J. Cleaveland Cady

Who was J. Cleaveland Cady?

Josiah Cleaveland Cady, commonly know as J. Cleaveland Cady, was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1837 and died in New York City on April 17, 1919. He was a New York-based architect whose most familiar surviving building is the south range of the American Museum of Natural History on New York's Upper West Side. He worked in partnership from 1870 with Milton See in the firm of Cady, Berg and See.

Cady was the son of Josiah Cady and his wife Lydia, of Providence, Rhode Island, where he was born. He graduated from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860; the following year he married Emma M. Bulkeley, of Orange, New Jersey; they had five children. Cady was a devoted Presbyterian, who served as head of the Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, East 42nd Street; his first church commission was the First Presbyterian Church of Oyster Bay, New York. Here he utilized the Carpenter Gothic or Stick Style to create a surprising effect for this wood-frame church building set on a hillside overlooking Oyster Bay.