J. Cleaveland Cady

J(osiah) Cleaveland Cady (Providence, Rhode Island, 1837 - April 17, 1919) was a New York-based architect whose most familiar surviving building is the south range of the American Museum of Natural History on New York's Upper West Side. He worked in partnership from 1870 with Milton See (1854 - October 27, 1920) in the firm of Cady, Bird and See.

Cady's first church commission was the First Presbyterian Church of Oyster Bay in Oyster Bay, New York. Here he utilized the Carpenter Gothic or Stick Style to create a surprising effect for this wood-frame church building set on a hillside overlooking Oyster Bay.

Cady was the architect of the original Metropolitan Opera, opened October 1883, demolished in 1966. Suitable to the Italian opera that was central to the repertory as New Yorkers then conceived it, the new Opera presented a palazzo-like full front on Broadway between 39th and 40th streets that offered three tiers of arched triple openings framed by strong masonry piers. Soon the facade was flanked by matching seven-storey towers, to provide extra space and income to support the opera. Cady's original auditorium was gutted by fire on August 27, 1892.

The American Museum of Natural History has a magnificently rusticated Richardsonian Romanesque entrance range by Cady and his partner See, stretching 707 feet along its 77th Street frontage. The Museum also preserves its Cady auditorium, restored in 2002 as the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Theater.

Cady and See designed the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the Skin and Cancer Hospital, Bellevue Medical School, and the Hudson Street Hospital, and also many churches.

They designed many college buildings, fifteen buildings for Yale University alone, and buildings for Williams College, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and for Wesleyan University.

At Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, Cady's 1878 St. Anthony Hall (Delta Psi) is massively rusticated Richardsonian Romanesque in style, with narrow "arrow-slit" windows and even a tall cylindrical tower with a steep conical roof. The tower and an octagonal "chapter house" are half-embedded within the densely-massed picturesque structure.

A 1993 Trinity College exhibition "Forgotten architect of the gilded age: Josiah Cleaveland Cady's legacy" with a catalogue by Kathleen A. Curran, failed to cause Cady's reputation to rebound.

External links

* [http://www.metopera.org/history/week-961021.html Facade of the old Metropolitan Opera]
* [http://www.gwctc.commnet.edu/artdept/arthis01/revivals/secret.html Victor Katz' photographs of the Trinity College Delta Psi fraternity]