Circular house in N.J. neighborhood is unique. So was the flying daredevil who built it.

The eight-sided house that William P. Gary built at 75 Lincoln Avenue, Totowa.
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About the only odd thing in what is a very ordinary-looking neighborhood in Totowa is the gleaming white house with the wrap-around porch on Lincoln Avenue. The house is a circle among the squares and rectangles squares that stand side-by-side in this neatly-trimmed suburb of Paterson, a block from a lazy stretch of the Passaic River just above the Great Falls.

A flyover reveals another odd feature of this house: the octagon-shaped cupola that peaks out over the roof. Eight sides, all of equal length, with exterior angles adding up to the 360 degrees of a circle. An attempt at perfection, and as daring as the man who built it.

William P. Gary was born in 1867 and wanted to fly. By 1910 he was a pressman at the Paterson Guardian who was building flying machines in his spare time at his lot on Lincoln Avenue.

Gary had this idea for a plane with a circular wingspan, with the pilot astride a gas-powered engine that was more or less at the center of the circle. He called it “The Garyplane”; others, somewhat derisively, dubbed it “The Hoople.”

William P. Gary with one of his flying machines, dubbed The Hoople, that he built in his yard of his octagon house in Totowa.

Undaunted, Gary tested — and crashed —his planes on numerous occasions, and triumphantly flew over the Passaic River on Feb. 8, 1912. Gary was a pressman for the Press Guardian in Paterson, which duly reported his successes and failures.

“He was inventive and intrepid,” said Edward A. Smyk, the Passaic County historian, who keeps a file of old newspaper clippings about Gary. “He built this flying machine that didn’t work out because he had a design problem, yet he persisted. It’s right out of the American playbook.”

William P. Gary, an early aviator from Totowa who built flying machines and an eight-sided house.

Try as he might, Gary’s prototype for a circular plane never really got off the ground. In 1922, he was badly injured testing a plane he’d designed to carry mail for the U.S. government when he crashed in Wayne.

William P. Gary crashed numerous times testing his flying machines.

Gary also built houses, and his passion for circular design is evident in the house he built for himself in 1926 on Lincoln Avenue. The octagon style was an architectural fad in the 1850s, a part-mystical, part-mechanical form of design made popular by another out-of-the-box thinker, Orson S. Fowler.

Fowler, who was from upstate New York, was an exponent of Phrenology, a pseudoscience that theorized that the shape and size of the human skull determined character traits. Although this early form of psychiatry has been completely debunked, it clearly influenced Fowler’s free-thinking ideas about home-building, which he laid out in a book, “The Octagon House: A Home for All” published in 1848.

“Orson Fowler, by profession both publisher and phrenologist, held that every man could be his own architect,” observed Madeline B. Stern, a scholar and rare book dealer who wrote the forward to “The Octagon House” when it was republished in 1973. Stern notes that Fowler was part of a high-powered literary circle: Walt Whitman edited Fowler’s American Phrenological Journal, and Mark Twain wrote “Huckleberry Finn” in his octagonal study.

Fowler believed that home-building was an expression of character, and the best design for a home was the octagon, that circle of squares that offered 20 percent more space, let in more light, and improved ventilation. “Nature’s forms are mostly spherical...Then why not apply her forms to houses? Fruits, eggs, tubers, nuts, grains, seeds, trees, etc. are made spherical, in order to enclose the most material in the least compass,” Fowler mused in his 1848 book “The Octagon House: A Home for All.”

The book touched off a mini-boom in the U.S., with over 1,000 octagon houses, schools, churches, barns, and even eight-sided pigpens being constructed. Fowler felt more space meant bigger rooms, and bigger rooms meant more air to breathe, which made for cleaner, healthier living.

“Waking up in the small room, you feel dull, stupid, gloomy, oppressed, yawny, lax and all unstrung in body and mind, because almost stifled for want of breath,” Fowler wrote. “In the large one, fresh, lively, strong, bright, bright, happy, and healthy. And how much more you can enjoy and accomplish during the day!”

Khalid Mahmood, the current owner of the property on Lincoln Avenue, agrees. “Yes, the rooms are brighter,” he said. “And the ventilation is good.”

Mahmood said he bought the house 22 years ago, but had never heard of Gary or Fowler. He didn’t buy the house for the octagon design. “I like the Totowa schools,” he said.

The NJ Department of Environmental Protection has a list of octagon houses in the state. According to the DEP, there are octagon houses in Garfield on Orchard Street; in Montvale on West Grand Avenue; in Hackettstown on Washington Street, and in Newark on South 10th Street. There are two octagon houses on Cornelia Street in Boonton in Morris County.

This article is part of “Unknown New Jersey,” an ongoing series that highlights interesting and little-known stories about our past, present, and future — all the unusual things that make our great state what it is. Got a story to pitch? Email it to local@njadvancemedia.com.

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