Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz

Failing health had long kept Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz from frequent association with the Century. Those who knew him recall his imaginative grasp of his art and his picturesque reminiscence of the eminent architects whom he had known. The buildings designed by him were chiefly marked by bold defiance of the restrictions of ground space to which most New York architects surrender in advance. If his conception of the structure whose design was entrusted to him pictured surroundings which should require elbowroom in the huddling of city buildings, he was able to persuade his clients to the sacrifice of office-space; with the result that many of his structures, like the Bank for Savings, are not only notable landmarks but have the air of dominating their neighborhood. It is an instance of the ability of such artistic genius to adapt itself to circumstance that he was also the architect of the New York “skyscraper” which through force of circumstances occupied the smallest ground-space of any such structure in the city and could therefore not dispense with an inch of room—the Times building on the Square—for whose outlines it is said that Eidlitz found his suggestion, oddly enough, in Giotto’s Florentine campanile.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1922 Century Association Yearbook