Arthur Delevan Gilman was born on November 5, 1821, in Newburyport, Massachusets. His parents were Arthur Gilman (17731836), a prosperous Newburyport merchant, and his third wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Joseph and Rebecca Marquand and widow of Samuel Allyne Otis.
Gilman attended Trinity (then Washington) College, Hartford, Connecticut, but left in 1840, during his junior year.
Thereafter he spent some time in travel and study abroad, returning to begin practice as an architect in Boston.
Gilman gave early evidence of an interest in architecture in a paper entitled “Architecture in the United States”.
The following winter, 1844 - 45, he gave twelve lectures on architecture for the Lowell Institute, Boston, which were so well received that they were repeated before a second audience.
During his early years of practice in Boston, he was connected with the project for filling in the Back Bay district and widening Commonwealth Avenue.
On May 13, 1867, he was employed to prepare plans for the New York State Capitol at Albany. These, made in association with Edward Hale Kendall, he presented on August 1 of that year, but they were not accepted.
On August 14, Gilman and Thomas Fuller were instructed to make designs which, on November 13, 1867, were accepted by the Capitol Commissioners and the Commissioners of the Land Office and on December 7, by the Governor.
After 1868, he made New York his headquarters. There in association with Edward Hale Kendall, and with George B. Post as consulting architect, he designed the building for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, at 120 Broadway. It was the first office building in New York to have elevators.
At the same time, Gilman was the architect of St. John’s Episcopal Church at Clifton, Staten Island (1869 - 71), and for a short time (1871 - 73) he lived on Staten Island.
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
In his North American Review article, Gilman's passionate rebellion against the classic revivals was already evident; he termed the United States Capitol and the Boston State House “those flaunting and meretricious edifices” and called Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1837), “that inexhaustible quarry of bad taste. ”
He quoted Pugin and praised the Gothic but reserved his enthusiasm for the architecture of the Italian Renaissance and to a lesser degree that of ante-Revolutionary Boston. In the Arlington Street Church, this combination of tastes appears: the exterior is Georgian but the interior based, according to the architect, “as closely as possible upon the church of Sta. Annunziata at Genoa”.
St. John’s Church at Clifton, Staten Island, is, on the other hand, an unusually charming version of the current Gothic revival, unassuming and without the extravagances of detail that so frequently mar similar work.
The Boston City Hall and the New York and Boston Equitable Buildings bear witness to Gilman’s fondness for Renaissance detail.
Working in a vernacular new to him and uncommon at the time anywhere, Gilman floundered hopelessly; but the small-scale and monotony of the recurrent engaged columns and windows on every floor set an example the popularity of which at the time and later was attested by numberless imitations.
On April 27, 1859, Gilman married Frances Juliet, daughter of Henry Raynor of Syracuse, New York.
