J. Cleveland Cady

In his professional career, J. Cleveland Cady was perhaps the embodiment of the effort of American architecture, fifty years ago, to find itself while cutting loose from the false and meretricious standards of the Second Empire. Beginning his work at so unpropitious an artistic period as 1870, his own taste was simple; verging perhaps, as did his personality, on the austere. He was a man of strong religious convictions; but in so far as these habits and convictions influenced his art, it was the religion rather of the Covenanter than of the Mediæval Church.

The very numerous church buildings which Cady designed expressed this phase of character; so, in their somewhat stern simplicity, did the Presbyterian Hospital and the Museum of Natural History, both of which were his work. That a man of just this temperament—deprecating, as did so many other sincere church members of his day, what they deemed frivolous amusements—should have become the designer of the Metropolitan Opera House, was an odd coincidence of circumstance. That work, in fact, fell to Cady as a result of selection from the plans of numerous competing architects, and it is characteristic of his point of view that he is said not to have entered the competition until after taking counsel with his religious associates and accepting their judgment.

Mr. Cady did a great amount of good for the community in which he lived. He was an untiring worker, and his work in his church, which was continued actively and uninterruptedly during more than half a century, was supplemented by equally active service on the boards of a large city hospital and of the City Mission. Like most other men, there was one side of his tastes and acquisitions known to few but his intimates—his fondness for music, especially the older and simpler chorals, which for many years he would himself render at the organ.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1920 Century Association Yearbook