Henry L.A. Jekel: Architect of Eastern Skyscrapers and the California Style

From the introduction: If anyone ever embodied the great Cass Gilbert’s definition of an architect, it was Henry L. A. Jekel. From his seventeenth year to his death in 1960, he engaged architecture “with enthusiastic interest in every detail,” adopting it as his muse and his art form. Given his commitment and talent, Jekel emerged rapidly from the venerable apprenticeship ranks of Buffalo, New York, and New York City, placing him in the cohort of some of the greats of architecture at the turn of the twentieth century.   Like many of those designers, Jekel quickly proved himself an architectural whirlwind. In 1899, the Buffalo dynamo came roaring into New York City, intent on “nothing less than complete success.”   Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., received him next, where he designed and built the first steel-skeleton skyscrapers in those cities. The collapse of Jekel’s Philadelphia enterprise in 1904 and the dissolution of his fledgling skyscraper design firm, H. L. A. Jekel Company,