Henry J. Hardenbergh

In the sister profession of architecture, Henry Janeway Hardenbergh had a peculiar and interesting place. It used to be thought that the huge “skyscraper” hotels were an outgrowth solely of the topographical necessities of Manhattan Island. With them, as with the New York apartment house, the problem lent itself indifferently to the grace of architecture, and the architectural works produced were at first endured solely by virtue of necessity. Hardenbergh grappled with the unwelcome but unavoidable task, and nearly forty years ago designed the Dakota Apartment House, whose outlines the residents of the Orange Mountain used in those days to point out on the Eastern horizon to their guests, as a by no means unpleasing landmark of the distant city.

Following this, in the face of the still more exacting problem of a huge hotel structure in the heart of a business district, he designed the Waldorf-Astoria, to which during so many years the people of the West and South thronged as to what they conceived to be the temple of real New York life. So notably successful was his achievement of combining the possible maximum of sincere artistic purpose with the unavoidable minimum of ugliness involved by the handicaps of the task itself, that it presently appeared that his type of architecture appealed to other communities, placed under less exacting conditions than those of Manhattan Island. Boston, Washington, Montreal and California called on Hardenbergh’s imaginative genius. What is architecturally good of the modern hotel and apartment house—and to discover it, we have only to consider what those structures might have been without the kindly offices of our Hardenberghs—is largely the result of his constructive work.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook