Lottie Helwick

(1911–1992) worked in an era when a woman who performed essential work in

the realization of built structures never shared official credit for the projects she worked quietly behind the scenes to make possible. Helwick did “all the drawings” for the Cleveland Zoo’s iconic Pachyderm House while working for Hays & Ruth, including the critical subterranean engineering. But it was the role she played as an employee of Barnes  Neiswander in the realization of Western Reserve University’s Nursing & Dental School complex that she regarded as “my finest contribution to architectural work.” Handed a sketch, “I went ahead and did the mechanical or electrical drawings all myself,” she told oral historian Stanley Garfinkel looking back from the age of 76. As word spread “that I could carry a gang of six or seven fellows, correct what they did and coordinate all the engineering and the architectural,” Helwick would be engaged as a valuable team member, in the course of her career, by 14 local design firms including Spahn & Barnes, Outcalt Guenther, and Hays & Ruth, who trusted her to “do the detail”—which ranged from creative decisions on things like doors and moldings that gave a building its distinctive touches…to the tricky coordination of design and the intricate engineering.

At Carnegie Tech, told she couldn’t study architecture “because I was a girl” and directed “upstairs” to Painting & Decorating, she stubbornly sat in the administrative office for a week till the school relented. When students’ design projects were hung in a long corridor for faculty judgment and she got higher grades than her classmates, the boys “wore sour faces,” she told Garfinkel, and cried “ ‘teacher’s pet!’ Well, I wasn’t. The damn teachers made me work harder than the rest of them.” Informed that girls couldn’t do math, she was soon grading papers for the math teacher. But after she’d completed two-and-half-years of studies in a year and a half, the Depression forced her to move back home.