George B. Post

A large heart ceased to beat, and large and efficient human faculties were stilled, when George Browne Post died in his seventy-sixth year. No other man had so stamped his mark upon the financial and business architecture of lower New York for the period commencing some four decades ago, when the “elevator building” was beginning its portentous evolution. He was its leading demiurge during the years, say, from 1875 to 1890, which preceded the era of steel frame construction. Many of those buildings have since succumbed to the restless progress of metropolitan enterprise. But they still include, or once included, the Produce Exchange, the Cotton Exchange, and the new Stock Exchange; the old Mills Building and the old Equitable; the old Times Building, the Post, Mortimer, and Pulitzer Buildings. Outside of this district, he designed, among other buildings, the New York Hospital, the Cornelius Vanderbilt II residence at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, and the City College. Beyond New York, the Wisconsin State Capitol may be mentioned. It is a mighty record:—

“. . . Some good son

Paint my two hundred pictures—let him try.”

Mr. Post’s achievements were the fruit of his own talents; but he benefited greatly from the teaching and example of Richard M. Hunt. Within his profession, he was justly and highly honored, with decorations, with degrees, and presidencies,—as of the American Institute of Architects and of its New York Chapter. In 1911 that body, in recognition of his distinguished services to architecture, gave him a gold medal at its meeting in the National Museum in Washington. In another respect we may also honor him. Post fought in the Civil War, first as Captain in the Twenty-second Regiment of New York Volunteers, then as volunteer aid on General Burnside’s staff. For gallantry he was made Major, Lieutenant-Colonel, and then Colonel, of the Twenty-second. It was during the war that he married Miss Alice M. Stone of New York, from which marriage four sons and one daughter survive their parents.

Henry Osborn Taylor
1914 Century Association Yearbook