Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes

• Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes
• Born: April 11, 1867
• Died: December 18, 1944

Architect, housing reformer, and antiquarian was born in New York City, the eldest of nine children of Anson Phelps Stokes and Helen Louisa (Phelps) Stokes, of English descent. The Phelps family, to which both parents belonged, were Episcopalians who had been in America since the seventeenth century; after making a fortune in real estate and banking, they had established a tradition of public service, being active benefactors of the American Bible Society, the American Board for Foreign Missions, the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Civil Service Reform League, and various hospital boards. His aunts Caroline and Olivia established the Phelps-Stokes Fund for the education and welfare of blacks.

After attending the Berkeley School in New York and St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, Stokes went to Harvard, where he was an indifferent student in architecture and engineering courses. During the two years he spent in the family banking business after his graduation in 1891 he was convinced by reformers that improved housing for the poor was an urgent social need and that he could make a worthwhile contribution to public service as an architect. He studied the economic aspects of building and design for two years at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and from 1894 to 1897 attended the École des Beaux-Arts. While in Paris, he worked for a time in the office of Henri Duray, an expert in apartment-building design, and became acquainted with Samuel Barnett, founder of the Toynbee Hall settlement house in London.

With John Mead Howells, son of the novelist William Dean Howells, Stokes collaborated on a design that was accepted for the new University Settlement House in New York City. Their firm of Howells & Stokes, which lasted until 1917, was responsible for the Bon wit Teller building and the headquarters of the American Geographic Society in New York, the Baltimore Stock Exchange, St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia, Woodbridge Hall at Yale, and Paine Hall and the Dudley Memorial Gate at Harvard.

The late 1890s in New York City were a time of both explosive growth and loud cries for reform in the housing field. Investigations by a special New York State Tenement House Committee under Richard Watson Gilder in 1894 had revealed widespread corruption and unsafe conditions and had reawakened interest in the possibilities of “investment philanthropy” in model tenements by private companies willing to accept a modest return on their capital. The Improved Housing Council, formed in 1896 as a preliminary to such a company, held a design competition to which Stokes submitted an entry.

The first prize went to Samuel Flagg, author of an 1894 article in Scribner’s with which Stokes had been much impressed. According to Flagg, the basic evil in the New York City housing situation was the original decision to divide city blocks into lots measuring 25 feet by 100 feet. These were impractical for multiple dwellings because of the necessary duplication of halls and partitions. The main effect of these lots, said Flagg, was to stimulate speculation. Both his design and the second-prize entry called for an arrangement of apartment houses built around a central court. The small group of New York architects interested in tenement housing agreed that this design was the key to efficient and economical housing development.

In 1900 Stokes sponsored and supervised a tenement-architecture exhibition and competition by the Charity Organization Society’s Tenement House Committee, of which he was a founding member. After visiting the exhibition, Governor Theodore Roosevelt appointed Stokes a member of the New York State Tenement House Commission, in which capacity he helped frame the Tenement House Law of 1901 that spelled the doom of the crowded and insanitary dumbbell-style tenement and inaugurated a new era in housing reform.

The use of the architectural competition as a lever for change was one of Stokes’s distinctive contributions to tenement-house reform; the other was his insistence that private enterprise could not be expected to bear the cost of site clearance and acquisition necessitated by the new designs. In his Report on Park Tenements, submitted to the state Tenement House Commission, Stokes proposed that the municipality purchase, condemn, and raze the worst blocks, set aside the interior spaces for playgrounds, and sell the surrounding land to private construction companies, whose model tenements would provide their tenants with fresh air, light, and proper sanitation—features absent from dumbbell tenements—at a cost that would not require rent increases.

This plan, based on English precedents and anticipating both the garden apartments of the 1920s and post-World War II urban-renewal programs, was both too sophisticated and too drastic for a society unaccustomed to such sweeping use of eminent domain and conditioned to think of housing in solely private terms. In effect, the plan was stillborn, and Stokes placed the blame for its fate and for the length of time required to obtain approval for two of his own projects on what he regarded as excessive emphasis on building codes and other restrictive legislation. He resigned from the Charity Organization Society’s Tenement House Committee in 1911. Although he continued to work for better housing as director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the issue became a dead letter in the World War I housing boom. Not until 1930 was his plan put into effect, by the Prudential Insurance Company and the city of Newark, New Jersey; although it proved practicable, Depression conditions in the 1930s discouraged imitation.

During the next architectural competition organized by Stokes (it was sponsored by the New York City Chamber of Commerce, the Real Estate Board, and other private organizations) to find designs of special merit to which banks might grant preferential loans, the relationship between mass housing and private enterprise came to the fore in a way that starkly revealed Stokes’s limitations as a reformer. Criticized for not specifying a maximum lot coverage for each entry, Stokes replied that the purpose of the competition was not to solve the housing problem but to work for improvement within existing economic conditions, which required a very high rate of coverage in order to produce a six percent return on investment. Stokes was a capitalist by upbringing and temperament—he served as an officer of real-estate companies owned by his relatives—and did not doubt that housing for the poor would improve when advances in construction methods made better tenements a profitable enterprise for private investors. The public-housing programs enacted under the New Deal appalled him, together with the general decline of the genteel society he had known in his youth and which he evoked in his mimeographed autobiography, “Random Selections of a Happy Life” (1941).

Stokes’s passionate antiquarianism and his hobby of collecting old prints fused in his six-volume Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1492-1909 (1915-28), to which he devoted twenty years of his life and which remains the definitive compilation of data on the history, geography, people, buildings, and institutions of old New York. In a portrait by John Singer Sargent, his wife, Edith Minturn Stokes, whom he married in 1906, appears as a Gibson Girl beauty in tennis costume, and Stokes is a slim bearded gentleman in a white linen suit. They were the parents of an adopted daughter, Helen Bicknell. Stokes died at the age of seventy-seven, in Charleston, South Carolina, of a cerebral hemorrhage; his ashes are kept in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University.

Stokes’s letter books are in the New-York Historical Society. His ideas on housing are outlined in J. Ford, et al., Slums and Housing (1936), financed by the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Stokes’s contributions are favorably assessed by his colleagues in R. W. de Forest and L. Veiller, The Tenement House Problem (1903). R. Lubove, “I. N. Phelps Stokes: Tenement Architect, Economist, Planner,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, May 1964, is a modern treatment. See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973).