page_title: Lord & Burnham Building
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lord & Burnham Building / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The Irvington, New York waterfront, showing the Lord &amp; Burnham Building on the right. (after 1859)
context_page_description: The Lord & Burnham Building, located at the corner of Main and Astor Streets in Irvington, New York, United States, is a brick building in the Queen Anne architectural style built in the 1880s. In 1999 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was added as a contributing property to the Irvington Historic District in 2014.
  From 1870 on it had been home to Lord's Horticultural Works, a builder of boilers and conservatories that had relocated to Irvington to better serve the owners of the many Hudson Valley estates who were its main clients. A fire destroyed the original building; it was replaced by the current structure. As Lord & Burnham, it continued its business until 1988. The building currently houses condominium apartments and the village's public library.
context_section_description: In 1849 Frederick Lord, a carpenter in the upstate city of Buffalo, began building greenhouses for his customers. It became his full-time business, Lord's Horticultural Works, by 1856. He moved to Syracuse. In 1869 he took in his son-in-law, William Burnham, as a partner. He had also developed new methods of ventilating his buildings, and this led the company to enter the residential boiler market in 1873. It perfected its original cast iron sectional boiler design five years later and it became one of the top-selling models.
  Seven years later, in 1876, the firm moved to Irvington, close to its largest group of customers, the wealthy owners of large estates along the Hudson River north of New York City. The company worked from an existing building on the current site until it was destroyed in an 1881 fire. The current complex was built very quickly to replace it; it is not known who the architect is but it is likely that it was Frederick Lord himself. A map of the village from that year suggests that the factory wing may incorporate part of the original building.
  That year, the firm was also working on an important commission from railroad magnate Jay Gould. He, too, was replacing a burnt building, in his case the conservatories at Lyndhurst, his estate in nearby Tarrytown, today a National Historic Landmark (NHL). Lord built the first iron frame greenhouse in the country, revolutionizing the industry.
  Records from 1890 show that the company complex included a boiler shop, ironworks, carpentry shop and two lumber sheds. An insurance map says it employed 30 people. Shortly before Lord's death that year, the company name was changed to Lord & Burnham. In the years afterward it began filling in the Hudson across the tracks and building on it, expanding its facilities by about four acres (1.6 ha) by 1895.
  This was the period when Lord & Burnham was the market leader in building greenhouses. In addition to Lyndhurst, the company built the Enid Haupt Conservatory at what is now the New York Botanical Garden, another NHL, and the conservatory at the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens, listed on the Register today as a contributing property to the Cazenovia Park-South Park System. By 1903 the company's catalog boasted that the Irvington plant was the country's largest greenhouse production facility. Nine years later it claimed to employ 250 there, including a design staff with 18 engineers. Burnham served as an elected village official for short periods, as did Lord's son.
  Greenhouses were always erected at the factory before being disassembled and shipped for quality assurance purposes. The company claimed several other innovations in addition to the iron framing it had developed for Lyndhurst. It opened factories elsewhere in the country by the 1920s, and by 1930 it held nine patents related to greenhouse manufacture.
  During this period, greenhouse sales began to decline as only the truly wealthy could afford them. Boiler sales displaced greenhouses as the largest source of the company's profits. By the late 1940s Burnham Boilers had become a separate division headquartered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with its casting plant in Zanesville, Ohio. The company itself moved there in 1987; by then just 12 people worked in Irvington. All greenhouse production ended the next year and the factory was closed.
  The village did not want the building to stay empty for long. Its public library needed more space, and plans were soon finalized to convert 10,000 square feet (930 m²) of the factory wing into the new library, with 22 residential units upstairs. Architect Stephen Tilly of nearby Dobbs Ferry oversaw the $2.4 million project, which was completed in 2000.
caption: Building complex c.1890
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