Know Your Neighbor: Ed Elliott, Architect, Pleasantville

Ed Elliott remembered as a child being fascinated by the construction of a house on a neighboring property. Since he always seemed to be building something in his own home, he would be given tools, not toys, as Christmas gifts.

It made sense that when it was time for him to decide a career that it would be something related to building or construction.

As it turned out, Elliott became an architect, and for the past 30 years the longtime Pleasantville resident has been the sole practitioner of his own firm, Elliott-Architects. For about 20 years, he has worked out of a 350-square-foot space he carved out in the lower level of the house that he and his wife Katherine raised their three children and still live.

Elliott said he has always enjoyed working on a plan and seeing what he comes up with where even a slight miscalculation can be costly.

“If somebody comes in the door I try to figure out is this something I want to do,” he said. “It’s a challenge to figure out different projects.”

Most of his work has been in Westchester, but the largest project he’s designed was in Putnam, an expansive homeless shelter at Graymoor in Garrison. That project also included a kitchen, which serves about 600 meals a day, a dining room, a chapel and a meeting space.

“It had a lot of everything, even though it was one project,” Elliott said.

He finds the variety of projects he gets hired to design fascinating but it also helps to insulate him against economic slowdowns, where invariably the smaller residential jobs dry up and prospective commercial customers look for good deals.

“When the economy is bad, the residential stuff kind of dries up,” Elliott said. “That’s one of the reasons why I do a variety of projects.”

Born in Baltimore, Elliott and his family moved to Yorktown when he was about nine years old. After going through the Yorktown schools, he opted to study architecture at Miami University in Ohio.

The experience he had as a senior, serving as chairman of an annual spring event featuring bands and a host of other activities that the Architecture Department would organize, was perhaps more beneficial to Elliott’s career than most of his classes.

The year before, student organizers didn’t adhere to curfews and various guidelines and administrators were wary the following year.

“We had to convince them that we were more responsible than the guys who did it previously,” Elliott said. “That was a great experience for me because dealing with all the different people of the university was very similar to going before the planning boards and the zoning boards to get permission for a project. So that was really my best experience in college preparing me for work.”

The profession required that it would be nine long years before Elliott would become certified as a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Since his undergraduate degree was considered a pre-professional degree, he was required to work for an AIA member or an engineer for that length of time. Elliott worked for two small Westchester architectural firms and also had a stint in the engineering department at Nestle.

Toward the end of that time, he worked full-time for a contractor, which allowed him to dabble on his own projects in the evenings and on weekends. When work dried up with the contractor, Elliott was on his own trying to make a go of his fledgling firm.

When he and his family still lived in Yorktown, he had an office. But shortly after moving into their Pleasantville house in 1993, Elliott opted to work from home where he could tend to their children rather than pay for prohibitively expensive daycare. His wife is a nurse practitioner.

During the past two decades in Pleasantville, Elliott has been heavily involved in the community. He was one of the founders of the Pleasantville Youth Soccer Club, remains an assistant scout master for Boy Scout Troop 12 and has been a longtime officer with the Pleasantville Chamber of Commerce.

Since his oldest child was a high school sophomore, Elliott has also helped to build sets for the Pleasantville High School spring production.

Although computers heavily assist today’s architects, there’s no substitute for preciseness and taking an idea from concept to design.

“A builder’s got to build it. He can do it from what I’m giving him,” Elliott said. “If he can’t, how am I going to explain to him how it’s going to happen? It might be a note on the drawing. It might be a meeting with him or meeting him at the job site.”