When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Up for sale a RARE! "American Architect" Aymar Embury II Hand Signed 3X5 Card.
ES-4536E
Aymar
Embury II (June 15, 1880 –
November 15, 1966) was an American architect. He is best known for commissions
from the City of New York from
the 1930s through to the 1950s. In this period, Embury frequently worked
with Robert Moses in the
latter's various city and state capacities, especially, early on, in Moses’
capacity as New York City Parks
Commissioner. Many surviving examples of Embury's work are zoos,
swimming pools, playgrounds, and other recreational structures in New York City
parks. Embury was born in New York City to Aymar Embury and Fannie Miller
Bates. Married four times, his first union was with Dorothy Coe in 1904. They
later divorced, and he married Ruth Dean.[1] Dean was a famous landscape designer who
designed Grey Gardens during
the marriage. The two worked out of the same office but had separate shingles
for their businesses. A widower in 1932, he married Josephine Bound in 1934, which ended in divorce. He was survived by his fourth wife, Jane
Schabbehar. From the 1930s on, Embury maintained Manhattan
and East Hampton, Long Island residences, and was active in East Hampton
society. Aymar Embury graduated from Princeton University in
1900 with a degree in Civil Engineering and further received a Masters of Science
degree in 1901. Following graduate studies, Embury taught architecture at
Princeton while also working for various firms in New
York City, including Cass Gilbert, George B. Post, Howells & Stokes, and Palmer and Hornbostel. During this
period he developed a keen interest in the architecture of small country
houses, publishing several books and pamphlets on the subject. In 1905, Embury
won both the first and second prize in a design contest sponsored by the Garden
City Company for a modest country house in Garden City, Long Island. This gave
him visibility as a "society architect"; he acquired a reputation as
a builder of country houses for the upper middle class and received many
further commissions for such houses in the years surrounding World War I. He designed the James Boyd House, also known as Weymouth, at Southern Pines, North
Carolina, and it was added to the National
Register of Historic Places in 1977. By the late 1920s, Embury
was well-known and had received a wide range of commissions all over the east
coast of the United States, entailing college buildings and social clubs in
addition to residences. He designed the Players and Nassau Clubs in Princeton, New Jersey,
the Princeton Club of New York,
the University Club in Washington, D.C. and the Mountain Brook Country Club in Mountain Brook, Alabama He
designed the Hope Valley
Country Club Clubhouse at Durham, North Carolina, in
1927. In 1930 he was appointed consulting architect by the Port of New
York Authority He consulted on the Authority's Inland Terminal. As of the Authority's 1933 annual report, he
was listed as Architect. In 1934, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Robert Moses as sole commissioner of a newly unified
Department of Parks for New York City, commencing a seven-year period of
construction and renovation of city parks. Embury, along with landscape
architect Gilmore D. Clarke, was a
senior member of an 1,800 strong design and construction team that Moses had
assembled at the Arsenal in Central Park. In the following years, Embury was
chief or consulting architect in numerous projects in the New York City area. Exact figures are not available, but it is
possible that Embury supervised the design of over six hundred public projects.
Surviving examples include zoos such as the Central Park Zoo and Prospect Park Zoo; parks such as Bryant Park, Betsy Head Park, Crotona Park, Jacob Riis Park, McCarren Park, Red Hook Park, and Sunset Park;
bridges including the Triborough Bridge and Henry Hudson Bridge; and
other features including the New York City Building at the 1939 New York World's Fair (now
the Queens Museum) Orchard Beach, Prospect
Park Bandshell, and the Hofstra University Campus.
