  Uncle Doc’s real name was Adam Baum (yes, I heard that joke many times in school, but this was well before invention of the atom bomb).  Uncle Doc had served two years in the Civil War as a surgeon with the 50^th Engineers decades earlier.  His management skills were suspect, and his health was so poor that he delegated oversight of the business to a clerk.  One day in 1888, L. Frank Baum returned from a sales trip to the Baum Castorine Company office to find a shocking scene when he unlocked the door: he found the clerk dead, his lifeless body sprawled across a desk.  The revolver with which he had shot himself was still in his hand. The resulting forensic audit revealed that much of the company’s capital had been gambled away by the clerk, who due to Uncle Doc’s inattention, had also left the company’s bills unpaid.  Despite the product’s success, L. Frank Baum could no longer manage Baum’s Castorine under these circumstances.  He sold the business to Marcus and Howard Stoddard.  The Stoddards kept the signature “L.F. Baum” on the label and kept the Baum name in the company’s name for another 30 years. Baum’s Castorine is still in business today with offices in Rome, New York.

After graduating from Central High School in Syracuse, DJB attended and graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Architecture in 1909. “Since then, his rise in the field of architecture has been nothing short of phenomenal,” the University’s Alumni News later wrote. “Despite the national acclaim accorded him in his field, Mr. Baum always kept in close touch with Syracuse and with his Alma Mater.”   Similarly, the Little Falls Evening Times wrote that from the day DJB earned his degree at age 23, “his rise in the field of architecture has been nothing short of phenomenal.”

DJB worked his way through Syracuse University by selling display advertising on desk blotters.   Despite his work commitments, DJB shone as a star student.  Among his many honors as an undergraduate, DJB was the winner of the University’s architecture fellowship and elected to three different honor societies.  In 1934, 26 years after his graduation, Syracuse University honored DJB with an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts.  (My husband and I both wore DJB’s doctoral mortarboard at our respective graduations from law school.)  As his professional success grew, DJB was retained by Syracuse University to partner with another legendary architect, John Russell Pope, in mapping out a 50-year building and expansion program for Syracuse University.  In conjunction with that program, DJB was appointed architect for the University’s College of Medicine, the Maxwell School of Citizenship, and Hendricks Chapel, where DJB’s funeral was eventually held after his untimely death.

But in 1910, the year after his graduation, it was on a Syracuse streetcar where DJB’s life changed drastically.  One day on the streetcar he witnessed a meek young woman being hassled by a group of schoolboys.  DJB stepped between the offending students and the woman and scared them off. The young woman thanked him profusely for his protection, and he offered to sit with her to her stop to assure her safety.  The young woman was my grandmother, Lucia Katharine Crouse, and, of course, she fell in love with the handsome young architect, who was equally smitten with her.

DJB proved to be a chivalric gentleman caller. What he quickly discovered, however, was that the sweet young woman on the streetcar was the daughter and granddaughter of the richest family in Syracuse.  Wholesale grocer Jacob Crouse’s obituaries in the New York Times and the Cato, NY Citizen dated November 17, 1900, stated, “Jacob Crouse, regarded as the richest man in Syracuse, died last Thursday.  He was 76 years old and had retired from actual business as a wholesale grocer except in the management of his real estate interests, which were the largest held by any Syracusean.”   Those interests were inherited by Crouse’s son and Katharine’s father, Charles Mabie Crouse, who was himself an able businessman and investor.  The Charles Mabie Crouses, however, were somewhat suspicious of their debutante daughter having been “picked up” on a streetcar by a young man of high academic achievement but modest means. So the Crouses did what other wealthy families of the day were wont to do: they arranged for Katharine to go abroad to Europe for a year with her aunt, Mrs. Charlotte Elizabeth “Lizzie” Crouse Maynard Klock.  Aunt Lizzie was the older sister of Katharine’s father, Charles.  The Crouses wanted Katharine under well-travelled Aunt Lizzie to experience the Grand Tour to test the romantic devotion of the young couple.  So, they traveled through Europe and the Middle East for a year.  Katharine bought beautiful clothes and souvenirs in Paris, including some that have been passed on to me.  And she bought wooden shoes and cow bells and many other souvenirs that she shipped home in a steamer trunk that today resides with me.  And when she and Aunt Lizzie finally returned to Syracuse a year later, Katharine still insisted to her parents that she wanted to marry DJB.

The bridal showers and luncheons were held, all breathlessly described in local papers.  The wedding took place in “the old Crouse mansion” on January 3, 1912.  (January 3 was also Fayette’s and Alma’s wedding anniversary—they had been married on the same day in 1877.)  The papers described the nuptials in great detail, particularly focusing on the fact that in the dead of a Syracusan winter, the resourceful Mr. and Mrs. Crouse had filled their home with thousands of flowers. Like the flowers, the bride’s gown was also “imported.”   After their wedding, the young couple moved to an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City to launch DJB’s architectural career in the world capital of architecture.  My grandmother told me that I could always remember the year that she and my grandfather were married because it was the same year that the Titanic sank.

Whole books have been written about DJB’s illustrious architectural career, so it is challenging to summarize it in a brief essay. I will focus on only 4 aspects:  DJB’s fame for elegant and functional family homes; his fame for designing the celebrated Ringling mansion and other landmarks at the dawn of the Florida land boom; his fame at designing public spaces from university buildings to the West Side YMCA; and his civic work as a leader and spokesman supporting the architectural profession during the Depression.

In a field that had long apprenticeships, DJB was especially noteworthy in that he opened his own NYC practice only 6 years after his university graduation and junior role in NYC firms.  Through hard work, DJB was noticed and hired by the wealthy Edward C. Delafield to do some alterations to the Delafield mansion.  Delafield was so pleased with the young architect’s work that he encouraged DJB to build his architectural office and draftsmen’s workshop in Delafield’s new development called “Fieldston” which Delafield had carved out of his family’s Riverdale-on-Hudson lands about ten miles north of mid-town Manhattan. Delafield referred persons purchasing land from him to the young, on-site DJB as his architect of choice for families buying land to build stately homes in Fieldston. McCarty has written that DJB thus “attracted clients who tended to be self-made, middle-class business executives and working professionals who had achieved new levels of stature and affluence in the boom years of the 1920s by dint of hard work and unflagging dedication.  People, in short, like Baum himself.”

DJB built his own family’s home in Fieldston in 1913 and then a larger Fieldston home he named “Sunnybanks” in 1916 at 5001 Goodrich Avenue, on one of the highest points in New York City and directly across the street from Delafield’s own home.  My grandparents lived in the Goodrich Avenue house from 1916 until my widowed grandmother sold it in 1971 to move to Long Island to be closer to my family. We visited “Sunnybanks” frequently for Sunday dinners, Thanksgiving, and every Christmas Day dinner for the first 20 years of my life.  I knew that house so well that I still occasionally dream about it.

In the ‘teens, ‘twenties, and ‘thirties, DJB designed at least 150 residences in Fieldston and Riverdale in the Colonial Revival, Greek Revival, Georgian, and Mediterranean styles.  To this day, these homes are so prized that they are advertised for sale as “Baum homes”.  It was during this time that DJB also designed four homes for prominent Little Falls families – John Zoller on Diamond Street, Congressman H.P. Snyder on North Ann Street, Gordon Little on Burwell Street, and Frank Simpson on Salisbury Street.

DJB is also hailed today for “his respect for ecology before anyone thought of such things, when the words ‘ecology’ and the ‘environment’ were scarcely known,” stated architect Ludwig P. Bono quoted in a 1996 New York Times article by Tuck Stadler.  As noted earlier, the American Institute of Architects honored DJB in 1932 for designing the best 2-story house erected in the United States between 1926 and 1930 for one of his Fieldston houses.  He was summoned to the White House where President Herbert Hoover presented the medal himself.

One of the homes for which DJB is best remembered is Ca’ d’Zan (Venetian for “House of John”), which DJB designed for Ringling Brothers–Barnum & Bailey Circus owner, John Ringling and his wife, Mable.  At the turn of the last century, Sarasota was so small that it was ignored by the U.S. Census Bureau.  Only 12 families lived in the town then. The Ringling engagement in 1922 at the very start of the Florida land boom marked the beginning of DJB’s career as one of Florida’s star architects. “At a time when Sarasota was booming, Baum’s arrival from New York helped raise its architectural profile,” McCarty said in an interview.  “He was their most prominent of the architects of the 1920s.  He had a national reputation.”  In 1924, DJB made a long trip to Venice, Italy, with Mr. and Mrs. Ringling and quickly discovered that Mable Ringling had strongly held artistic tastes which did not always win praise from her architect.  Mrs. Ringling had spent years researching exotic marbles, glass, wood paneling and Venetian palazzos, and she wanted them all in her Sarasota mansion.  In DJB, Mrs. Ringling had contracted with an exceptionally talented architect whom she directed to create numerous architectural renderings, not to mention so many changes during construction that DJB had to adjust his fee structure.  Antique architectural elements were shipped from Venice to Sarasota by the ton.  The 36,000-square-foot mansion on the shore of Sarasota Bay was completed in October 1925.  In addition to its many architectural features, Ca’ d’Zan featured its famous 8,000 square-foot marble terrace where Mable and her pet cockatoo might greet guests arriving by water on her private Venetian gondola or for the Ringlings’ parties, where musicians might be playing on the gondola in the Bay with the sun setting behind them.

After the mansion and its outbuildings were completed in 1925, DJB continued his association with John Ringling and with Ca’ d’Zan’s builder, Owen Burns.  DJB opened a Sarasota office to produce designs for villas in Ringling’s own major land developments in the Sarasota Keys and in downtown Sarasota.  Among these were the Owen Burns Realty Company Building (1925), where Burns and DJB had their offices, the El Verona Hotel (1926), owned by Ringling and later known as Ringling Towers, the Sarasota Times Building (1926), and the Sarasota County Court House (1927).  Additional projects were on the drawing boards when the 1926 hurricane and then the 1929 market crash halted Florida’s real estate boom.  Mable Ringling died in 1929 and John Ringling died in 1936, willing Ca’ d’Zan and their art collection to the State of Florida. Ca’ d’Zan remains a major tourist attraction and a site of national interest, such as the recent “Antiques Roadshow” episode filmed there.  Outside of Fieldston and Riverdale, NY, Sarasota has the largest concentration of buildings in the country designed by DJB.

In the 1920s and the lean Great Depression years of the 1930s, DJB expanded his practice to include more government, institutional, and commercial commissions.  These included buildings at Syracuse University, Wells College, Middlebury College, Clarkson College, the Flushing, NY, Post Office and the Federal Building there, as well as the hospitals in Syracuse and in Little Falls.  “During the depression, many architects had to leave the profession to support themselves.  DJB was one of the few architects in the New York area who was able to keep his office open…because of his close association with the Architectural League of New York.  From the early 1920s DJB had been active in preservation activities. He photographed historic structures and wrote articles on preservation. Because of this interest, the Architectural League chose DJB’s office for work projects to support unemployed draftsmen and designers.  Among the projects undertaken at this time was the research and documentation of historic buildings in Barrytown, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina.”

DJB worked tirelessly on committees throughout the Depression to help struggling architects and draftsmen.  He famously kept his entire Fieldston draftsmen staff employed during the hard times by assigning them to work in shifts and on preservation projects.  The Museum of the City of New York in a 2011 exhibit hailed DJB for his Depression-relief work including promoting sales of sets of fine dinnerware featuring images of different architects’ designs.  At a more personal level, when the brother of the family’s long-time cook, Clara, showed up at Goodrich Avenue homeless and unemployed in the depths of the Depression, DJB welcomed him into the household and assigned him odd jobs in exchange for Clara’s home-cooked meals and a warm bed.

In 1929, DJB was engaged as architectural writer and editor for Good Housekeeping magazine, where he published numerous articles on the virtues of good design in homes.  His long association with Good Housekeeping lasted the rest of DJB’s life and led to several unique assignments in the Depression years.  Among other things, DJB was asked by Good

Housekeeping to design model houses of the future for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.  Unlike the classical houses for which DJB was famous, he successfully created Art-Moderne homes designed to contain all the most advanced appliances and conveniences for what were likely to be servantless homes of the future.  At the New York World’s Fair, DJB also served as architect for both the Home Furnishings and the YMCA pavilions.  The last was an outgrowth of DJB’s major role as architect of the still-celebrated West Side YMCA on Manhattan’s West 63^rd Street, which was completed in 1930.  The 16-story building spans a full NYC block from 63^rd to 64^th streets and houses 3 gyms, 2 swimming pools, and dormitory quarters for 600.  It is one of DJB’s most famous commissions and still in use.

DJB and Katharine had 3 sons, Dwight Crouse (who nicknamed himself “Bill”), John Leach, and my father, Peter Ackerman, all of whom were happily married, all of whom had children of their own, all of whom I knew well, and all of whom are now deceased.  The Baum sons’ fondest memories were of the extended family trips the Baums took in the summers to such destinations as Cuba, California, Canada, Alaska, Russia, Germany and, of course, Syracuse.  These trips often included cross-continental drives in 2 cars.  Katharine liked Packards and drove her own car.  DJB bought himself a movie camera and he photographed and filmed architecture everywhere they went.  I have inherited a number of those architectural photographic prints DJB made of those trips.  Given their father’s heavy work, travel, and civics schedule, and their mother’s civics work and fundraising for the Audubon Society where she was an active Life Member, the Baum boys were sent to boarding schools at early ages.  As a result, those summer trips were their most magical time spent with their parents, which they loved more than anything else.

My father, Peter Ackerman Baum, was in his senior year boarding at The Taft School when he got the terrible news:  At 5:40 pm on December 13, 1939, while running down New York City’s West 45^th Street to catch the bus home to Fieldston, DJB suffered a massive heart attack and died immediately on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Astor.  NYC Police Officer Joseph P. Maguire and the doorman understood that the victim was a celebrity and immediately summoned Dr. Bouton from Roosevelt Hospital, who pronounced DJB dead.  The Little Falls Evening Times reported that “[o]ne tragic feature of the death of Mr. Baum was the fact that his brother-in-law Jerome D. Barnum, publisher of the Syracuse Post-Standard, and President of the American Association of Newspaper Publishers, was attending a board of directors meeting of the American Association” at the nearby Cornell Club from which Barnum was summoned to identify his brother-in-law’s body. “Mr. Barnum’s wife and Mrs. Baum are sisters.”

Funeral services were held at Riverdale Presbyterian Church and again a few days later in the Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University which DJB designed.  DJB was interred in Oakwood Cemetery next to the legendary Crouse Boulder, traditional burial site of his wife’s family.

The architectural world was as shocked as DJB’s family at the sad news.  Condolences poured in from around the country.  Many of those messages spoke not just to the character of the man, but to his portfolio of architectural achievement.  As Ronald McCarty wrote, “Aged 53, [Baum at his death] had been a practicing architect for a mere 25 years.”

For all of these reasons, and in recognition of his outstanding intellect and character still admired today, I submit that my grandfather, Dwight James Baum, is “The World’s Most Famous Architect from Little Falls.”

Endnotes:

• Quotes from Mr. McCarty are from the new introduction to the 2008 Acanthus Press re-issue of “The Work of Dwight James Baum.”
• The details on L. Frank Baum are from the book “To Please a Child” by LFB’s grandson.

Victoria Baum Bjorklund is a member of the Little Falls Historical Society.