WELCOME TO the city that Neff built. Or designed, anyway.
To live in Norfolk is to live with the life's work of architect Clarence Amos Neff. Norfolk residents see their doctors and lawyers in his office buildings, learn in his high schools, shop in his arcades and department stores, and sleep in his houses and apartments.
They attend the opera in his theater, too, and there's the rub. The Virginia Opera's renovation of the Center Theater, which begins with a groundbreaking at noon Tuesday, will effectively eliminate one of Neff's last designs. Yet the controversy over that project has revived interest in his buildings.
Federal officials recently announced that the theater meets the standards of the National Register of Historic Places. The theater is not on the register yet, but it is close.
This fall, Neff and other architects will be featured in ``Beaux-Arts Norfolk,'' an exhibit at the Old Dominion University Gallery on Granby Street.
``What I find fascinating about Neff is that he is a microcosm of architecture in the 20th century,'' said Robert Wojtowicz, an assistant professor of art history at ODU. ``He started as a romantic revivalist and by the end of his career was a partially converted modernist.''
If there were a fan club for Neff, Wojtowicz would be president. Jogging by the Center Theater every morning, he developed an affection for the bulky limestone building. He nominated it for historic landmark status and has done much to revive Neff's memory in Norfolk.
Neff was one of a handful of architects who shaped Norfolk's urban skyline in the first half of this century, but probably none was so prolific. When Neff died in 1952 at age 79, his obituaries credited him with more than 600 buildings, mostly in Norfolk. Many, if not most, are still being used.
In the process, Neff and his buildings helped make Norfolk's unwritten history, the fabric of colorful tales that are collected by its longtime residents and usually disappear within a generation.
He was not a native. Neff was born in Delaware, Ohio, the son of a banker. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University and Columbia, where his architectural training began.
Neff lived in Paris for about a year and may have studied in the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which launched a revolution in the visual arts.
When he returned to the United States in 1898, he moved to Norfolk.
``He thought Norfolk would become like New York because of its great natural harbor,'' said his son, Parker Neff Sr., 69, partner in the Norfolk realty firm of Cooke & Neff. ``Many people thought the same way at the time.''
Neff formed the architectural firm of Neff and Thompson in 1902 with Thomas Thompson, an engineer. It quickly became one of the city's leading firms.
In 1904, they designed and built the Holland Apartments, so named because Holland was one of Neff's favorite parts of Europe. The apartments are now listed as a Virginia Historic Landmark.
In 1907, they put up Monticello Arcade and the Board of Trade building, both on downtown Plume Street.
On Mark Twain's last visit to Norfolk in 1909, he shook hands in a reception line at the Board of Trade and gave a short impromptu speech.
The buildings continued to rise, designed by Neff and engineered by Thompson: Maury High School, the Country Club of Norfolk, Princess Anne Country Club, Church of the Good Shepherd, the Flatiron Building. In 1916, Congress appointed Neff supervising architect of the Naval Base.
Neff was building houses all this time, too. In 1910, he married Lucy Latane Thom and they moved into a Neff-designed house along the Lafayette River on North Shore Road, right beside one for his partner, Thompson.
The Neff house featured a low-slung roof on the river side that kept its porch in shade most of the time. Its stairs all had shallow steps.
``He hated steep stairs,'' said Parker Neff, the youngest of the couple's four children. ``If you go in his apartment buildings, you'll notice how easy the steps are. You don't climb, you just walk right up them.''
Another Neff house is on Westover Avenue in West Ghent. He built it for the treasurer of Seaboard Airline Railway.
``What no one knew at the time was that the treasurer was paying for the house with his company's money, not his own,'' said attorney Harrell Lydon, who has owned the house since 1960. ``When they discovered it in 1923, he fled the country to Japan and never came back.''
The same railroad hired Neff in 1926 to do its headquarters on Bute Street, now called the Wainwright Building. It cost $517,201.
Neff did not work exclusively in Norfolk. In Richmond, he designed the Country Club of Virginia, heavily influenced by Monticello, and the offices of Imperial Tobacco Co.
In fact, the story of the Imperial Tobacco building contains a bizarrely coincidental postscript. It was renovated into offices and, until recently, it contained the Richmond offices of a prominent Norfolk cultural group: the Virginia Opera.
In the middle '20s, Neff undertook probably his best-known project: the Cavalier Hotel on Virginia Beach's Oceanfront.
For the Cavalier, Neff looked again to the classical lines of Monticello. The hotel cost $1.5 million to build, a fortune in its day.
It showed in the hotel's luxuries: singing waiters, a separate dining room for chauffeurs, its own railroad car that picked up guests in New York City.
It was completed in 1927 and immediately became a leading resort destination for the nation's rich and famous personalities. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald visited, and film star Mary Pickford got to know her next husband, band leader Buddy Rogers, at the Cavalier.
Cowboy humorist Will Rogers also stayed in the hotel in the early 1930s, and paid Neff a compliment by insulting him.
A well-known New York scandal of the time was industrialist Harry Thaw's shooting of architect Sanford White in a love triangle. After Will Rogers' first night in the Cavalier, he emerged to complain that the rooms were too small.
``Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect,'' he said.
In 1933, Thompson left the firm to become Norfolk's city manager. By now, Neff was 60 years old, but his pace did not slacken.
In the 1930s, he was tapped to design the Norfolk division of William & Mary, now ODU. He was responsible for what is now the old ODU administration building and Foreman Field.
For these two designs, Neff turned to the Colonial tradition. Wojtowicz sees strong influences from the 1792 Moses Myers house on Bank Street, which Neff would have been familiar with.
Neff's original ODU blueprints, one of the few sets surviving, will be used to create the poster for ODU's architectural exhibit this fall.
As Foreman Field rose, Parker Neff said, his father started early in the morning and worked all day. Plus, Neff said, ``Every night after supper he'd pile us all into the car and we'd go back over there. He would walk all around the site for two or three hours, looking at everything.''
War, and thousands of troops, came to Norfolk in 1942. The city decided to build a center to entertain soldiers and sailors.
Parker Neff said his father and some partners owned several acres at the edge of downtown, along Olney Road. They donated part of it to the city, and Neff, along with architect T. David Fitzgibbon, designed the Center Theater for USO shows and the attached Arena for sports.
It was in this building that Neff best demonstrated his ability to adapt to new styles, Wojtowicz says.
The architect was 70 by the time the Center Theater opened, yet he used ``modernist'' design principles, made popular by the 1939 World's Fair, to fashion its massive lines. This was a popular style for theaters of the period, and Wojtowicz notes its influence on the Commodore Theater in Portsmouth.
Although Neff continued working through the late 1940s, the theater would be his last major building, along with the public housing neighborhood called Roberts Park, now Roberts Village, in 1943.
Neff fell ill in the summer of 1952 and was hospitalized. He died Aug. 8 and was buried in Elmwood Cemetery .
To live in Norfolk is to live with the life's work of architect Clarence Amos Neff. Norfolk residents see their doctors and lawyers in his office buildings, learn in his high schools, shop in his arcades and department stores, and sleep in his houses and apartments.
They attend the opera in his theater, too, and there's the rub. The Virginia Opera's renovation of the Center Theater, which begins with a groundbreaking at noon Tuesday, will effectively eliminate one of Neff's last designs. Yet the controversy over that project has revived interest in his buildings.
Federal officials recently announced that the theater meets the standards of the National Register of Historic Places. The theater is not on the register yet, but it is close.
This fall, Neff and other architects will be featured in ``Beaux-Arts Norfolk,'' an exhibit at the Old Dominion University Gallery on Granby Street.
``What I find fascinating about Neff is that he is a microcosm of architecture in the 20th century,'' said Robert Wojtowicz, an assistant professor of art history at ODU. ``He started as a romantic revivalist and by the end of his career was a partially converted modernist.''
If there were a fan club for Neff, Wojtowicz would be president. Jogging by the Center Theater every morning, he developed an affection for the bulky limestone building. He nominated it for historic landmark status and has done much to revive Neff's memory in Norfolk.
Neff was one of a handful of architects who shaped Norfolk's urban skyline in the first half of this century, but probably none was so prolific. When Neff died in 1952 at age 79, his obituaries credited him with more than 600 buildings, mostly in Norfolk. Many, if not most, are still being used.
In the process, Neff and his buildings helped make Norfolk's unwritten history, the fabric of colorful tales that are collected by its longtime residents and usually disappear within a generation.
He was not a native. Neff was born in Delaware, Ohio, the son of a banker. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University and Columbia, where his architectural training began.
Neff lived in Paris for about a year and may have studied in the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which launched a revolution in the visual arts.
When he returned to the United States in 1898, he moved to Norfolk.
``He thought Norfolk would become like New York because of its great natural harbor,'' said his son, Parker Neff Sr., 69, partner in the Norfolk realty firm of Cooke & Neff. ``Many people thought the same way at the time.''
Neff formed the architectural firm of Neff and Thompson in 1902 with Thomas Thompson, an engineer. It quickly became one of the city's leading firms.
In 1904, they designed and built the Holland Apartments, so named because Holland was one of Neff's favorite parts of Europe. The apartments are now listed as a Virginia Historic Landmark.
In 1907, they put up Monticello Arcade and the Board of Trade building, both on downtown Plume Street.
On Mark Twain's last visit to Norfolk in 1909, he shook hands in a reception line at the Board of Trade and gave a short impromptu speech.
The buildings continued to rise, designed by Neff and engineered by Thompson: Maury High School, the Country Club of Norfolk, Princess Anne Country Club, Church of the Good Shepherd, the Flatiron Building. In 1916, Congress appointed Neff supervising architect of the Naval Base.
Neff was building houses all this time, too. In 1910, he married Lucy Latane Thom and they moved into a Neff-designed house along the Lafayette River on North Shore Road, right beside one for his partner, Thompson.
The Neff house featured a low-slung roof on the river side that kept its porch in shade most of the time. Its stairs all had shallow steps.
``He hated steep stairs,'' said Parker Neff, the youngest of the couple's four children. ``If you go in his apartment buildings, you'll notice how easy the steps are. You don't climb, you just walk right up them.''
Another Neff house is on Westover Avenue in West Ghent. He built it for the treasurer of Seaboard Airline Railway.
``What no one knew at the time was that the treasurer was paying for the house with his company's money, not his own,'' said attorney Harrell Lydon, who has owned the house since 1960. ``When they discovered it in 1923, he fled the country to Japan and never came back.''
The same railroad hired Neff in 1926 to do its headquarters on Bute Street, now called the Wainwright Building. It cost $517,201.
Neff did not work exclusively in Norfolk. In Richmond, he designed the Country Club of Virginia, heavily influenced by Monticello, and the offices of Imperial Tobacco Co.
In fact, the story of the Imperial Tobacco building contains a bizarrely coincidental postscript. It was renovated into offices and, until recently, it contained the Richmond offices of a prominent Norfolk cultural group: the Virginia Opera.
In the middle '20s, Neff undertook probably his best-known project: the Cavalier Hotel on Virginia Beach's Oceanfront.
For the Cavalier, Neff looked again to the classical lines of Monticello. The hotel cost $1.5 million to build, a fortune in its day.
It showed in the hotel's luxuries: singing waiters, a separate dining room for chauffeurs, its own railroad car that picked up guests in New York City.
It was completed in 1927 and immediately became a leading resort destination for the nation's rich and famous personalities. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald visited, and film star Mary Pickford got to know her next husband, band leader Buddy Rogers, at the Cavalier.
Cowboy humorist Will Rogers also stayed in the hotel in the early 1930s, and paid Neff a compliment by insulting him.
A well-known New York scandal of the time was industrialist Harry Thaw's shooting of architect Sanford White in a love triangle. After Will Rogers' first night in the Cavalier, he emerged to complain that the rooms were too small.
``Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect,'' he said.
In 1933, Thompson left the firm to become Norfolk's city manager. By now, Neff was 60 years old, but his pace did not slacken.
In the 1930s, he was tapped to design the Norfolk division of William & Mary, now ODU. He was responsible for what is now the old ODU administration building and Foreman Field.
For these two designs, Neff turned to the Colonial tradition. Wojtowicz sees strong influences from the 1792 Moses Myers house on Bank Street, which Neff would have been familiar with.
Neff's original ODU blueprints, one of the few sets surviving, will be used to create the poster for ODU's architectural exhibit this fall.
As Foreman Field rose, Parker Neff said, his father started early in the morning and worked all day. Plus, Neff said, ``Every night after supper he'd pile us all into the car and we'd go back over there. He would walk all around the site for two or three hours, looking at everything.''
War, and thousands of troops, came to Norfolk in 1942. The city decided to build a center to entertain soldiers and sailors.
Parker Neff said his father and some partners owned several acres at the edge of downtown, along Olney Road. They donated part of it to the city, and Neff, along with architect T. David Fitzgibbon, designed the Center Theater for USO shows and the attached Arena for sports.
It was in this building that Neff best demonstrated his ability to adapt to new styles, Wojtowicz says.
The architect was 70 by the time the Center Theater opened, yet he used ``modernist'' design principles, made popular by the 1939 World's Fair, to fashion its massive lines. This was a popular style for theaters of the period, and Wojtowicz notes its influence on the Commodore Theater in Portsmouth.
Although Neff continued working through the late 1940s, the theater would be his last major building, along with the public housing neighborhood called Roberts Park, now Roberts Village, in 1943.
Neff fell ill in the summer of 1952 and was hospitalized. He died Aug. 8 and was buried in Elmwood Cemetery .
WELCOME TO the city that Neff built. Or designed, anyway.
To live in Norfolk is to live with the life's work of architect Clarence Amos Neff. Norfolk residents see their doctors and lawyers in his office buildings, learn in his high schools, shop in his arcades and department stores, and sleep in his houses and apartments.
They attend the opera in his theater, too, and there's the rub. The Virginia Opera's renovation of the Center Theater, which begins with a groundbreaking at noon Tuesday, will effectively eliminate one of Neff's last designs. Yet the controversy over that project has revived interest in his buildings.
Federal officials recently announced that the theater meets the standards of the National Register of Historic Places. The theater is not on the register yet, but it is close.
This fall, Neff and other architects will be featured in ``Beaux-Arts Norfolk,'' an exhibit at the Old Dominion University Gallery on Granby Street.
``What I find fascinating about Neff is that he is a microcosm of architecture in the 20th century,'' said Robert Wojtowicz, an assistant professor of art history at ODU. ``He started as a romantic revivalist and by the end of his career was a partially converted modernist.''
If there were a fan club for Neff, Wojtowicz would be president. Jogging by the Center Theater every morning, he developed an affection for the bulky limestone building. He nominated it for historic landmark status and has done much to revive Neff's memory in Norfolk.
Neff was one of a handful of architects who shaped Norfolk's urban skyline in the first half of this century, but probably none was so prolific. When Neff died in 1952 at age 79, his obituaries credited him with more than 600 buildings, mostly in Norfolk. Many, if not most, are still being used.
In the process, Neff and his buildings helped make Norfolk's unwritten history, the fabric of colorful tales that are collected by its longtime residents and usually disappear within a generation.
He was not a native. Neff was born in Delaware, Ohio, the son of a banker. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University and Columbia, where his architectural training began.
Neff lived in Paris for about a year and may have studied in the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which launched a revolution in the visual arts.
When he returned to the United States in 1898, he moved to Norfolk.
``He thought Norfolk would become like New York because of its great natural harbor,'' said his son, Parker Neff Sr., 69, partner in the Norfolk realty firm of Cooke & Neff. ``Many people thought the same way at the time.''
Neff formed the architectural firm of Neff and Thompson in 1902 with Thomas Thompson, an engineer. It quickly became one of the city's leading firms.
In 1904, they designed and built the Holland Apartments, so named because Holland was one of Neff's favorite parts of Europe. The apartments are now listed as a Virginia Historic Landmark.
In 1907, they put up Monticello Arcade and the Board of Trade building, both on downtown Plume Street.
On Mark Twain's last visit to Norfolk in 1909, he shook hands in a reception line at the Board of Trade and gave a short impromptu speech.
The buildings continued to rise, designed by Neff and engineered by Thompson: Maury High School, the Country Club of Norfolk, Princess Anne Country Club, Church of the Good Shepherd, the Flatiron Building. In 1916, Congress appointed Neff supervising architect of the Naval Base.
Neff was building houses all this time, too. In 1910, he married Lucy Latane Thom and they moved into a Neff-designed house along the Lafayette River on North Shore Road, right beside one for his partner, Thompson.
The Neff house featured a low-slung roof on the river side that kept its porch in shade most of the time. Its stairs all had shallow steps.
``He hated steep stairs,'' said Parker Neff, the youngest of the couple's four children. ``If you go in his apartment buildings, you'll notice how easy the steps are. You don't climb, you just walk right up them.''
Another Neff house is on Westover Avenue in West Ghent. He built it for the treasurer of Seaboard Airline Railway.
``What no one knew at the time was that the treasurer was paying for the house with his company's money, not his own,'' said attorney Harrell Lydon, who has owned the house since 1960. ``When they discovered it in 1923, he fled the country to Japan and never came back.''
The same railroad hired Neff in 1926 to do its headquarters on Bute Street, now called the Wainwright Building. It cost $517,201.
Neff did not work exclusively in Norfolk. In Richmond, he designed the Country Club of Virginia, heavily influenced by Monticello, and the offices of Imperial Tobacco Co.
In fact, the story of the Imperial Tobacco building contains a bizarrely coincidental postscript. It was renovated into offices and, until recently, it contained the Richmond offices of a prominent Norfolk cultural group: the Virginia Opera.
In the middle '20s, Neff undertook probably his best-known project: the Cavalier Hotel on Virginia Beach's Oceanfront.
For the Cavalier, Neff looked again to the classical lines of Monticello. The hotel cost $1.5 million to build, a fortune in its day.
It showed in the hotel's luxuries: singing waiters, a separate dining room for chauffeurs, its own railroad car that picked up guests in New York City.
It was completed in 1927 and immediately became a leading resort destination for the nation's rich and famous personalities. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald visited, and film star Mary Pickford got to know her next husband, band leader Buddy Rogers, at the Cavalier.
Cowboy humorist Will Rogers also stayed in the hotel in the early 1930s, and paid Neff a compliment by insulting him.
A well-known New York scandal of the time was industrialist Harry Thaw's shooting of architect Sanford White in a love triangle. After Will Rogers' first night in the Cavalier, he emerged to complain that the rooms were too small.
``Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect,'' he said.
In 1933, Thompson left the firm to become Norfolk's city manager. By now, Neff was 60 years old, but his pace did not slacken.
In the 1930s, he was tapped to design the Norfolk division of William & Mary, now ODU. He was responsible for what is now the old ODU administration building and Foreman Field.
For these two designs, Neff turned to the Colonial tradition. Wojtowicz sees strong influences from the 1792 Moses Myers house on Bank Street, which Neff would have been familiar with.
Neff's original ODU blueprints, one of the few sets surviving, will be used to create the poster for ODU's architectural exhibit this fall.
As Foreman Field rose, Parker Neff said, his father started early in the morning and worked all day. Plus, Neff said, ``Every night after supper he'd pile us all into the car and we'd go back over there. He would walk all around the site for two or three hours, looking at everything.''
War, and thousands of troops, came to Norfolk in 1942. The city decided to build a center to entertain soldiers and sailors.
Parker Neff said his father and some partners owned several acres at the edge of downtown, along Olney Road. They donated part of it to the city, and Neff, along with architect T. David Fitzgibbon, designed the Center Theater for USO shows and the attached Arena for sports.
It was in this building that Neff best demonstrated his ability to adapt to new styles, Wojtowicz says.
The architect was 70 by the time the Center Theater opened, yet he used ``modernist'' design principles, made popular by the 1939 World's Fair, to fashion its massive lines. This was a popular style for theaters of the period, and Wojtowicz notes its influence on the Commodore Theater in Portsmouth.
Although Neff continued working through the late 1940s, the theater would be his last major building, along with the public housing neighborhood called Roberts Park, now Roberts Village, in 1943.
Neff fell ill in the summer of 1952 and was hospitalized. He died Aug. 8 and was buried in Elmwood Cemetery .
To live in Norfolk is to live with the life's work of architect Clarence Amos Neff. Norfolk residents see their doctors and lawyers in his office buildings, learn in his high schools, shop in his arcades and department stores, and sleep in his houses and apartments.
They attend the opera in his theater, too, and there's the rub. The Virginia Opera's renovation of the Center Theater, which begins with a groundbreaking at noon Tuesday, will effectively eliminate one of Neff's last designs. Yet the controversy over that project has revived interest in his buildings.
Federal officials recently announced that the theater meets the standards of the National Register of Historic Places. The theater is not on the register yet, but it is close.
This fall, Neff and other architects will be featured in ``Beaux-Arts Norfolk,'' an exhibit at the Old Dominion University Gallery on Granby Street.
``What I find fascinating about Neff is that he is a microcosm of architecture in the 20th century,'' said Robert Wojtowicz, an assistant professor of art history at ODU. ``He started as a romantic revivalist and by the end of his career was a partially converted modernist.''
If there were a fan club for Neff, Wojtowicz would be president. Jogging by the Center Theater every morning, he developed an affection for the bulky limestone building. He nominated it for historic landmark status and has done much to revive Neff's memory in Norfolk.
Neff was one of a handful of architects who shaped Norfolk's urban skyline in the first half of this century, but probably none was so prolific. When Neff died in 1952 at age 79, his obituaries credited him with more than 600 buildings, mostly in Norfolk. Many, if not most, are still being used.
In the process, Neff and his buildings helped make Norfolk's unwritten history, the fabric of colorful tales that are collected by its longtime residents and usually disappear within a generation.
He was not a native. Neff was born in Delaware, Ohio, the son of a banker. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University and Columbia, where his architectural training began.
Neff lived in Paris for about a year and may have studied in the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which launched a revolution in the visual arts.
When he returned to the United States in 1898, he moved to Norfolk.
``He thought Norfolk would become like New York because of its great natural harbor,'' said his son, Parker Neff Sr., 69, partner in the Norfolk realty firm of Cooke & Neff. ``Many people thought the same way at the time.''
Neff formed the architectural firm of Neff and Thompson in 1902 with Thomas Thompson, an engineer. It quickly became one of the city's leading firms.
In 1904, they designed and built the Holland Apartments, so named because Holland was one of Neff's favorite parts of Europe. The apartments are now listed as a Virginia Historic Landmark.
In 1907, they put up Monticello Arcade and the Board of Trade building, both on downtown Plume Street.
On Mark Twain's last visit to Norfolk in 1909, he shook hands in a reception line at the Board of Trade and gave a short impromptu speech.
The buildings continued to rise, designed by Neff and engineered by Thompson: Maury High School, the Country Club of Norfolk, Princess Anne Country Club, Church of the Good Shepherd, the Flatiron Building. In 1916, Congress appointed Neff supervising architect of the Naval Base.
Neff was building houses all this time, too. In 1910, he married Lucy Latane Thom and they moved into a Neff-designed house along the Lafayette River on North Shore Road, right beside one for his partner, Thompson.
The Neff house featured a low-slung roof on the river side that kept its porch in shade most of the time. Its stairs all had shallow steps.
``He hated steep stairs,'' said Parker Neff, the youngest of the couple's four children. ``If you go in his apartment buildings, you'll notice how easy the steps are. You don't climb, you just walk right up them.''
Another Neff house is on Westover Avenue in West Ghent. He built it for the treasurer of Seaboard Airline Railway.
``What no one knew at the time was that the treasurer was paying for the house with his company's money, not his own,'' said attorney Harrell Lydon, who has owned the house since 1960. ``When they discovered it in 1923, he fled the country to Japan and never came back.''
The same railroad hired Neff in 1926 to do its headquarters on Bute Street, now called the Wainwright Building. It cost $517,201.
Neff did not work exclusively in Norfolk. In Richmond, he designed the Country Club of Virginia, heavily influenced by Monticello, and the offices of Imperial Tobacco Co.
In fact, the story of the Imperial Tobacco building contains a bizarrely coincidental postscript. It was renovated into offices and, until recently, it contained the Richmond offices of a prominent Norfolk cultural group: the Virginia Opera.
In the middle '20s, Neff undertook probably his best-known project: the Cavalier Hotel on Virginia Beach's Oceanfront.
For the Cavalier, Neff looked again to the classical lines of Monticello. The hotel cost $1.5 million to build, a fortune in its day.
It showed in the hotel's luxuries: singing waiters, a separate dining room for chauffeurs, its own railroad car that picked up guests in New York City.
It was completed in 1927 and immediately became a leading resort destination for the nation's rich and famous personalities. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald visited, and film star Mary Pickford got to know her next husband, band leader Buddy Rogers, at the Cavalier.
Cowboy humorist Will Rogers also stayed in the hotel in the early 1930s, and paid Neff a compliment by insulting him.
A well-known New York scandal of the time was industrialist Harry Thaw's shooting of architect Sanford White in a love triangle. After Will Rogers' first night in the Cavalier, he emerged to complain that the rooms were too small.
``Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect,'' he said.
In 1933, Thompson left the firm to become Norfolk's city manager. By now, Neff was 60 years old, but his pace did not slacken.
In the 1930s, he was tapped to design the Norfolk division of William & Mary, now ODU. He was responsible for what is now the old ODU administration building and Foreman Field.
For these two designs, Neff turned to the Colonial tradition. Wojtowicz sees strong influences from the 1792 Moses Myers house on Bank Street, which Neff would have been familiar with.
Neff's original ODU blueprints, one of the few sets surviving, will be used to create the poster for ODU's architectural exhibit this fall.
As Foreman Field rose, Parker Neff said, his father started early in the morning and worked all day. Plus, Neff said, ``Every night after supper he'd pile us all into the car and we'd go back over there. He would walk all around the site for two or three hours, looking at everything.''
War, and thousands of troops, came to Norfolk in 1942. The city decided to build a center to entertain soldiers and sailors.
Parker Neff said his father and some partners owned several acres at the edge of downtown, along Olney Road. They donated part of it to the city, and Neff, along with architect T. David Fitzgibbon, designed the Center Theater for USO shows and the attached Arena for sports.
It was in this building that Neff best demonstrated his ability to adapt to new styles, Wojtowicz says.
The architect was 70 by the time the Center Theater opened, yet he used ``modernist'' design principles, made popular by the 1939 World's Fair, to fashion its massive lines. This was a popular style for theaters of the period, and Wojtowicz notes its influence on the Commodore Theater in Portsmouth.
Although Neff continued working through the late 1940s, the theater would be his last major building, along with the public housing neighborhood called Roberts Park, now Roberts Village, in 1943.
Neff fell ill in the summer of 1952 and was hospitalized. He died Aug. 8 and was buried in Elmwood Cemetery .
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