Aymar Embury II (b. 1880, d. 1966)

Aymar Embury II was born in New York City, graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Civil Engineering, and received a Masters of Science degree.  He taught architecture at Princeton while also working for various firms in New York City, including Cass Gilbert, George B. Post, Howells & Stokes, and Palmer and Hornbostel.  Embury was an American architect best known for commissions from the City of New York from the 1930s through to the 1950s. In this period, Embury frequently worked with Robert Moses in the latter's various city and state capacities, especially, early on, in Moses capacity of Parks Commissioner. Embury won both the first and second prize in a design contest sponsored by the Garden City Company for a modest country house in Garden City, Long Island. This gave him visibility as a "society architect"; he acquired a reputation as a builder of country houses for the upper middle class and received many further commissions for such houses in the years surrounding World War I. Many surviving examples of Embury's work include zoos, swimming pools, playgrounds and other recreational structures in New York City parks.

 

Embury was chief or consulting architect in numerous projects in New York City and supervised the design of over six hundred public projects. Surviving examples include the Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, Prospect Park Bandshell, McCarren Park and four of the other ten WPA pools built throughout the city in the mid-1930s, the New York City Building at the 1939 New York World's Fair (Currently the Queens Museum of Art), Triborough Bridge, and Henry Hudson Bridge, Orchard Beach, Bryant Park, the Hofstra University Campus, and Jacob Riis Park.

 

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