William James Dodd (1862–1930) was an American architect and designer who worked mainly in Louisville, Kentucky from 1886 through the end of 1912 and in Los Angeles, California from early 1913 until his death. Dodd rose from the so-called First Chicago School of architecture, though of greater influence for his mature designs was the classical aesthetic of the Beaux-Arts style ascendant after the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. His design work also included functional and decorative architectural glass and ceramics, furniture, home appliances, and literary illustration. In a prodigious career lasting more than 40 years, Dodd left many structures that are still standing on both east and west coasts and in the midwest and upper south, among the best known of these being the original Presbyterian Seminary campus (now Jefferson Community & Technical College), the Weissinger-Gaulbert Apartments, and the old YMCA building, all three in downtown Louisville facing Broadway. Also notable are his numerous residential and ecclesiastical designs, restored and in continuous use in Kentucky and Tennessee. In California, examples of his extant work include the Pacific Center and Hearst's Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Building in downtown Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse south of Pasadena as well as residences across Los Angeles, in the Pacific Palisades, in Altadena and more distantly in Palm Springs. Some of the earliest attributed and oldest designs of his career may be found in Hyde Park, Chicago.

Early years

William J. Dodd was born in Quebec City, Canada, in 1862. Prior to emigrating from Canada to the United States and Chicago Illinois, William's English/Welsh father, Edward, was an inn keeper and before that a wharfinger, and his Irish mother, Mary Dinning, was a school teacher and dressmaker. In 1869, the family of six, then including daughters Jane (Jenny) Dinning and Elizabeth Ann (Lizzie), and sons Edward Jr. and William James, moved to Chicago. The 1870 Chicago Directory gives the first known address for the Dodds on south Des Plaines near the original site of the Old St. Patrick's Church. In 1871, the ill-timed move of the Dodd household to West Harrison Street in Ward 9 placed them in the path of the great Chicago fire during October of the same year. Dodd received his earliest training in drawing and design in the office studio of Chicago architect William Le Baron Jenney, c. 1877–1879. His first professional employment appears to be from 1880 into mid 1883 for the Pullman Car Company as a draftsman of architect Solon Spencer Beman's designs for the planned city of Pullman, Illinois now the Pullman National Monument. Dodd's social life in Pullman was marked with athletic participation on the first Pullman competitive rowing crew. As a member of the Pullman Rowing Club and the Pullman Pleasure Club he was often mentioned in the press accounts of fetes and dance parties that he coordinated for the young elites of Pullman and Hyde Park. This sporting sociability is not merely incidental to Dodd but returns as an important feature of his later life in Louisville, with his membership in the Pendennis Club and Louisville Country Club, and in Los Angeles with his co-founding of The Uplifters Club, an offshoot of the Los Angeles Athletic Club. In November 1889, William married Ione Estes of Memphis, TN. The marriage produced no children. Ione was from a large family of some political and historical importance in post-Reconstruction era Tennessee and in the Upland South region. It is not yet determined what was the religious practice, if any, of William and Ione after marriage. Ione was Presbyterian, and their marriage was officiated by a Presbyterian minister. William was christened in the Methodist Church, the religious denomination of his mother. There are still many uncertainties in Dodd's biography. Although naturalized in 1869 upon entering the United States, from the 1890s onward Dodd identifies as Chicago-born, doing so, Jay Gatsby-like, in all kinds of public documents. In an 1897 interview with a reporter for the newspaper Louisville Courier-Journal W. J. Dodd left the reporter, and thus posterity, with the impression that he was a native Chicagoan, that he graduated from "the Chicago schools" and had been in the first graduating class of the Chicago Art Institute. The archives of the Institute do not yet support this claim. Similarly unclear is precisely when Dodd began his professional practice in Louisville. The year usually offered in the histories of Kentucky architects (from Withey to Hedgepeth, to Kleber, to Luhan, Domer and Mohney ) for Dodd's arrival in Louisville is 1884, based upon the aforementioned 1897 Courier-Journal article. In contrast, around this same time, Inland Architect tracks Dodd taking employment as an architect with the Northern Pacific Railway upon recommendation by S. S. Beman and moving to the rail company's office in Portland Oregon only to return to Chicago (Hyde Park) and employment with the Beman brothers (S. S. and W. I.) by the end of 1885 after the collapse of the Northern Pacific's leadership and its reorganization. Contrary to what was reported in the previously cited 1897 newspaper interview, there is yet no evidence that Dodd was ever employed by McKim, Mead and White in New York; however, if the employment happened it may have been related to Dodd's brief time in Portland and plans by the Railway to build the Portland Union Station. The journal Inland Architect of February 1886 announced Dodd's imminent departure from Chicago to begin a partnership with Oscar C. Wehle of Louisville, saying: "Mr Dodd will [soon] be a valuable addition to the architects of Louisville". By September 1886 Dodd is cited as partner with Oscar Wehle for the design of "a magnificent three story brown stone residence" in Louisville. In November 1886, Dodd was elected to membership in the Western Association of Architects, or WAA, his home city being given as Louisville. Dodd first appears as a resident, a boarder, in Louisville in the 1887 Caron's Louisville Directory, and in February of same year, a trade journal cites "Wehle & Dodd, architects, of Louisville." In December 1887, the Courier-Journal newspaper gives the partnership office in Louisville as "s.e. cor. Fifth and Main"

[Dodd's earliest identified design:

a cottage for W. I. Beman on Blackstone Ave. Hyde Park, Chicago. 1886. Click on picture to enlarge. | upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/5425SBlackstone///HydePark///DoddDesign1886.jpg]

Career

Dodd spent nearly 27 years in Louisville. During this time his professional partners were Oscar C. Wehle, Mason Maury (1889–1896), Arthur Cobb, and Kenneth McDonald. Also, Dodd's output from these years contained many free-lance projects, and in at least one case Dodd teamed with Ohio architect Frank Mills Andrews. He worked throughout Kentucky and across the midwest, specifically Illinois, Indiana, and Tennessee, creating structures of exceptional craftsmanship and high style, designs which traced the transitional tastes and technologies of the period leading up to Modernism. On the east coast, extant Dodd structures from the early 1890s can be found in Virginia, in the historic Ghent (Norfolk) neighborhood. On Christmas Day 1912 Dodd departed the midwest to continue his profession in the greater Los Angeles area, a period lasting until his death there in June 1930. Upon arrival in Los Angeles, Dodd immediately partnered with J. Martyn Haenke (1877–1963), but only briefly, through October 1913. After a year of free lance, Dodd teamed with William Richards (1871–1945), his longest professional partnership, from 1915 until his death. In southern California, "the Southland", Dodd's buildings are to be found in the old downtown financial district around Pacific Center, above Hollywood in Laughlin Park and Hancock Park, to the west in Rustic Canyon, Playa Del Rey and Long Beach, southeast to San Gabriel, and northeast in Altadena. Related to Dodd's Los Angeles work are residences in Oak Glen and Palm Springs, California. From as early as 1893, and to the end of his life, Dodd was a mentor to talented younger designers who were new to the profession, designers with now well-known names like Lloyd Wright, Thomas Chalmers Vint, and Adrian Wilson, often outsiders without a developed practice and contending with a new client base and fast evolving licensing standards in cities enjoying rapid expansion as was Louisville after the American Civil War and Los Angeles after World War I. The architect Julia Morgan, a mostly free-lance upstate California designer from San Francisco, rare as a female in a male-dominated profession, formed a team with W. J. Dodd and J. M. Haenke as her LA facilitators and design partners for William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Building, a landmark downtown Los Angeles project completed in 1915. William Dodd's design work extended to glass and ceramics. His designs of Teco pottery are among the most sought-after and rare of the Arts and Crafts movement products introduced by the Gates Potteries near Chicago Illinois. He also designed furniture and art glass windows for many of his best residential and commercial buildings; examples of such work by Dodd are to be seen in the Ferguson Mansion, currently the Filson Historical Society, and the Hoyt Gamble house, both of Louisville.

Civic and cultural involvement

Dodd was an amateur musical and theatrical performer. For public and private occasions he was known to sing popular airs and, as well, provide recitations of Irish, Welsh & German verse; his effective ear for the Irish Gaelic pronunciation was remarked upon. He served on the founding boards of the Louisville Symphony Orchestra (1908) and the Louisville Art Association (1909), now Louisville Visual Art, and he was a member of dramatic societies in both Louisville and Los Angeles. From 1916 to 1919 he served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, this latter organization being the predecessor of the LA Philharmonic, and he was a mover and shaker in the Los Angeles Gamut Club, an exclusively male music fraternity. In 1918, the journal Pacific Coast Musical Review said "It seems Mr. Dodd has the knack of making artists and others do what he wants them to" and nicknamed Dodd "the Mayor of Seventh Street", presumably a reference to the theater and vaudeville district of old Los Angeles. From 1917 until his death he served on the California State Board of Examiners. In early 1930 he joined the newly founded International Deserts Conservation League as an advisory board member.

Death

William became acutely ill while traveling abroad with his wife in the spring of 1930, returning home without Ione in early May and dying at Los Angeles on June 14, 1930, in Hollywood Hospital. Cause of death: lymphocytic leukemia with hypostatic pneumonia. The funeral was postponed until June 28, 1930, upon the return of Ione from Europe, his last rites and burial conducted at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale, Little Church of the Flowers. Obituary notices of June 15, 23, 27 and 28 make no mention of any religious facilitation of Dodd's obsequies. For enlarged context on Dodd's religious affiliation, see the "Early Years" section above. Ione lived on, accompanied by two widowed sisters Kate & Sallie, in California. Death came for Ione in February 1950 as a patient at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, per death certificate.

Extant designs

Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee

Street numbers reflect the year 1909 citywide renumbering of street addresses in advance of the 1910 U.S. Census.

California

Demolished or destroyed Dodd structures

Kentucky

Illinois

Tennessee

California