Willis G. Hale

His tastes inclining more to the latter profession he decided to adopt it, and began study in Buffalo, going later to Rochester, and finally to Philadelphia, where he entered the office of Samuel Sloan, and later had Mr. John McArthur Jr. as his preceptor.

His lively facades often contrasted sculpture, tile, inventive brick- and stone-work, in an exuberant high-Victorian style: "Hale's genius was to take ... essentially identical rowhouses, with their mass-produced industrial parts and lathe-turned woodwork, and to make them distinctive.

The over-the-top interiors were decorated by George Herzog, and included buxom nudes as newel posts, walls embellished with alabaster and bronze, and murals of the Widener children in Renaissance dress.

[3] Almost an anachronism when completed in 1887, the family lived there only a dozen years before building a sedate neo-Georgian palace in the suburbs: Lynnewood Hall.

The city house served as a branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1900–1946; the offices of an architectural firm, and in 1970 became the Conwell School of Theology's Institute for Black Ministries.

Hale designed numerous ornate office buildings in Center City Philadelphia, but few survive unaltered.

He built his own office building at the southwest corner of Chestnut and Juniper Streets (1887, expanded 1892, altered), an unsuccessful investment that almost bankrupted him.

... Their walls were always more clever than their plans; when they were forced to change brick and brownstone arches for marble cornices, as the tastes of the nineties demanded, the new work showed seams.