Frank Lloyd Wright's Almost House in Warwick - Goodwin

Frank Lloyd Wright's Almost House in Warwick - Goodwin

Thank you for Will Morgan’s fine article about “Frank Lloyd Wright in Rhode Island,” which appeared in your March 6 issue. Decades ago, I searched for the Wright family’s home in Pawtucket, but was unable to find it.

I would like to add a few more details about the master architect’s contacts here.  Perhaps the most important is that in 1946 he designed a home for Mr. & Mrs. William R. Slater for a site that they had purchased in Warwick.  Unfortunately, however, this splendid example of a suburban dwelling for a middle-class family was never built.  I learned about the commission from an illustration in a beautiful book, Bruce B. Pfeiffer’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s Drawings: Masterworks from the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, which was published in 1990.

So of course I was eager to find Mr. & Mrs. Slater to learn about their experiences working with Wright.  They’re being dozens of Rhode Islanders named Slater, I called about 15 homes before a Mr. Slater suggested that I call the Cranston Public Library because of its excellent reference staff.  So I made that call and learned that I was probably searching for Eleanor Slater, a prominent state legislator who later became the first head of the state’s Division of Aging, later known as the Department of Elderly Affairs.  In 1994, about four years after I reached William and Eleanor Slater, Gov. Bruce Sundlun would name the state’s psychiatric hospital in her honor.

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The Slaters grew up and married in New Jersey and in 1944 relocated to Rhode Island.  They were living in Riverside when, having dreamed of commissioning a Wright residence, wrote a letter to his home and office near Spring Green, Wisconsin.  He was happy to accept the Slaters’ invitation, but after a student architect arrived in Warwick to supervise construction, William and Eleanor decided that the cost of about $40,000 was just too expensive.  The student architect suggested that they meet with Wright at his office-apartment at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, so they made such arrangements.  Wright studied his plans and then told the couple, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing more that I can do.  Mr. Slater, you’re still a young man, so go earn the difference.” 

I interviewed William and Eleanor when they were living in a wonderful 19th-century home on Church Lane in Wickford.  Its numerous brick chimneys reminded them of a Wright home.  The Slaters hoped that one of their sons, who was living in Ohio, would build their Wright home someday- even though it was designed for a particular site- a hill overlooking Narragansett Bay.  The Slaters, whom I much enjoyed meeting, are buried in Quidnessett Memorial Cemetery in North Kingston.

I am aware of a woman, now about 70, who grew up in a Wright home, the Gerald Tonkens House, in suburban Cincinnati.  She has lived most of her adult life in Rhode Island and has wonderful memories of her childhood dwelling.  Was it merely a coincidence that her second husband, now deceased, was an architect?

I am also aware of a former Wright client who was laid to rest in Providence’s Swan Point Cemetery.  This is Nina Anderton (1898-1979), a native of Madison, Wisconsin, who in 1952 built Wright’s Anderton Court Shops, a three-story arcade on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Her second husband, Raymond Anderton (1881-1939), was a Pawtucket native.  His parents, John and Mary, are buried close to Wright’s boyhood home at Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls. 

Around 1933, Wright lectured at Brown, hoping to recruit apprentices for his new Taliesin Fellowship, which would be based at his compound, Taliesin, in central Wisconsin.  Unfortunately, he found no takers.  But he found other dreamers from New York City to Boston, many of whom I have interviewed.  During the early 1990s, I conducted dozens of oral history interviews with many leading architects on behalf of the Wright archives, which were located at Wright’s Arizona compound, Taliesin West, near Scottsdale.  A few years ago the archives were transferred to the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University’s Avery Library.

There’s one more structure in Rhode Island that can be easily associated with Frank Lloyd Wright.  This is the core of Brown’s Hillel House, located at 80 Brown Street, which was constructed in 1878, about a year after the Wright family left Pawtucket.  This structure, commissioned by Caroline Alden and originally known as Froebel Hall, was a school for training kindergarten teachers.  The first such school in this country had been built in Boston a few years earlier.  Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), a German philosopher and educator (with some architectural training), was a founder of the kindergarten movement.  Wright’s mother, Anna, learned about Froebel when she saw examples of his “blocks” and other toys exhibited at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition in 1876.  It is not known if her son accompanied her, but Frank later enjoyed playing with the “blocks,” which became fundamental to his outlook.

Rhode Island is linked with Froebel and Wright in still another way, for Henry Barnard (1811-1900), who became the state’s first commissioner of education in 1845, was a Froebel disciple- both in his belief in the kindergarten concept and in the training of teachers.  Barnard, the namesake of the Providence school, also became this country’s first commissioner of education.

All of these Rhode Island connections lead me to conclude that architectural creation at its best surely revolves around play.  How sad that there weren’t more imaginative and playful clients in Rhode Island who sought Wright’s magic.  Unfortunately, there were relatively few in all of New England. 

Nevertheless, for a quarter-century, Betsey and I have enjoyed living in an Arts & Crafts bungalow built in Providence in 1920. There are two sister bungalows on our street. This year would be quite late for Wright’s formative style, but his influence is nevertheless evident.  Indeed, these dwellings express a nearly ideal synthesis of simplicity, geometry, craftsmanship, nature, and beauty- a notion he described as “organic.”

Thanks again for Mr. Morgan’s fine article.

George M. Goodwin has written and lectured on Frank Lloyd Wright, synagogue and museum architecture, Holocaust memorials, and other aspects of American Jewish history. A specialist in oral history research, he is also served as archivist of Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island.