Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison

Who was Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison?

Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison was a U.S. architect. He was born in New York City in 1872 and died in New York in 1938.

Murchison graduated from Columbia University in 1894 and from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, in 1900. Two years later, he opened an office in New York where his first major commissions were for railroad stations for the Pennsylvania Railroad company. Among the stations he designed are the Delaware Lackawanna Station, Hoboken, New Jersey; both the Lackawanna Terminal and the Lehigh Terminal, Buffalo, New York, and Pennsylvania Station, Baltimore, Maryland.

In New York, he was well known as one of the founders of the Beaux Arts Balls, elaborate costume parties benefiting architects who had fallen on hard times. He also was a founder of the Mendelsohn Glee Club. He lived in the Beaux Arts Apartments, which he designed, at 310 E. 44th St.

Murchison died suddenly, at 11:45 p.m. on Dec. 15, 1938, "as he was emerging from the I.R.T. station in Grand Central Terminal", the New York Times reported.

At the time of his death, he had started work on a new Dunes Club to replace the one destroyed a few months earlier.