Theodate Pope Riddle

Theodate Pope, left, with two classmates at Miss Porter's School, 1888.

Theodate Pope Riddle , née Effie Brooks Pope (born February 2, 1867 in Salem , Columbiana County , Ohio , † August 30, 1946 in Farmington , Hartford County , Connecticut ) was an American architect and spiritualist .

career

Theodate Pope Riddle was the only child of the entrepreneur, investor and art collector Alfred Atmore Pope (1842-1913) and his wife Ada Lunette Brooks (1844-1920). She was born into a wealthy family who lived on Cleveland , Ohio's posh Euclid Avenue , popularly known as Millionaires' Row. At the age of 19 she called herself "Theodate" after her paternal grandmother Theodate Stackpole Pope (1805-1887). Both grandfathers and father had always been interested in architecture and construction, so that Theodate also took a liking. Pope Riddle was a first cousin of the architect Philip Johnson .

Pope attended Miss Porter's School in Farmington , Connecticut and graduated from Middlesburger's School in Cleveland in 1886. She then moved into a house, Hill-Stead , in Farmington, which she had designed herself. It served her as an artistic focal point and as a contact point for other architects. Among her early architectural accomplishments was the reconstruction of the birthplace of former American President Theodore Roosevelt in New York City . Pope became a member of various organizations and associations, e. B. the Architectural League of New York, the Archaeological Institute of America and the Mediaeval Academy of America. She also joined the Unitarian Church in 1900 and the Colonial Dames of America in 1901.

Exterior view of the Avon Old Farms School.

Pope was an educated, progressive, and independent woman. With her parents, she made many trips to Europe , Alaska , Bermuda , Mexico and other places. At a young age, she also began to be interested in supernatural phenomena such as clairvoyance and ghost apparitions. Around 1914 she met Edwin William Friend, a young professor at Columbia University in New York, who was appointed secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research by James Hyslop and who was also the editor of the institute's journal. Pope then also became a member. A close collaboration developed, culminating in Friend and his wife Marjorie moving to Pope's Hill-Stead estate.

In December 1916, she became the sixth licensed female architect in New York State . In the years that followed, she designed the Avon Old Farms School in Avon and the Westover School . In 1923, an exhibition of photos of the Avon Old Farms was held at the Architectural Club of New Haven . In 1927 she received the Robinson Memorial Medal from the Architectural Club of New Haven for her work at Avon Old Farms .

On May 6, 1916, at the age of 49, she married John Wallace Riddle (1864–1941), a Republican politician from Minnesota who was, among other things, US ambassador to Russia (1907–1909) and Argentina (1921–1925). Riddle had been introduced to her by Anna Roosevelt Cowles, a sister of US President Theodore Roosevelt . The couple traveled extensively and adopted two children, Donald Carson (1917) and Paul Martin (1918). Theodate Pope Riddle had no biological children. Her husband died in December 1941; Pope herself died in her Farmington home in 1946 at the age of 79.

She was posthumously elected to the American Institute of Architects in 1981 . In 2003, Sandra L. Katz, a professor at Hartford University, published the book Dearest of Geniuses: A Life of Theodate Pope Riddle.

Accident of the RMS Lusitania

In the spring of 1915, Pope and Edwin Friend were invited to England by Oliver Lodge , then Britain's leading spiritualist. They also wanted to advertise their own newly formed society for researching parapsychological phenomena overseas.

On May 1, 1915, the two of them boarded the RMS Lusitania in New York with Pope's maid Emily Robinson , the fastest luxury liner of its time at the time. Because of the war between England and Germany, travelers to the Atlantic were warned against traveling with British ships, as these could be destroyed by German submarines . Despite the known danger, Pope booked a first class passage. Her personal acquaintances on board included the New York wine merchant George Kessler, and among her table companions in the first class dining room was Marie Depage . She originally occupied cabin D-54. After the first night, however, because of a noisy, large family in the neighboring cabin ( Paul Crompton with his wife and six children), she moved to cabin A-10 on the A deck.

During their walk on the promenade deck around noon on May 7, Pope and Friend suddenly heard a "dull explosion" when the German submarine U 20 fired a torpedo into the starboard side of the ocean liner. The sudden lean of the steamer hurled both of them against the wall of a corridor. Pope and Friend went to the boat deck, clogged with panicked passengers, where they watched the fully occupied lifeboats capsize. They decided not to get into one of the boats, but to jump off the ship together. Underwater they were caught in the suction of the sinking steamer. Pope reappeared shortly afterwards, was almost drowned by a man who wanted to hold on to her and clung to floating debris. She passed out after spending several hours in the freezing water. In the evening a fishing cutter found her clinging motionless to an oar, which is why she was believed dead, lifted out of the water with a boat hook and placed on a pile of corpses.

It was thanks to an attentive passenger that Pope was revived and taken to a hotel in Queenstown (now Cobh). Edwin Friend and her maid were both killed in the sinking of the Lusitania . Over the next few days, Pope's hair began to fall out due to the shock . She was so exhausted from the exertion that it was a week before she could get out of bed. She described the experience as follows: "I saw hundreds of panicked, screaming people in this gray, wet inferno." For the damage suffered (loss of luggage and jewelry) and "personal inconvenience", Pope was awarded $ 30,000 by the Cunard Line.

bibliography

• Phyllis Fenn Cunningham: My Godmother Theodate Pope Riddle. A Reminiscence of Creativity . Phoenix, Canaan NH 1983, ISBN 0-914016-97-0 .
• Brooks Emeny: Theodate Pope Riddle and the Founding of Avon Old Farms . Avon Old Farms, Avon CT 1973.
• Henry Edward Flanagan: Aspirando et Perseverando. The Evolution of the Avon Old Farms School as Influenced by Its Founder . University Microfilms, Ann Arbor MI 1978 (University of Michigan, PhD thesis).
• Mark Alan Hewitt: The Architect and the American Country House. 1890-1940 . Yale University Press, New Haven CT 1990, ISBN 0-300-04740-1 , (Hill-Stead, pp. 156-163, figs. 171, 178-182).
• Judith Paine: Theodate Pope Riddle. Her life and work . National Park Service, Washington DC 1979 (Exhibition Catalog: New York, May 24 - September 1, 1979).
• Adolf K. Placzek (Ed.): Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects . Volume 3: Lhote - Schlueter . Free Press, New York NY 1982, ISBN 0-02-925030-7 , pp. 578f.
• Gordon Clark Ramsey (Ed.): Aspiration and Perseverance. The History of Avon Old Farms School . The School, Avon CT 1984.
• Robert AM Stern: Pride of Place. Building the American Dream . American Heritage, New York NY et al. 1986, ISBN 0-395-36696-8 (mention of Westover and Avon Old Farms).
• Susana Torre (Ed.): Women in American Architecture. A Historic and Contemporary Perspective . Whitney Library of Design, New York NY 1977, ISBN 0-8230-7485-4 .