By JIM KEVLIN
RICHFIELD SPRINGS
Jim Jordan’s father was “an architect’s architect,” the architect son recalls.
On rare vacations, dad would have the sons – Jim and Peter – measuring details on buildings, to good purpose: One overhang on a bank in Massachusetts was later used in one of the firm’s local designs.
Father Myron began practicing locally in 1934; his son bought the practice in 1984, but the family’s construction roots go back to its arrival in 1850, fleeing the Irish Potato Famine.
Jim Jordan’s great-great-grandfather was a stone mason. His grandfather, Peter, ran a masonry supply business behind the architectural firm’s current office, a Greek Revival home at 68 Main St.
In that century and a half, many businesses have moved away from Upstate villages – both Jim and his father considered doing so – but Jordan enterprises have stayed within a stone’s throw of Route 20.
That’s hardly the reason why James Jordan Associates, Architects, is being honored with the Otsego County Chamber’s Small Business Award at a banquet Thursday, Oct. 8, at The Otesaga.
Not only has the firm endured, it has flourished, successfully out-competing larger firms in urban centers for dozens of projects across New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. (The firm’s URL – www.jordanusa.com – speaks to its ambitions.)
Jordan, in an interview in a conference room that showed the firm’s range – there’s a Calder-like mobile, and there’s a replica of Remington’s “Bronco Buster” – modestly speaks of the “addition” to New York Central Mutual in Edmeston.
While technically an “addition,” Jim Jordan’s contribution is the be-pillared, 45,000-square-foot main building you drive past on Route 80. (He’s particularly proud of the wood and marble interior, with its spiral staircases and brass fittings.)
The science addition to Oneonta High School – including the 100-seat auditorium – Schenevus Central School’s new wing and Clinton Central’s auditorium are other of the firm’s many contracts.
For 10 years, Jordan would rise before dawn once a week and drive to the Hamptons, on Long Island’s tip, for status meetings on various projects in the school district there.
The Glimmerglass Opera’s Thaw Pavilion is another standout. (Hugh Hardy, the opera building’s architect and board member, sketched it on the back of a napkin, Jordan remembers.)
The firm’s principal credits its success with perspiration – “a lot of hard work” – rather than inspiration; he skirts around questions about whatever aesthetic debates have occurred around that conference table.
And he credits the people who work with him – the firm’s four associates have been with the firm an average of 20 years. Miriam Kelsey, his assistant, has been there 28 years, starting with Jim’s father.
The Jordan firm’s story begins with Jim’s father, born in 1901 “on a kitchen table on Hotel Street.”
He studied at Oneonta Normal School for a year, taught in a one-room school house in Delaware County for another, then, homesick, returned to his sister, Anna, a spinster school teacher in the Sulphur City.
She encouraged him to become an architect, and he obtained his degree from Syracuse in 1928. He was the Rochester school board’s architect until 1934, when the Depression dried up construction and he returned home.
It was a bit of a let-down to find himself working in his father’s store, but he soon obtained his first commission: that two-room former school in Mount Vision, just south of the hamlet on Route 205.
Then, the Schuyler Lake school on Church Road, now abandoned.
The experience positioned him to win the contract for the imposing Richfield Springs Central High School, built in 1936-37, now on the National Register of Historic Places.
And he was on his way.
Myron’s beloved sister Anna suffered from TB, and he was president of the Otsego County Tuberculosis Association when Mary Margaret Burke, a D’Youville College grad with a master’s from Bonaventure, arrived as executive director.
The two married in 1947 – the groom was 46 – and son James arrived the following year.
As a boy, he often visited work sites with his father, but it took him a while – youthful contrariness, perhaps – before choosing his
eventual career.
Jim Jordan attended Alfred University – he is now on the board of trustees – graduating in 1972. It was after he enrolled in Syracuse’s MBA program “I decided I might want to do architecture.”
As a draftsman – those were pre-computer days – for his father back home, he commuted nights to Syracuse, obtaining his architecture degree, then his license, and finally completing his MBA in 1977.
After buying the firm from his father, the son specialized in schools, and commercial and institutional buildings.
“It’s a very complicated business,” he said. “Not only do you design a building, but you have to do the documentation – the cookbook you give the contractor to work with.”
He estimated 75 percent of any big job is the drawings and specifications, 5 percent the bidding, and 20 percent getting the job built.
“When I first started,” he said, “I couldn’t believe people would pay me to do that work. I don’t feel that way today.”
Even if you believe him – the self-deprecating manner and dry sense of humor makes you doubt it – he does claim to have been worn down a bit by the business’s contentious.
That’s magnified in New York State by the Wick’s Law – originally an anti-corruption measure dating to the 1930s, it requires four separate contractors on any job, with resulting disputes.
One particularly hair-raising memory had to do with a school pool: When it was filled, the water level dropped three feet in a single night.
Happy ending: It was drained, cracks discovered and filled, and it has been in use many years.
