Paul was born on November 25, 1866 in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, the son of William Aiken Starrett, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary who had immigrated to Kansas as a Presbyterian minister in 1864. His mother was Helen Martha Ekin. The elder Starrett supplemented his meager income by working as a farmer and a carpenter.
In 1883, he graduated from Lake Forest Academy, an elite boarding school for boys which was part of the Lake Forest, Illinois, educational experiment.
After a short while as a salesman, Starrett became discouraged and returned to office work, as a stenographer for a grain company. In poor health as a result of long hours of work and night school, he eagerly accepted the offer of an unsalaried job as clerk on his employer's ranch in New Mexico.
When he returned to Chicago in 1888 he found a job with the architectural firm of Burnham and Root, where his older brother, Theodore, was a draftsman. The enthusiasm and optimism of the late nineteenth-century American city permeated the offices of Burnham and Root, whose classic eclecticism was to dominate urban building in America for a generation.
Engineering seemed a logical alternative, and Starrett worked at its practical applications, performing the thousands of tedious calculations necessary to turn architectural drawings into bricks and mortar, steel and stone. Meanwhile, he spent his lunch hours watching the rebuilding of Chicago, where some of the world's first skyscrapers were rising.
It was as an architect's superintendent that Starrett learned construction methods. Burnham and Root were the chief architects of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Starrett superintended the construction of several of the classic temples that rose on the midway.
In 1894 Starrett directed the construction of Buffalo's Ellicott Square Building and was so disgusted at the contractor's incompetence that he decided to go into the business himself. Meanwhile he superintended construction of one of the first buildings influenced by the Chicago fair: Union Station in Columbus, Ohio, designed by his brother Theodore. But it was Harry S. Black, who had taken over the heavy construction company founded by George A. Fuller, who gave Starrett his big opportunity in 1897.
Starrett turned a profit on a building in Baltimore that Black had decided was a losing proposition, and he did the same thing with the new Willard Hotel in Washington, D. C. After Black put the Fuller Company into a promotional combine, U. S. Realty and Improvement Company, Starrett resigned, but when business difficulties led to Black's suicide, Starrett came back to head the firm.
He had failed to get the contract for New York's most celebrated skyscraper of the era, the Woolworth Building (1913), and considered it his biggest disappointment.
The literal-minded master builder lived to see its utilitarian simplicity praised more highly than the classic entablatures of his youth, many of which were already being dismantled when he died, in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Paul Starrett was the leader of Starrett Brothers, Inc. , his firm was in the top over two decades (1902 - 1922). His most famous included the Flatiron Building, Pennsylvania Station, General Post Office, the Hotel Pennsylvania, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, the Hippodrome, and the Plaza Hotel in New York City; the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. More than any other single firm, Starrett's company helped create the twentieth-century American city. Starrett continued to change the skyline of New York with the New York Life Insurance Company Building (1928), the McGraw-Hill Building (1931), and Bank of Manhattan Company buildings.
Quotes from others about the person
Daniel H. Burnham said Starrett "had a genius for organization and leadership. "
On May 25, 1892, Starrett married Anna Therese Hinman, daughter of his former boss at the insurance agency. They had two daughters. His wife died in 1904.
On June 8, 1920, he married Elizabeth Root; they had three sons.
