John E. Scharsmith was an American architect of Swiss extraction with a practice in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
. Having served with a New York regiment in the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...
, by the turn of the 20th century, with offices at 1 Madison Avenue, he was responsible for several landmarked apartment blocks in
Beaux-Arts style
Beaux-Arts architecture ( , ) was the academic architectural style taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, particularly from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century. It drew upon the principles of French neoclassicism, but also incorporat ...
, such as The Hohenzollern,
West End Avenue
West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth.
Etymology
The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some R ...
and 84th Street (1902), and The Chatsworth Apartments, 344 West 72nd Street, (1902–04, Annex, 1905–06), and for the eight-storey apartment block, 425 West End Avenue, at 72nd Street (1905). He designed the neo-Gothic Swiss House, 37 West 67th Street (1906–07), built for the Swiss Benevolent Society as a home for aged Swiss, one among a group of artists' studio buildings on that block being constructed at the time by various firms.
His office also provided designs for less ambitious projects, such as the Fort Tryon Apartments, northeast corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and 180th Street (for Moersh & Wille, 1907) the pair of 6-storey brick and stone apartment houses at the northwest corner of St Nicholas Avenue and 163rd Street and southwest corner of 164th Street (1908) or stables he built on West 151st Street just west of Convent Avenue, for John Quinn (1897). Scharsmith designed the extant block of Renaissance Revival rowhouses at 449-459 Convent Avenue, near 150th Street (1896–97). Some of his other early rowhouses include the nine 3-storey brick dwellings 503-519 West 173rd St near Amsterdam Avenue (1896-1897).
Notes
American architects
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