An accomplished student, at his commencement from the Institute for Colored Youth he delivered a speech entitled 'The Role of Art in Negro Life' and was awarded a $15 prize for being the best student in mathematics. As a boy, he attended the Institute for Colored Youth and Brown Preparatory School. He resided at 718 South Twenty-first Street and 1911 Fitzwater Street before moving to 1515 Christian Street, his home for several decades. Today we appreciate Abele as one of the early twentieth-century's most adept designers of revival buildings, who rejuvenated many long-dormant styles as vital, modern forms of architectural expression.īorn in Philadelphia in 1881, Abele lived most of his life in the city. Although Fiske Kimball, a noted architectural historian and the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, acknowledged that Abele was 'certainly one of the most sensitive designers anywhere in America' in 1942, the pioneering African American architect remained virtually unknown outside Philadelphia's architectural community until the 1970s and 1980s.

Julian Francis Abele, the first African American graduate of the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, received scant recognition during his lifetime despite his many significant contributions. Perhaps more than any other architects, Trumbauer and Abele defined the Philadelphia cityscape we experience today. Like William Penn, who devised Philadelphia's grid plan in the late seventeenth century, and Edmund Bacon, who led the drives to redevelop Penn Center and Market East after World War II, Horace Trumbauer and his gifted associates played a critical role creating the modern skyline around Philadelphia's City Hall. During those decades, leading up to the Stock Market crash in 1929, as the city's business district shifted west from the Independence Hall neighborhood to Broad Street, Trumbauer and his talented designers, especially Abele, erected dozens of offices, homes, hotels, clubs, and cultural institutions for the city's burgeoning business class in the area. Over the ensuing 30 years Abele grew into the chief designer and primary consultant for the firm. In 1906 He recruited the accomplished young architect, Julian Abele, to join him. Two of the most important are the Reading Railroad's imposing, classical station (1928) on Broad Street in North Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania's English medieval style Irvine Auditorium (1929). In the greater Philadelphia area, Trumbauer erected several hundred buildings, from modest suburban homes to towering skyscrapers.

However the vast majority of his buildings were designed for Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs. He erected buildings throughout the United States: Saint Catherine's Chapel (1901) in Spring Lake, New Jersey, the Hotel Pere Marquette (1925) in Peoria, Illinois, and the New York Evening Post Building (1925).

Chief architect knock down library