Josiah Cleaveland Cady, commonly known as J. Cleaveland Cady He 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 and from 1873 with Louis DeCoppet Berg in the firm of Cady, Berg & See. The firm was dissolved in 1909. Cady was the son of Josiah Cady and his wife Lydia, of Providence, Rhode Island, where he was born. He graduated from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860; the following year he married Emma M. Bulkeley, of Orange, New Jersey; they had five children. Cady was a devoted Presbyterian, who served as head of the Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, East 42nd Street; his first church commission was the First Presbyterian Church of 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, Berg & See
Cady was the architect of the original Metropolitan Opera House, opened October 1883. Suitable to the Italian opera that was central to the repertory as New Yorkers then conceived it, the new house for the Metropolitan 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-story 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, Berg & 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. Cady served as a trustee for Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, during the tenure of President William Goodell Frost, Cady's nephew. He designed many of the buildings on the Berea College Campus. At Trinity College, Cady's 1878 St. Anthony Hall 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 is half-embedded within the densely massed picturesque structure. on the corner In 1880, Cady, Berg & See were hired by William West Durant to design a summer chapel on an island in Raquette Lake, New York, to entice his wealthy acquaintances to build their summer homes in the area. The chapel was constructed in the Stick Style. The plans were used in 1881, modified by Durant at the request of Harriet Beecher Stowe, for the Church of Our Saviour in Mandarin, Florida, and again in 1883 for the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beattystown, New Jersey. Ten years later Cady again built a chapel on Raquette Lake, St. William's Roman Catholic Church on Long Point, again in Shingle Style, for Durant's employees and local residents. Both churches, only accessible by water, preserve and reflect the Adirondack heritage. Among the firm's New York houses was the Isaac Stern House, 858 Fifth Avenue.
Cady & Gregory
In 1909, after Cady, Berg & See was dissolved, Cady and William S. Gregory formed a partnership known as "Cady & Gregory," with offices at 40 West 32nd Street, New York.
First Romanian-American Congregation Synagogue, 89-93 Rivington St., New York, New York
Grace Episcopal Church Complex, 15515 Jamaica Ave., Queens, New York
Othniel C. Marsh House, 360 Prospect St., New Haven, Connecticut, a U.S. National Historic Landmark
One or more properties in Plantsville Historic District, Roughly bounded by Prospect St., Summer St., Quinnipiac River, Grove St., S. Main St., W. Main St., and West St., Southington, Connecticut
Saint Anthony Hall, 340 Summit St., Hartford, Connecticut
St. William's Catholic Church, Long Point on Raquette Lake, Long Lake, New York
Cady presented his architectural library to Trinity College in 1918 and died the following year at his apartment, 214 Riverside Drive. 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.
