Rita Bartscherer kept a handwritten record of Joseph Bernard Bartscherer’s major construction projects. This archive traces all 205 of those entries from 1948 to 1991—identifying the buildings, documenting Kelly’s role where records survive, and following what happened to the sites afterward.
Together, the projects offer an unusual view of postwar New York through its hospitals, housing, airports, offices, schools and infrastructure.
A tour tells you why a building matters. The project record tells you what is actually known about it — the identification, Kelly’s role, the masonry scope and the sources behind each.
375 Pearl Street photographed in 2013, before the 2019–2021 recladding: the windowless switching block Joseph's 1973 list points to. Not a construction-period photograph.
2013 · Photo: Beyond My Ken · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source
375 Pearl Street was one of the most disliked buildings in Lower Manhattan: a windowless New York Telephone switching fortress in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Joseph’s 1973 project list places him on the job. Four decades later the same structural frame was stripped back and reclad in glass, leaving one of the most dramatic transformations in the archive.
Project identifiedAltered / data center and office reuseRead the story →
Current view · 2023 · Photo: SnowFire · CC BY 4.0
Joseph Bernard Bartscherer in uniform. Branch, location and date are still to be confirmed with the family.
Artifact A-005 · Bartscherer family archive
The man behind the list
Joseph Bernard Bartscherer
Family testimony holds that Joseph worked as a bricklayer for John B. Kelly, Inc., whose Philadelphia address still appears on the “Kelly for Brickwork” instruction card kept with his papers. Public records place Kelly Masonry Corporation in New York from 1970 onward. The listed projects run from the postwar hospital and housing boom to the early 1990s.
