SADDLE RIVER, NEW JERSEY.- Pioneering New Jersey architect Eleanore Pettersen, 86, dies. She first worked as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1950 she was one of the first women to be licensed as an architect in New Jersey. She designed a house in 1971 for John Alford on a four-acre plot in Saddle River. In 1981 the house was sold to Richard Nixon and it became his home.

Eleanore Pettersen designed luxury town houses, a church, a convent school, offices, a a nursing home. She was born in Passaic, N.J. During the Depression she studied at Cooper Union. She graduated in 1941. She worked at the  Tennessee Valley Authority, designing power service buildings and visitors’ facilities from 1946 to 1950. She was president of the New Jersey Society of Architects in 1984.