George Skidmore's Churches

Last year, on August 28, I went to the funeral of my friend Glenn Irvin Lipp—“Irv “ to me—at the Westhampton Presbyterian Church. It was a really sad occasion; we had hoped Irv would pull through.

It was my first time ever in the church, which was much bigger and grander than I expected, with these curved, heavy pews that looked old, and great.

As I was looking up at the ceiling on the sides of the church, I noticed these dark-stained narrow planks, pine, I guessed, that looked really familiar, and I thought, “I wonder if this is the same architect who designed Pam’s house?”

Pam and Peter McBride, my aunt and godfather­ uncle, have resided on Woodbridge Lane on Quiogue since 1996. The Westhampton Presbyterian Church is also, confusingly to some, on Quiogue, across the street and one property back.

Pam is an architect with the firm William G. Brown in Wyckoff, New Jersey. She specializes in shingle­-style architecture and has done beautiful examples of that look all over the Hamptons. But the place they chose looked nothing like it. I always told people their house was Victorian. It is three stories tall, with eight bedrooms and gracious, wide porches. There are decorative scalloped shingles on most of the exterior, finials and decorative touches everywhere.

When she told me that the architect’s name was George Skidmore, I got so excited—thinking, of course, of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. How grand! But the next words out of her mouth were: “He is of no relation to Skidmore, Owings.”

Close but no cigar.

The McBride family owned, for decades, a big old pile of a house in Sea Island, Georgia; we have a very large family and like to crowd in together. We always thought the house was designed by the famous architect Addison Mizner, who designed that resort community’s legendary Cloister hotel.

But this spring, at a McBride family reunion, I did a site inspection on a new house going up on the ocean by an architect who does very faithful reproductions of Mizner’s Spanish/Moorish/Indian-inspired look. He took one look at the pictures of our old house and said, “Oh, no, that’s not one of his.” Our luck, I suppose.

At least I was gratified to learn that my notion was correct, and that George Skidmore did indeed design the church. So I decided to do a story about him and the two houses anyway, and was bumbling along—there wasn’t much written about him—until Anne Surchin, The Press’s architecture critic, as a favor came by to look at the house.

She pegged the house as “late 1880s,” which turned out to be spot on. “He was not a minor architect,” she told me, “just an overlooked one.”

I asked Pam McBride recently what drew her to the house? “We have kept this house as we bought it. I loved the austere exterior, which matches many of our neighbors’, but the giant conical turret is signature. I sensed that a change had been made, maybe after the big 1938 hurricane. From inside the roof, obvious and dramatic cut marks kind of tell the story. But the curved turret seems to at least follow the church’s belfry tower. We love it.”

Skidmore had designed buildings all over Long Island and many in the Quogue-Westhampton area. Two buildings that looked very impressive, the Bonnyfield Estate and the Quogue House (a hotel), are gone, but many remain, including the Presbyterian Chapel in Quogue, which is the same congregation as the Westhampton Presbyterian Church.

Anne Surchin turned me on to an architectural dissertation by Patricia Orfanos at the Long Island Collection, a private library, a hidden jewel within the East Hampton Library. Who knew?

The story of my not­-so-­properly-­announced arrival at the collection, while comical, is embarrassing—heads up, people: you need to make a reservation—so we’re skipping it. But Andrea Meyer, the collection’s librarian and archivist, took pity on me and let me look at the Ms. Orfanos dissertation and maps from that time.

She hauled out this massive, beautiful book, “Atlas of Suffolk County, Long Island, Volume I: Ocean Shore.” ​It was published by​ E. Belcher Hyde in Brooklyn in 1902. What looked pretty clear to me to be the McBride residence had Julia Reeve listed as the owner. An 1888 map also lists her as the owner, and a census from 1860 lists a Reverend William G. Reeve in Quogue. We also found a Reverend George Reeve, a property owner, on Ancestry.com, between 1860 and 1910.

So there is a chance, I’ll go so far as to call it a likelihood, that the McBride home was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church at one time. But it would take a better researcher than me to establish that as fact. The Orfanos dissertation, while exhaustive, does not focus on private residences.

Currently, the parsonage of Westhampton Presbyterian Church is directly across the street, in a house that has many of the distinguishing marks of Skidmore, but I am not at all sure designed by him. It is occupied by Pastor Charles Carey, who gave me a tour and allowed my brave photographer, Chris Arnold, to climb up to the belfry to take a picture.

Apparently, when both the McBride residence and the Presbyterian Church were built, people on both properties could see Quantuck Bay. The surrounding area was farmland and had not yet become all private residences.

The church’s location was a compromise at the time of building (designed in 1887, finished in 1888). The congregation was originally near the Westhampton Cemetery but had many Quogue members who took a day-long cart ride to attend services. As you can imagine, many of them vocalized the need for a compromise location.

A contemporaneous newspaper article stated that $5,000 had been raised to begin construction on the church. Put to a vote, the proposal passed after what seems to have been a spirited and rousing debate.

In the beginning, the east pews were for Quogue residents, while the Westhamptoners sat on the other side. Most of that tradition has faded, but Rev. Carey told me that a parishioner commented to him, “We never had a pastor’s wife sit on the Quogue side before.” Old grudges die hard.

Both buildings have so many of the same interesting details. There are clapboard, fish-scale and square shingles. Both have dark stained ceilings and walls; I am still going with pine as the wood.

The McBride house has an amazing mid­-floor bedroom in the front of the house between the second and third floors, with a conical paneled ceiling and super-tricky­-to­-navigate stairs, plus a trap door.

I will leave the serious analysis of Skidmore’s work to Anne Surchin. But his buildings deserve to be seen. I’m sure Rev. Carey would want me to invite you to come take a look on any given Sunday, when services begin at 10 a.m.