Aymar Embury II (1880-1966)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Compared to most other parts of the country, New York City enjoys a rich New
Deal legacy... and an even more remarkable ignorance of it beyond some vague
notion that "master builder" Robert Moses did it all himself, seemingly with
his own bare hands. In reality, we owe NYC's construction boom during the
Great Depression to President Roosevelt and the New Deal agencies he created
and that paid for the materials, labor, engineering, and architecture. And to
the close friendship of FDR and NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who
obtained so much federal money for New York City that it was sometimes
called the 49th state[1] — the only
non-state entity that had its own WPA branch. Throughout the Depression
WPA* crews were all over the City constructing bridges, highways, tunnels,
subways, public schools, clinics, hospitals, campuses, marinas, boathouses,
parks, playgrounds, zoos, athletic fields, golf courses, recreation centers,
swimming pools, beaches, bathhouses, bleachers, band shells, housing
projects, fire houses, police stations, comfort stations, and on and on.
When you think of architects who left their mark on New York City, who comes
to mind? McKim, Mead, and White? I.M. Pei? Anybody else? Probably
not!
Triborough Bridge
Meet Aymar Embury II, member of President Roosevelt's Advisory
Committee on Architecture 1934-43[2] and New
York City Parks Department's chief architect from 1934 until the end of the
Great Depression, and well beyond. In this capacity, he is said to have
designed or supervised the design of over six hundred public projects in New
York City[2]. He was a well-heeled, prosperous,
and highly-regarded upper-crust architect who for some 20 years had
specialized in elegant homes for the wealthy. He certainly did not take the
Parks job for the money. More likely he took it on because at a time when
unemployment in New York City exceeded 30%, he would be designing projects
that would employ tens of thousands of jobless workers and once built, many
of these projects would improve the lives of struggling families. Anyway,
he liked his new Parks Department job better than his other ones because
"it's such a madhouse"[3].
Orchard Beach Pavilion
In some ways Embury's public-spirited New Deal work diminished his own
architectural legacy. Quite aside from the fact that he was now designing
structures for ordinary people rather than estates in the Hamptons, there
was the WPA's quite proper insistence on the least expensive construction
materials — cheap concrete and bricks — to be able to hire the
most workers. This was fine with Embury; in fact, he became a veritable
master of the Aesthetics of Concrete[4]. The
downside was that such gems as
his Orchard Beach
pavilion would decay and turn ugly over time. Yet it is a tribute to
the value and impact of his New Deal creations that at least twenty of them
have achieved landmark status and now, after decades of shameful neglect,
many of them are being restored to their original glory.
Colonial Pool and Play Center
I have no special knowledge of Embury and I know of no biography of him
although he certainly deserves one. (What would Robert Moses have been
without him?) He must have worked long hard days years on end to
bring so many public works to fruition, with little recompense and not much
recognition either since most NYC New Deal structures are not credited by
the Parks Department to any particular architect, nor indeed to the very New
Deal funding and labor that made them possible. No matter, Embury's work
speaks for itself; it ranges from the humble and workaday (comfort stations,
drinking fountains, ticket booths) to the monumental and magnificent:
I am not aware of any published list of Embury's New Deal projects, so I
have been working on assembling one myself. At this writing (25 November
2019) I have identified 235 of them. In most cases I can't say to what
extent he designed a project personally, or collaborated with other
architects on it, or simply supervised; short of digging through mountains
of boxes at the Embury archive in Syracuse, we can only rely on official
records that name him as architect of a given New Deal project. The
current list of these projects is here:
The list is useful in identifying New York City New Deal projects in cases
where no other New Deal connection is recorded. By virtue of Embury being
on a federal New Deal payroll, any particular project can be classified as a
New Deal project if Embury is officially credited as its architect in his
Parks Department capacity during 1934-1943.
Delacorte Clock
Lincoln Tunnel
Eighty years hence, countless people traverse Embury's bridges and highways
and tunnels, and visit his beaches and pools and parks and zoos and other
creations, without having the faintest notion of how these marvels came to
be. In 1965 Embury's son, Edward Coe Embury, paid tribute to his father's
New Deal career by designing the marvellous Delacorte
Clock[5] for the Central Park Zoo that his Dad
had designed in 1934.
In 1995, a New York Times article[6]
reported how Embury's descendents were taken by the Parks Department on a
bus tour of some of his most famous and enduring New Deal public works. The
article concludes: "During the years of the Federal Works Projects
Administration construction, while he served as chief architect for Robert
Moses, he did as much as anyone to bind the city together and to help it dig
its way out of the Depression."
*
For simplicity, "WPA" is used in this article as a shorthand for any New
Deal agency such as FERA, CWA, PWA, or WPA itself, that paid for public
works.
Aymar
Embury II Papers, Syracuse University, Libraries Special Collections
Research Center. Home of Embury's papers and one of dozens of reputable
sources for the 600 number.
"Architect", Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, 7 July 1934,
pp.12-13.
Bill Case,
Architect
of the Sandhills, PineStraw Magazine, 14 September 2016.
Includes some early photos of Embury, and 3/4 of the way down includes about
eight paragraphs on Embury's New Deal work.
