William H. Allen (1858 – 1936) was an American architect who worked in New Haven, Connecticut, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He designed hundreds of houses and other buildings.
Life and career William H. Allen was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1858. In the late 1860s his family moved to New Haven, where he spent most of his adult life.
Allen began practice in 1886, when he formed the partnership of Allen & Tyler, architects, with Frank M. Tyler. Both had previously worked in the office of architect David R. Brown."Architectural," New Haven Daily Morning Journal and Courier, March 2, 1886. Their larger works included the Simpson Block (1887) in Wallingford and the demolished Guilford Free Library (1891).Leading Business Men of New Haven County (Boston: Mercantile Publishing Company, 1887): 91.Sanitary News 42, no. 379 (May 9, 1891): 320. After about five years the partnership was dissolved and Allen continued alone. In 1892 he began one of his largest projects, the general office building of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (1894)."A handsome office building" in New York Railroad Men 9, no. 6 (March 1896): 160-162. He also designed the former fraternity house of Alpha Delta Phi (1895), a bombastic Richardsonian Romanesque palazzo now home to the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments.Patrick Pinnell, Yale University: An Architectural Tour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999): 139 and 142. Allen was well known as an architect of single-family homes. The most notable of these is the Fyler-Hotchkiss House (1900) in Torrington, designed in the Châteauesque style popularized in the United States by Richard Morris Hunt. and Contemporaneously with the Fyler house he designed the Richardsonian Romanesque former Plymouth Congregational Church (1901) in New Haven.Elizabeth Mills Brown, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976): 78.
In 1901 Allen moved to Los Angeles. He sold his New Haven practice to Richard Williams, who had been his employee for eight years."Richard Williams" in A Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County 2 (New York: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1918): 228-229. In Los Angeles Allen designed the now-demolished Chamber of Commerce Building (1903), a Neoclassical office building.Engineering Record 45, no. 24 (June 14, 1902): 574. In 1905 he returned to New Haven and bought back part of his former firm from Williams, forming the partnership of Allen & Williams. This firm had the largest practice in New Haven before World War I.Elizabeth Mills Brown, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976): 8.
Their largest project was the New Haven County Courthouse (1914) on the New Haven Green, a monumental Neoclassical building modeled on St George's Hall, Liverpool. They won this in a competition which drew significant criticism from the architectural profession. The county commissioners had chosen to conduct the competition against the best practices that had been developed by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the most important of which was the employment of an impartial architectural advisor. Several prominent architects, including Cass Gilbert and Tracy & Swartwout, had been invited to participate, and all publicly refused. Only four architects, none of them AIA members, submitted proposals: Allen & Williams and Brown & von Beren of New Haven, Griggs & Hunt of Waterbury and Charles Scranton Palmer of Meriden. The commissioners eventually agreed to hire an advisor, Francis H. Kimball, who recommended the Allen & Williams proposal."The New Haven case" in Western Architect 13, no. 6 (June 1909): 64-66. The highlight of the building is its interior. Historian Elizabeth Mills Brown described it as "an astonishing spatial fantasy...[w]ith diagonal vistas, changes of height and sudden shafts of light, it is far more Piranesian than classical." The courthouse features an extensive sculptural program by J. Massey Rhind and murals by Gilbert White. and Elizabeth Mills Brown, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976): 114. While the courthouse project was just beginning they also completed the former New Haven County Temporary Home for Dependent and Neglected Children (1909), a Colonial Revival building which is now Maxcy Hall of the University of New Haven.Bob Belletzkie, "Happy 100th Birthday to Maxcy Hall," Charger Bulletin, November 4, 2009. Accessed June 22, 2025.
Allen & Williams dissolved their partnership in 1914, about the same time the courthouse was completed. Little is known of Allen's work after 1914. He died in New Hampshire in 1936.
Several of Allen and Allen & Williams' works are individually listed on the United States National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Others are contributing buildings to New Haven's NRHP-listed Whitney Avenue Historic District and other historic districts.
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