Cyrus Lazelle Warner Eidlitz was an American architect best known for designing One Times Square, the former New York Times Building on Times Square.
Background
Eidlitz was born in New New York He was the son of Lazelle Warner and influential New York architect Leopold Eidlitz, one of the founders of the American Institute of Architects. His father was of Jewish descent.
His mother was Christian and the children were raised in that tradition.
Cyrus Eidlitz was the nephew of the noted builder Marc Eidlitz of Marc Eidlitz & Son Builders New York City and the grandson of the architect Cyrus Warner (who was the father of architects Samuel A Warner and Benjamin Warner).
Education
The young Eidlitz was educated in New York, Geneva, Switzerland and Stuttgart, where he studied architecture at the Polytechnic Institute.
Career
Eidlitz began working for his father. His first independent work was the 1877-1878 reconstruction of Saint Peter"s Church in the Bronx after it was damaged by fire. lieutenant had originally been designed by his father.
His early Gothic and Romanesque Revival designs, including Dearborn Station in Chicago and the precursor to the current Buffalo & Erie County Public Library in Lafayette Square, show his father"s influence.
His Romanesque Revival design for the Metropolitan Telephone Building on Cortlandt Street (1886) was the first purpose-built telephone building in New York City. By the turn of the century, Eidlitz embraced the Beaux-Arts style.
In 1903, he formed Eidlitz & McKenzie with Andrew McKenzie, who had been a construction supervisor and engineer for his father"s firm. Eidlitz & McKenzie was one of the first architecture firms that put architects and engineers on equal footing.
Eidlitz & McKenzie worked primarily on telephone buildings, but their best known design was for the New York Times Building (1903-1904) for the publisher Adolph Ochs.
Their design used their expertise in connecting buildings to subterranean infrastructure. The building, the second-tallest in the city at the time, incorporated a subway stop into its basement levels. Times Square was named for the building.
Eidlitz"s other works include the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (1898), located at 42 West 44th Street in New York City.
lieutenant is still occupied by its original client, an unusual circumstance in a changing city. He also designed, with others, the Bell Laboratories Building (Manhattan), a National Historic Landmark, and the First National Bank on West Commerce street.
The interior decoration design of the Arnot Memorial Chapel at Trinity Church in Elmira, New York is also attributed to him.