The Beginning Was an End

My search for G. L. Norrman began with his sensational death in 1909. It was a shocking event in the age of yellow journalism -- well-known architect and society favorite commits suicide. So began my fascination with one of Atlanta's greatest nineteenth century architects.


The first decade of the twentieth century was drawing to a close in mid-November of 1909 and the city of Atlanta relaxed in the warm weather of an Indian Summer. It was clear and around seventy degrees as Gottfrid Leonard Norrman walked slowly across the lawn of the Majestic Hotel on the east side of Peachtree Street between Ellis and Cain, a few yards from his beloved Capital City Club an a short block from his architectural office in the new Candler Building. Briefly sitting in a rocker on the full length piazza of the elegant hotel, the portly and bearded architect chatted for some minutes with a lady before entering the building and commenting offhandedly to the desk clerk, "Well, I have lost my last hand; I don't suppose I am much good any more."

Going to his room on the third floor, Norrman removed his coat, climbed into his bathtub, placed a Colt 45 derringer to his right temple, and pulled the trigger. First reports indicate that hotel maid Emma Bowers heard the shot and entered the room to discover the body. Three physicians and the hotel manager came immediately but were unable to revive the still living man. Rushed to Presbyterian Hospital on nearby Cain St., he was pronounced dead about two hours later at 5:05 p.m. on November 17. Thus died one of Atlanta's leading citizens and best-known architects; a man who had helped to shape the physical contours and silhouette of his adopted city for almost thirty years and had represented her throughout the southeast from Durham, N.C. to Mobile, Alabama and Jacksonville, Florida.

The shocking suicide of one of the city's elite made front page news in the Atlanta Constituion, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Georgian. Extensive obituaries, highlighted by photographs, summed up the life and career of Godfrey [he had anglicized his name] Norrman. They proclaimed that the Swedish born architect was one of the city's only "first class architects" upon his arrival in 1881, and that his talent and genius were quickly recognized as, "Building after building was erected of his designing." Writing in the Journal, Sidney Ormond would state, "Godfrey L. Norrman did more for art than any man now living in the city of Atlanta. At the same time he came to this city, "Atlanta was a mass of architectural aberrations. Mr. Norrman would have none of this. Examine any of his structures and you will notice that detail of ornament is made subservient to dignity of line and mass." Another writer would state that through his membership in "all the social clubs of the city . . . there was no more popular or better known man in the community." Georgia's leading poet, Frank L. Stanton, composed an ode to his fellow fallen artist:

After the toil -- after the bitter
strife
That is the way of breath,
He, being weary of the ways of
Life,
Challenged the gates of
Death.

He went away: The road seemed
dark and long
And flowerless as the sod;
Yet, in the sorrow, still he heard
a song
Thrilled to the courts of God.

He knew to love mankind --
brother to all.
And through the trend of years
He made in homes where fast
the teardrops fall
A starlight in the tears.

God will be kind to him, and not
unknown
He goes where great dreams
keep
No memory of Life's shadows,
There, alone,
He reaps the rose of Sleep. (1)

The almost five years preceding Norrman's suicide had been difficult ones for the architect. In early January 1905, he had suffered a severe stroke in his personally designed apartment in the Black Building on North Pryor St. Unconscious, he had been rushed to the private sanatorium of his friends and clients, Drs. Hunter Cooper and W. S. Elkin. At the time, Norrman was proclaimed by the Southern Architect and local newspapers to be one of the city's and the entire South's leading architects, citing many examples of his more recent works. While recuperating, and probably to help oversee the on-going construction of the massive First Baptist Churches in Atlanta and Montgomery, Al., which he had designed, Norrman hired John Falkner as a partner. An unknown figure, then and now, Falkner does not appear to have helped greatly in building up the new firm during Norrman's incapacitation, and he never became a recognized architect after the dissolution of the partnership. (2)

Nevertheless, due to his "iron constitution," Norrman was soon on the road to recovery and so was his business. The Southern Architect for April 22, 1905 reported him "looking well" and "again upon the streets." By February 25, it was reported that he would ". . . be able to return to his business in a week or ten days." Although he was in Savannah in November of 1905 to go over his plans for a new school for the Chatham County Board of Education, he did not officially re-open his architectural office until March 1906, still with Falkner as his partner. (3)

By 1909, however, prospects were very bright for Norrman. He formed a new partnership in June with two talented young men, Hal Fitzgerald Hentz and John Neel Reid, who would become two of Atlanta's greatest 20th century architects. Hentz and Reid had come to Atlanta in April 1909 and set up an architectural practice. According to one Reid biographer, the young architects were ". . . fortunate in finding Gottfried Norrman, a well-established Atlanta architect, willing to accept them as partners." Norrman's reputation ". . . enabled his two junior partners to secure their first important commissions." The later careers of Hentz and Reid would prove this to be a wise decision on the part of the now sixty-three year old Norrman and, even in the brief period before his suicide, the firm received many important commissions. (4)

Thus in the fall of 1909, Norrman's prospects were improving greatly and Neel Reid testified at the coroner's inquest that the senior partner of Norrman, Hentz & Reid was generally "of a most cheerful disposition." The problem was a "tiny sore" which appeared on the architect's right hand, the one not impaired by the 1905 stroke. Again according to Neel Reid, Norrman had recently seen his doctor, who had told him the only "cure" was amputation. The thought of complete incapacitation and the end of his career as a designer was obviously unacceptable and the result was suicide. (5)

It certainly appears that Norrman killed himself on the spur of the moment in a state of despair over the diagnosis since Sidney Ormond stated that he was returning to his office from the Majestic when he apparently changed his mind and walked back into his hotel. Also he left no will and the papers in his room were not left in any order. (6)

With this dramatic beginning and end, I begin my tale of the life and career of G. L. Norrman.

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(1) Weather reports, AC, 11/16/09 and 11/17/09; Sidney Ormond, "G. L. Norrman Ends His Life In Room in the Majestic," AJ, 11/17/09, 1; "Architect G. L. Norrman Speeds A Fatal Bullet Through Right Temple," AC, 11/17/09, 1; "Death By Own Hand, Says Coroner's Jury," AC, 11/17/09, 5; The Atlanta Georgian, 11/17/09, 1.

(2) "G. L. Norrman Stricken By Paralysis," AJ, 1/11/05, 1; "Architect Norrman Seriously Ill," Southern Architect and Building News, 1/14/05; "G. L. Norrman Seriously Ill, " AC, 1/12/05, 7; Atlanta City Directory, 1905.

(3) AJ, 1/11/05, 1; "Information from Atlanta Architects," SA, 4/22/05; "G. L. Norrman Is Better; Out On The Streets," AJ, 4/19/05, 9; "Plans For New School Houses," Savannah Morning News, 11/19/05, 5; "Mr. G. L. Norrman Will Resume Business," AJ, 3/4/06, N-3.

(4) "They Are Well Equipped In Their Profession," AC, 6/27/09; Paul Lewis, "Neel Reid, 1885-1926, The Atlanta Historical Bulletin, Vol. XVI # 1(Spring 19710, 10; Catalogue of the First Annual Exhibition of the Architectural Arts League of Atlanta and the Atlanta Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (Atlanta 1910).

(5) AC, 11/18/09, 5

(6) Ormond, AJ, 11/17/09, 1.