Philip Sawyer

Philip Sawyer. [Born] 1868. Architect. A member of the Century for forty-eight years, the longest membership on our memorial roll [of 1949 decedents] tonight.

There was a day ten years ago when I came to know Philip Sawyer very well. After lunch at the Century, a lunch gay with Sawyerian story and good wine, we went to his bank around the corner. There he cashed a check for four thousand dollars and put the cash in my hands with these words: “It’s for one good artist of your choosing, Henry, and none of this damned nonsense about being economical with it. I want my artist to have a whirl, a hell of a good time, preferably in foreign parts where there can’t be any checking up, doing his work. All you have to do is keep me out of it and some day show me some photographs of what happened.” Nor was this the only time he showed this side to me: it was only the most spectacular.

There sometimes seemed to be a lot of nonsense—conventionally judged—about Phil Sawyer. His stories would not often have pleased Helen Hokinson’s ladies. He had a pirate’s nerve in a tough situation, and apparently he had had it from boyhood.

He was a partner in the great architectural firm of York & Sawyer, Centurions all—Edward York, Louis Ayres, Murray Franklin. It was not easy going at first: 1898 was a year of war. But soon after the turn of the century the lines of the firm’s practice had been established. They were consulting architects to the New York Board of Water Supply engaged on the Croton Dam, consulting architects to the United States Treasury. Thereafter, they built many government buildings, hospitals and banks throughout the world. Among them are the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Pershing Square Building on East Forty-second Street, the Department of Commerce Building in Washington, the Brick Presbyterian Church in this city, and more recently the New Tripler General Hospital for the United States Army in Honolulu and the Naval Hospital in St. Albans, Queens.

Other buildings for which York & Sawyer were the architects and which Sawyer personally designed are the Greenwich Savings Bank, the Bowery Savings Bank on Forty-second Street, the Guaranty Trust Company, all in New York, Federal buildings in Honolulu, the Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, the First National Bank of Boston, the Royal Bank of Canada in Montreal, and the Law Group of the University of Michigan.

My last letter from him is dated a year ago today. He was very ill, but the spirit was the same as ever. He ended it: “from the senescent past to the crescent future, best wishes for 1949. May it be less lousy than I anticipate. Affectionately, Philip Sawyer.”

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1949 Memorials