Talk:Edna S. Purcell House

message: I added a picture, but it really doesn't look too good -- I took it on a day when it was starting to rain, so the colors are off and the sky is unnaturally bright.  Also, the rain sort of blurs things.  I'll try to get out there again and take another photo when I can.  --Elkman 03:48, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The sources I'm looking at have different names for the house, as well as the one at 2409 Lake of the Isles Parkway.  AIA Guide to the Twin Cities calls the 2328 Lake Place house the "Purcell-Cutts House" and the one on 2409 Lake of the Isles Parkway "Catherine Gray House".  This was apparently the house that William Gray Purcell planned for his family first, but then named for his grandmother when she moved from Chicago in 1907.  The Minneapolis Institute of Arts calls the Lake Place house the "Purcell-Cutts House".  organica.com calls it the "Edna S. Purcell Residence".  Another book, At Home on the Prairie: The Houses of Purcell & Elmslie, calls it the Purcell-Cutts House.  Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission calls it the William Gray Purcell House.  It's a complicated lineage, so I'm thinking we might as well go with the majority and call it the "Purcell-Cutts House".  Anson Cutts was the second owner of the house, and his family willed the house to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  --Elkman (Elkspeak) 20:24, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

text: The title blocks on the original working drawings are usually considered the proper attribution of a building in making an architectural citation. The title block for the 2409 Lake of the Isles house is "William G. Purcell residence." This house was built in 1907, and his grandmother, Catherine Gray, came to live with him there prior to his marriage to Edna S. Purcell in 1908. When the two women could not get along, Purcell built his wife a second house across the alley on Lake Place. The title blocks of these drawings read "Edna S. Purcell residence." (Happy to supply scanned images, if that helps.) To make a fair and just peace in his life, the original house on Lake of the Isles was thereafter referred to as the Catherine Gray house since his grandmother continued to reside there until 1916--when the Purcells moved to Philadelphia. Anson willed the Lake Place house, together with a $400,000 endowment, to MIA in the early 1990s with the condition that the official name in the museum registry be "The Purcell-Cutts house." Compilation sources like the AIA guide are not usually written with an eye toward the scholarly perspective, even though it seems they should be IMHO.
Since the rest of the P&E buildings that are being added to Wikipedia use the original title block name, it seems to me that the Edna S. Purcell residence should be the reference, both for consistency and to respect the woman for whom it was created. The Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission citation is simply a blatant error in their usage. The complete commission list of the firm with job titles as they appear on the original working drawings and office records was published as an appendix to my P&E monograph in "Purcell and Elmslie, Architects," in Art and Life on the Upper Mississippi, 1890-1914: Minnesota 1900 (University of Delaware Press, 1994). --User:Organicus  —Preceding undated comment was added at 20:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
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