Alexander McMillan Welch (1869–1943)[1] was an American
architect trained in the
Beaux-Arts tradition, who led the
New York City firm of Welch, Smith & Provot, in partnership with Bowen B. Smith and George Provot.
The firm's trademark style of discreet brick and limestone townhouses in neo-Georgian style is embodied in the
Benjamin N. Duke House at 1009 Fifth Avenue, one of a row of four houses built in 1899-1901 for the speculative builders William and Thomas Hall. Number 1009 was purchased by the tobacco magnate
Benjamin Newton Duke. Similar rowhouses by Welch, Smith & Provot are 28 through 38 West 86th Street (1906–1908) and 5 and 7 East 75th Street (1901).[3]
The New French Hospital, 450-58 West 34th Street, New York (1905), for the French Benevolent Society,[7] as the result of a competition supervised by A.D.F. Hamlin, Columbia University. Isolated sunrooms at the rear south-facing facade were provided for each floor. The tuberculosis ward on the top floor was isolated from the others.
^His portrait by Seymour Millais Stone is at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, of which Welch was a Trustee, 1920-1943, and Chairman of the Executive Committee, 1931-1938. The
Society's webpage notes his obituary, The Record, 75:1 (January 1944).
^Alexander McMillan Welch, Philip Welch of Ipswich, Massachusetts 1654 and His Descendents, (Richmond Virginia: Byrd Press) 1947:3-16.
^The free restoration and furnishing of the Dyckman House is described in Mason, Randall "Historic preservation, public memory and the making of modern New York City", in Page, Max and Mason Randall (eds.) Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation 2004:131ff.
^Year Book of the Architectural League of New York, 1905.