William Halsey Wood

Family spiritual life centered around the House of Prayer, an Anglo-Catholic congregation where the children were introduced to ritualist liturgy and William became a member of the choir, eventually serving as its director.

During an unspecified time circa 1880, he is reported to have traveled to England and gained employment in the office of George Frederick Bodley, a leading figure in the High-church or Anglo-Catholic movement within the Anglican Communion.

On November 19, 1889, Wood married Florence Hemsley, a Philadelphian and member of the Church of St. James the Less in that city, one of the most prominent Anglo-Catholic congregations in America.

From his practice in Newark, New Jersey, Wood focused on two characteristic building types of the late 19th century: large single-family residences and ecclesiastical designs principally for the Episcopal Church.

Three of his suburban homes were featured in Artistic Country-Seats by G. W. Sheldon, an 1886 publication that included work by McKim, Mead & White, Wilson Eyre and other notable turn-of-the-century designers.

Though often seen as being heavily influenced by Richardson, the massive two-towered building is really a nod toward twentieth century expressionism, its abstract masses seeming to burst from their bases like missiles from silos.

At the opposite extreme, Wood entered and was one of four finalists in the competition for New York City's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an unsuccessful proposal that would have been larger than any of its European counterparts.

Wood died during an important transition in American architecture; a shift from the exuberance—some have said excesses—of nineteenth-century eclecticism to the functionally based perspectives of twentieth-century Modernism.

[5] One of the first to re-appraise Wood in a more positive light was the early 20th century medievalist, Ralph Adams Cram, himself a competitor for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.