Wassell as Architect of Tudor Arms
Despite being the architect of the Tudor Arms Apartments in Portland, Richard Wassell has been denied credit for his role in the building’s masterful design. The below attempts to correct the record.
Image at right is a modified version of Angelus Studio photographs, 1880s-1940s, University of Oregon. (02 Sep 2023). Tudor Arms Apartments, on corner of Couch and 18th, Portland. Retrieved from https://oregondigital.org/concern/images/df71ft50k
Alexander C. Ewart. Claussen and Claussen. William L. Morgan. Elmer E. Feig. Carl L. Linde. These five architects or architectural firms are known for their masterful designs of apartment houses (strictly residential buildings) in the first few decades of the twentieth century in Portland, Oregon. This paper aims to introduce Richard F. Wassell into the consideration among the elite apartment house designers of early-20th century Portland by correcting the historical record on a building that he designed but does not get credit for.
Richard Fleming Wassell is remembered in Portland as a developer of apartment houses and for the four-block development in SE Portland on Peacock Lane. Wassell is also often tied to Carl Linde—a renowned architect in Portland during Wassell’s career. Linde is celebrated as a master architect which includes his 1915 design for the Tudor Arms Apartments at 1811 NE Couch Street. However, I refute Linde’s role with Tudor Arms in the paragraphs below. Linde did not design Tudor Arms although he all but certainly assisted. Instead, the building’s architect was Wassell.
It is merely human nature, in the absence of evidence, to rely upon conjecture to explain an unknown. Conjecture can be integral in building an understanding of a larger story or construct. When done without skepticism, however, it can spin a fact where none exists. And that fabrication can be restated enough that it becomes a false statement of fact. And that is what has happened with Tudor Arms.
While researching another apartment building that was developed by Wassell in 1913, I surmised that a complete accounting of his career had never been conducted. Historian and architect Ernestina Fuenmayor had also come to the same conclusion in 2017 in her National Register nomination for Peacock Lane and therein provided the most thorough review of his career to date. Even still, there were some notable gaps in understanding of his life and career accomplishments. I dug deeper than I should have and realized many of Wassell’s accomplishments were forgotten and now outright denied. I was compelled to unearth all I could on the man.
As I started accounting for all the properties that Wassell was involved with, one of the big surprises I came across was related to Tudor Arms. The 1994 National Register nomination for the building formally recognizes the significance of the building due to its architecture. Every single other modern resource I could find that mentions the architect of Tudor Arms credits Linde as the architect.
Newspaper reporting did not identify the architect for Wassell’s earliest apartment houses—starting in 1910 until the first half of 1912. No original plans were unearthed through the City of Portland’s records requests. Through my deep dive into Wassell’s arc, it became evident to me that he was the designer of these apartment houses. In studying the designs of his apartment buildings, it is clear that each of his designs was on an upward trajectory. He started with a 1910 apartment house that had minimal detail and awkward fenestration patterns. But with each project, his designs became more developed, sophisticated, and cohesive. Tudor Arms was Wassell’s seventh apartment building design. While a leap forward in design, it seems like the natural trajectory of Wassell’s taste and talents.
Having already researched some of Wassell’s other buildings, I was skeptical of this assertion. I was also surprised to discover that Wassell was a uniquely talented and hard-working individual. He was and is still known as a developer and general contractor for numerous apartment houses during his relatively brief career. Contrary to present beliefs, Wassell was also an accomplished architect of apartment houses, including for all the ones he developed in the first of three discernable phases of his career. Wassell completed no fewer than seven apartment houses between 1910 and 1916 and remarkably served as the developer, architect, and builder in all of them.
While these first-phase apartment buildings were developed in conjunction with others, Wassell’s role in the companies was central. The first company formed was in his own name: the R. F. Wassell Company. Wassell was only 23 years old when his namesake company was formed. He had four partners backing him, the youngest of which was nearly double his age. In this and its next iteration (the Royal Arms Company), Wassell’s partners were silent partners, providing capital and guidance on building construction. Wassell was the out-front developer, the on-site general contractor, and the brains behind the architectural plans. None of his business partners ever had experience in architectural design. Wassell clearly did and identified himself as an architect starting in 1909. While he never worked as a draftsman or an apprentice in an architecture firm, he learned design through self-study, his hand-on work as a builder, and likely through the International Correspondence School. ICS was the most widely used program for correspondence coursework—a popular means of achieving post-secondary education and technical training during the early 20th century. A Portland newspaper in 1908 described ICS as the means in which “carpenters have become architects,” among other career advancements. Wassell had been a carpenter after graduating high school in Walla Walla, WA where he thereafter worked for his father’s and cousin’s construction business.
Oregon Daily Journal, August 29, 1915, 31.
In the second half of 1912, Wassell was the architect and builder for another developer (an anomaly for his career) and it would be the first time that a local newspaper article gave him credit for designing the building. Articles on his subsequent apartment houses, through 1916, that bothered to mention the architect listed him—and no others—as the architect. Linde, to be sure, was never mentioned in any reports about these buildings. These reports, as seen below, did include Tudor Arms.
Sunday Oregonian, February 14, 1915, p. 54
Pacific Coast Architect, 1915, Volumes 9-10
The most convincing bit of proof for who designed Tudor Arms came from the original building plans acquired from the City of Portland. They clearly show that Richard Wassell was the architect for the building. However, in the lower right corner, the initials “C. L. L.” curiously appear, certainly for Carl L. Linde. This suggests that Linde was working for Wassell at the time Tudor Arms was being designed. While the two likely collaborated on the design, it is also possible that Linde was just drafting the plans. I suppose we may never know. However, with Wassell’s name directly adjacent to the word “architect,” there is little to mistake who should get credit for the design.
One other piece of evidence does exist for Linde’s likely involvement in Tudor Arms. A 1925 article in the Pacific Builder and Engineer noted that Linde designed Tudor Arms although it does not indicate that Linde actually said this. It seems the author, through his conversation with Linde, assumed he was the lead architect. While we know that it is not true based on the above, it does lend some evidence that Linde and Wassell perhaps collaborated some on the design for Tudor Arms.
Conjecture can be made about a much earlier connection between Linde and Wassell’s elders when both were living in Milwaukie, Wisconsin in the 1880s—Linde as an architect and the Wassell families as bricklayers and stone masons. While conceivable, this is just speculation. The first solid pieces of evidence of their association points to 1916, the year after Tudor Arms was built. In 1916, Wassell and Linde, developer and architect, respectively, started sharing an office. This was also the year that Wassell had completed Imperial Arms Apartments, his first apartment house after Tudor Arms. Linde became a resident of Imperial Arms (1429 SW 14th Avenue) upon its completion in September. Wassell, with Linde engaged as the architect, began plans for another apartment house, called Republic Arms, which was to be larger, more elaborate, and more “European” than Tudor Arms. When Wassell was unable to launch the development of Republic Arms (at least partly due to the United States’ April 1917 entry into World War One), Wassell would not engage in building apartment houses again until 1921.
The American Architect, July to December 1916, vol. CX, 46.
When Wassell did eventually build again in 1921, he and Linde would consummate their earlier partnership with the completion of the Ambassador Apartments and the Sovereign Hotel. Both built in downtown Portland, these nine-story structures catapulted Linde’s reputation for apartment house design in Portland. Prior to these two designs, Linde had not designed any other strictly-residential apartment houses that we know of. His relative lack of experience was arguably buttressed by Wassell’s experience being a do-it-all apartment house magnate. Therefore, I believe—but cannot definitively prove—that Wassell was involved in the process of designing the two landmark buildings even though Linde was the architect of record.
So how did Linde end up being credited as the architect of Tudor Arms? (Beyond that, he has even been deemed by some as the architect of Wassell’s other well-known apartment houses during Wassell’s first career phase.) The misattribution debunked here likely started with some conjecture—leading to more conjecture. Subsequent researchers put faith in the work of others and let confirmation bias do its thing. The way I put it together is the 1994 Tudor Arms National Register nomination publicly recognized the building’s architecture and identified Linde as its creator. Tudor Arms would henceforth be widely acclaimed as the work of Linde. The nomination does not individually reference Linde being the architect but its bibliography lists the city’s Historic Resource Inventory. That early-1980s program created thousands of reports as part of taking stock of Portland’s historic buildings. The report for Tudor Arms credits Linde as the architect. That report references a Carl L. Linde job list that had been compiled by the Historic Landmarks Commission in the 1970s. This job list was likely created by early commission members and architectural historian legends, George McMath and Bill Hawkins. It is possible they reviewed the Pacific Builder and Engineer article and ran with Linde’s purported role, buoyed by Tudor Arms’ design similarities to Linde’s later work. Hawkins in particular, despite being a renowned academic, is known to have freely yet astutely applied his perceptions about a building’s appearance and ascribing it to an architect. Lest one think I’m slapping Hawkins around, it is necessary to point out the advantages gained by a researcher today compared to what he and McMath were working with, when reading between the lines skillfully was a often a necessity. The original plans for Tudor Arms might not have even been rediscovered in the city archives until after their work in the 70s. The more recent availability of searchable newspaper articles in online databases is a game-changer for researchers.
Many decades later, the design of Tudor Arms can correctly be attributed, without the benefit of conjecture, to Richard Wassell. Linde might have had a role in its design but that is an assertion that relies on some conjecture, the same act that created the misattribution in the first place. Conjecture is not needed, however, to assert that Wassell was the indisputable architect of other large apartment houses before and after Tudor Arms, including Melcliffe Court Apartments (1912), Rex Arms Apartments (1913), Royal Arms Apartments (1914), and Imperial Arms Apartments (1916). With my exhaustive research on Richard Wassell, plus just a smidge of conjecture, I can also assuredly conclude that he was the architect of the Wassell Apartments (1910), Chesterbury Apartments (1911), and Chesterbury Hotel (1912). In sum, during the first of three distinguishable phases of Wassell’s building career, from 1910 until 1916, he designed and built no fewer than eight apartment houses in a span of seven years, having been the developer of all but one. Combined with his design of the R. F. Wassell house (1609 S. Radcliffe Court) in 1916 and most of the houses on Peacock Lane during the second phase of his career, Richard Wassell is one of the master architects of early-20th century Portland.
Research and writing by Erik Hovmiller.