Charles Coolidge Haight was an American architect. He also fought with the Thirty-first New York Volunteers during the American Civil War.
Background
Charles Haight was born on March 17, 1841, in New York City, New York, United States, the son of Benjamin Isaac Haight, assistant rector of Trinity Church, and Hetty (Coolidge) Haight. He was of the tenth generation in America among the descendants of John Hoyt (or Haight), who settled in Salisbury, Mississippi, in the middle of the seventeenth century.
In 1806 his grandfather, Benjamin, moved from Bedford, Westchester County, New York, where his branch of the family had lived, to New York City, and there he became a well-known merchant.
Education
Charles Haight graduated from Columbia College in 1861 and studied law for a short time.
Career
Charles Haight enlisted in the 7th Regiment, with which he served in Baltimore in 1862.
In 1862 he was commissioned in the 31st New York Volunteers, serving as first lieutenant and adjutant from October 1862 to December 1863, when he received a captain’s commission in the 39th New York Volunteers. Severely wounded at the Wilderness, he retired in November 1864. He then entered the office of Emlen T. Littell, architect, where he remained as a student until he left in 1867 to open his own office.
Haight’s earliest important work was the school of mines building, Columbia College, 1874, which, although in the then fashionable Victorian Gothic style, showed much creative promise. Hamilton Hall, 1880, on the Madison Avenue side of the Columbia block, was almost entirely free from Victorian mannerisms and was one of the earliest examples of the adaptation of collegiate Gothic to school architecture in America.
It was followed in 1884 by the library and in 1887 by the Trinity parish offices on Church Street in much the same style, the Columbia library being especially noteworthy because of its exposed iron trusses. Other outstanding educational buildings of this period, all revealing the same effort to attain charm, dignity, and an honest expression of their function, were those at Hobart College, Geneva, New York, St. Stephen’s College, Annandale, New York, and the grammar school building at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennesse.
Haight also designed several commercial buildings, the largest of which was that for the Lawyer’s Title Insurance Company of New York, 1894. Its most striking feature is a graceful tower with a picturesque top. Three works most perfectly characterize Haight’s taste and ability during this period; the General Theological Seminary, New York, 1887-1889; the New York Cancer Hospital, 1885-1890; and the Havemeyer house, 1890.
The first of these is a quiet group of brick and stone buildings around a quadrangle, full of variety, charm, and unforced atmosphere. The Cancer Hospital is picturesquely composed, somewhat after the manner of a French chateau, but with detail of English flavor. The freest in design is the Havemeyer house, the style of which, although distantly based on Richardsonian Romanesque, is much quieter and less manneristic; it is without doubt one of the most successful adaptations ever made of a picturesque style to city conditions, beautiful in composition and exquisitely refined in detail.
The building of Vanderbilt and Phelps halls at Yale, completed in 1898, carried still further the beginning already made of the adaptation of English collegiate Gothic in America. These two buildings were the first of several at Yale which formed the bulk of Haight’s later work. A. M. Githens became associated with him in the most of this work which was done under the name of Haight and Githens. The university library was the first of these and was followed rapidly by a large group of halls and laboratories for the Sheffield Scientific School, all in a continually more free English collegiate style. He died at Garrison-on-Hudson in his seventy-sixth year.
Achievements
Charles Haight was a well known architect of his time. Among his best known buildings are those of the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, most of the buildings at Columbia College's old campus, and Yale University.
Personality
In person Charles Haight was a ‘‘gentleman of the old school, ” dignified and courtly in manner.
Interests
Haight was an ardent yachtsman and usually spent his summers on the water.
Connections
Charles Haight was married in October 1870 to Euphemia Kneeland.
