1892 - Architecture, Real Estate

Architecture, Real Estate

Engineer-architect Montgomery C. Meigs of Pension Office Building fame dies at Washington, D.C., January 2 at age 75.

British judges at Madras move into a new High Court building, a red brick structure exceeded in size among judicial buildings only by the courts of London.

Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza is graced with a Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch dedicated to the Civil War dead. The arch serves as an entrance to Prospect Park.

Marble House is completed at Newport, Rhode Island, by architect Richard Morris Hunt for railroad heir William K. Vanderbilt, now 42. The summer "cottage" on Bellevue Avenue has lines derived from those of the Grand Trianon and Petit Trianon at Versailles and will be augmented in 1913 by a lacquered Chinese teahouse on Cliff Walk.

The Reno Inclined Elevator patented March 15 by New York mining engineer Jesse W. (Wilford) Reno, 30, is the world's first escalator. It will be installed in the fall of 1896 at Coney Island's Old Iron Pier. The flat-step moving staircase patented by U.S. inventor Charles A. Wheeler August 2 is the first practical escalator, although it will never be built; inventor Charles D. Seeberger will buy Wheeler's patent, incorporate its basic feature in his own improved design, coin the brand name Escalator, and have Otis Elevator produce it; the Seeberger Escalator will be used at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and in Gimbels department store at Philadelphia in 1901.

The cornerstone of New York's St. John the Divine is laid December 27 on an 11½-acre site acquired last year on Morningside Heights by the Episcopal diocese of New York for $850,000. Planned as the world's largest cathedral, it has been designed by George Lewis Heins, 32, and Christopher Grant La Farge, 30, who will be succeeded in 1911 by Ralph Adams Cram, now 28, and Frank William Ferguson, now 30, who will change its design from Romanesque to Gothic.

Denver's Brown Palace Hotel opens in August as prospectors crowd into Cripple Creek to make their fortunes in the goldfields. Pioneer Henry Cordis Brown, now 70, arrived by oxcart at Cherry Creek in 1860 and by 1888 owned much of the miners' encampment that became Denver. Located in what heretofore was Brown's pasture, the hotel has a ship's tavern whose head waiter is dressed in nautical garb with four stripes on his sleeve; its breakfast menu includes creamed chipped beef, chicken hash and cream, broiled Rocky Mountain trout, liver and bacon, and double-thick lamb chops.