State Administration Building, Newark
The Administration Building of the Newark State School was torn down in 1974.
The oldest unit of the Newark State School faces north, set on the edge of a hill overlooking the Ganargua valley. When it was completed in 1873, its four-story brick wings were much as they are today, but the center section was capped by a broad classic gable and small square cupola. The present hip roof and pyramid-topped arcaded corner units, meant to suggest Romanesque towers, were added in 1886, along with the splendidly latticed porch. The metal balcony and prefabricated circular stair are more recent additions.
The exposed basement and first floor of the building were constructed about 1860 by Henry Price. It was intended for a Baptist Collegiate Institute, but remained unfinished until 1873. It was completed, furnished, and opened in September of that year as a German Lutheran Academy with thirty-six students. The school was a financial failure and was sold in June 1876. Two years later it was rented by the Syracuse Asylum for Idiots to serve as an experimental branch facility. In 1885 local representatives persuaded the state legislature to pass a bill setting up a New York State Custodial Asylum for Feebleminded Women on a permanent basis. The following year the school building was remodeled by Stephen N. Keener, a local architect who was also a contractor, builder, and lumberyard proprietor.
Born in 1841, Keener had learned the carpenters trade before he was twenty-one. He first saw Newark as a soldier, in 1862, and returned there after the Civil War. In 1904 he advertised "rough and dressed lumber' and was a manufacturer of sash, doors, and blinds. He was prepared to do "inside house finishing and turning,' and made a specialty of stair building. The pair of towers he added to the front of the Newark school are reminiscent of those designed by H.H. Richardson for the contemporary state asylum in Buffalo. To make them more impressive, the brick walls of the fourth-floor corner rooms were demolished and rebuilt, carried forward on eight courses of brick corbeling. Five-part wheel windows fill the upper part of the fifth-story arches, reflecting the varied and ingenious patterns of the turned, pierced, framed, and bracketed porch below. This disguises the top-heavy character of the design and calls attention to its recessed entrance by omitting the third column either side of the broad center ground floor bay. Matching dormitory wings were also designed by Keener. The one on the east was built in 1886, while the west dormitory dates from 1889. In June 1890, when the 600-seat chapel at the rear of the main building was complete, the asylum was officially dedicated.
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