David Hazlitt King Jr. (1849 – April 1916) was a prominent Gilded Age constructor, developer, hotelier, investment banker, art collector, President of the New York City Park Commission, and one of the initial Directors of the Metropolitan Opera House Company of New York. King is known for the assembly of the Statue of Liberty as well as the building of its plinth, constructing Washington Square Arch and Stanford White's Madison Square Garden.
Early life King was born in New York City in 1849, the son of David H. King, a wealthy property owner of Lower East Side tenements. Having been educated in New York City, which had prepared him for college, King decided to pursue a business career early on instead and in 1870 became a contractor.
Career
Early career David H. King Jr. started his building career in masonry and became a general contractor. In 1877 the architects Charles William Clinton and James W. Pirrson commissioned King to do the masonry work for their Queen Insurance Company Building (37–39 Wall Street). In 1878, when apartments were associated with tenements rather than homes to the financially comfortable, Miers Coryell commissioned the then up-and-coming architect Bruce Price and King Jr. to erect an upper-middle-class Queen Anne apartment house at 21 East 21st Street. The names of the builder and the architect are still visible on either side of the date stone on the building. In the early 1880s when the idea of luxurious apartment living was picking up, a group of investors, Knickerbocker Apartment Company, purchased and demolished the mansion of the Knickerbocker Club on the southwest corner of 5th Avenue and 28th Street to build the Knickerbocker Apartment House. The company contracted King as a builder in 1882.
Statue of Liberty pedestal King's involvement with the building of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty started in 1882, when the American Committee on the Statue of Liberty appointed him as the head of the special committee within the executive committee, the Building and Mechanics' Exchange Committee, where he was responsible for collecting subscriptions for the building of the pedestal from the respective occupational groups. When the concrete base of the pedestal was completed in 1884, the executive committee outlined specifications for the stone pedestal and asked for proposals. However, as fundraising for the pedestal had been proving difficult and slow, and the received tenders exceeded what the committee could afford, Gen. Charles P. Stone, the engineer-in-chief of the pedestal proposed that only the facing of the statue be made of stone, the backing be entirely made of the best quality concrete. It was then that King offered to build the pedestal according to the original exterior design by Richard Morris Hunt and technical specifications of Gen. Stone for $132,500, "including the dressing of stone". King also promised that in no event was he going to charge more than the sum initially stipulated, and that he would return to the executive committee, as his contribution to the Statue fund any profits which he might have made on the work. On behalf of the committee, Stone signed a contract with King on May 16, 1884. Upon the completion of the pedestal in 1886, the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty contracted with King to assemble the Statue, which task he completed by October 23, 1886. On the day of the dedication of the Statue, October 28, 1886, King was in charge of all the arrangements on the then Bedloe's Island (renamed Liberty Island) and was one of the three men, with Auguste Bartholdi and Richard Butler, to be standing on the head of the Statue and holding a cord attached to the veil which had covered the Statue's face. King's son, Van Rensselaer Choate (b. 1880), standing below the three men, gave them a sign with a white handkerchief to pull the rope and remove the cloth.Maurer, William C.F., "Dedication of the Statue of Liberty & the King Family. Oct. 28, 1886", An unofficial publication from the Interp Section. The National Park Service. Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island, Liberty Island, New York, NY, 2009.
1880s and collaboration with George B. Post From 1878 to 1881 King completed the Long Island Historical Society building on the corner of Pierrepoint and Clinton Streets, which was designed by George B. Post and is now the Center for Brooklyn History. This was the first time for terra-cotta to be used in place of stone, as the best fire-proof material then available. Professional relationship with Post which started on the Long Island Historical Building project was responsible for many of the city's most prominent buildings in the 1880s and early 1890s. In 1882, in only one year, King completed the construction of the G.B. Post's Mills Building at 15 Broad Street and Exchange Place, across from the New York Stock Exchange (torn down in 1925), then the largest, most expensive and luxurious office building ever erected in New York City. The Mills Building set a new standard by which other tall office buildings were judged in the city for more than a decade. From 1885 to 1887 King was a general constructor of a large extension to the Equitable Life Building (destroyed by fire in 1912), the headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, at 120 Broadway (including the removal of the mansard roof and replacing it with the eighth and ninth stories). Post designed the extension. In 1889 King completed an ambitious enlargement of the New York Times Building at 41 Park Row designed by Post, adding eight stories and new foundations while the operations at the Times preexisting quarters proceeded, and the printing presses remained in place. King "arrived at the conclusion that it [had been] perfectly feasible to carry on the entire business of the New York Times under what were abnormal conditions." Describing the new structure Harper's Weekly compared King to Aladdin, whose "pure magic" had been "accomplished [...] by the means of practical mechanical skill and [King's] own genius". The New York Times used the word "skyscraper" for the first time in the article reporting the expansion of 41 Park Row, thus, later on, the press referred to King as "the pioneer in skyscraper construction".
When Cornelius Vanderbilt II purchased two brownstone houses on the southwest corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue to build his palatial mansion there he commissioned Post as an architect. In 1879, on Post's suggestion, the two buildings were not demolished, and material not sold, but instead King took them down, piecemeal, "every part having been previously marked and numbered" and reconstructed on the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, another ground belonging to Vanderbilt, halving the costs of construction. In the early 1890s Vanderbilt decided to enlarge his already spacious residence, bought two "costly" brownstone houses so that his property could face 58th Street. He once again employed Post as an architect, hired the mansion designer Richard Morris Hunt as a consultant and entrusted the construction to King, first giving him eighteen months to complete the project (works started on March 1, 1892, Vanderbilt later extended by three months). Upon completion of the "largest and finest private residence in America" in 1893 (demolished 1927), styled loosely after Louis XII's wing of Château Royal de Blois, The New York Times dubbed King a "master mind" who had been fitted to fulfill Mr. Vanderbilt's wishes and praised his "system of work" as being "nearly perfect as human calculation could make it." King employed 600 men at times and pushed the work to the night. During the same time King oversaw the construction (1889–1895) of the opulent G. B. Post designed mansion, on the southeast corner of 57th Street across from the Vanderbilts' château, built for the New York railroad mogul Collis P. Huntington and his wife Arabella Yarrington Worsham Huntington (demolished 1926).
In 1889 and 1890 Charles William Clinton worked with King yet again, this time with King as the general contractor, on two office buildings, the new eight-story quarter for the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company at 16–22 William Street and the Mechanics' National Bank at 37–39 Wall Street.
1890s and collaboration with Stanford White Strong and continuous collaboration with the star architect Stanford White of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, marks the 1890s in King's career. The fruitful cooperation gave the city many of its landmark buildings. In 1889-1890 King built one of the earliest and most interesting structures designed by McKim, Mead & White – Madison Square Garden II – on Madison Square, at East 26th Street and Madison Avenue (demolished 1925), dubbed by the press "the largest hall of public entertainment in the world" at that time. Following King's success with the plinth of the Statue of Liberty, in April 1890, a committee of citizens, formed to raise funds and commission a permanent replacement of the then wood and plaster Washington Square Arch (1889), designed by Stanford White, awarded King the contract for building the Washington Square Arch, "exclusive of the curving upon it". King contracted James Sinclair & Co. for the marblework and David Angus for "the setting", while King's employees did the brick filling. During the structural construction, which took less than three years, the traffic between the two piers of the arch continued uninterrupted. On April 30, 1895, the day of the planned dedication of the Arch (moved to May 4 due to the weather), New York Tribune praised King for waiving his commissions (10%) "from public-spirited motives", and thus making "the largest individual subscription to the fund" for the Arch's erection. As upon the dedication of the Arch and its formal transfer to the city, King had already been recently appointed Park Commissioner, and the Arch was in a public park, King, the builder went through the ceremony of handing the Arch over to King, the Park Commissioner. In 1892 King signed a contract for the construction of McKim, Mead & White's New York Herald Building, completed in 1895 (demolished in 1921). With the plans for the Metropolitan Club announced by Stanford White in February 1892, in April 1892 McKim, Mead & White signed on King as the general contractor of what was dubbed by the press as "the handsomest clubhouse in the world". Between 1893 and 1895 King completed McKim, Mead & White designed headquarters of the now defunct Bowery Savings Bank at 130 Bowery.
On December 27, 1892, when the cornerstone of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was laid, New York Evening World mentioned King as the cathedral's builder.
Developer and hotelier