Life History

Notes

• A reference in "History of the County of Albany" gives Woollett, William L, 2 May 1815 - 2 April 1874 and states that he left England at the age of nineteen to emigrate to America.
  
  From an article by Austin O'Brien.
  For three generations the Woollett family practiced architecture in mid and late nineteenth century Albany. The productive William L. Woollett (1815-1874) handed his practice on to his talented son, William M. Woollett (1850-1880) who died early in his promising career.
  Two of his children, William Lee Woollett and John Woollett, later became architects and practiced in Albany at the turn of the century.
  Born near Maidstone in Kent on June 24th 1815 the first Woollett apparently emigrated in 1834. He first appears in an Albany directory in 1845 when he listed himself as William L. Woollett Jr., Architect of the Delevan House. The Delevan House, a massive classically inspired hotel which covered a full block on Broadway, on the current site of Union Station, is also attributed to another local architect, J.W. Adams, in the 1845 Albany City Guide.
  
  As a young man and newcomer to Albany it seems likely that Woollett worked under Adams for this major commission. The Delavan House burned to the ground, with much death and devastation, when filled to capacity on New Years Eve in 1894. Like the Delavan House, many of Woollett's buildings have been lost in the course of the past century. His best known surviving works - Our Lady of Angels R.C. Church (1869), Emmanuel Baptist Church (1868-71), and a delightful picturesque English Gothic chapel (or schoolhouse according to one source) added in 1866 to the Church of the Holy Innocents - date from the period of his partnership with Edward Ogden from 1856 to 1870. A resident of Loudonville, Woollett designed a number of buildings outside Albany including "Fountain Elms" in Utica (now the home of the Oneida County Historical Society) which was completed in 1852. A devout Methodist, he served as superintendent of the Watervliet Union Sabbath School, Trustee of the College of Missionaries at Syracuse University, and President of the Albany YMCA in 1859-60. He was also a fellow of the American Institute of Architects in London.
  
  At the time of his death Woollett was working on the Albany Savings Bank, a handsome Italianate building, on the northwest corner of State and Chapel Streets, which was completed in 1875 by Thomas Fuller and William M. Woollett."
  
  One obituary says that he died suddenly at the residence of his brother in law J. Woodward, 79 Ten Broeck Street. aged 58 years."
  
  Albany Morning Express 21 May 1874
  
  "His disease was apoplexy. On Monday night he was stricken down with a fit while in his office and was at once conveyed for treatment to Mr. Woodwards. But medical aid was without avail. From a previous attack of the same disease, which took place about a year ago, it is thought he never fully recovered. His funeral will take place from the Methodist Church on Pearl Street tomorrow afternoon."
  
  *****
  LIVING WITH THE ASHES
  IN HIS BEST NOVEL YET, WILLIAM KENNEDY EXPLORES MISPLACED PASSION AND THE POWER OF ART
  By R.Z. SHEPPARD
  May. 13, 1996 William Kennedy's new novel, The Flaming Corsage (Viking; 209 pages; $23.95), turns on two distantly related events. The first actually happened. In 1894 a fast-moving fire engulfed the Delavan House hotel in Albany, New York. Fifteen people died, mostly kitchen help and chambermaids trapped in top-floor workers' quarters later found to have sealed emergency exits. The second event is pure fiction by the author of such raffish and elegiac novels as Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Ironweed. In 1908 Giles Fitzroy, a prominent Albany physician, tracks his wife to a Manhattan hotel, where he finds her...
  
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  Delavan, Edward Cornelius
  Occupation: Publisher
  Source(s): S1 Wealthy individual. Financed NYS Temperance Union. Built Delevan House Hotel in Albany. Known to have sent support to Anti-Slavery Kansas settlers. Delevan appears in the Dictionary of American Biography
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