New York early years Hunt spent Christmas 1855 in Paris, after which he returned to the United States. In March 1856, he accepted a position with the architect
Thomas Ustick Walter helping Walter with the renovation and expansion of the
U.S. Capitol, and the following year moved to New York to establish his own practice. Hunt's first substantial project was the
Tenth Street Studio Building, where he rented space, and where in 1858 he founded the first American architectural school, beginning with a small group of students, including
George B. Post,
William Robert Ware,
Henry Van Brunt, and
Frank Furness. Ware, who was deeply influenced by Hunt, went on to found America's first two university programs in architecture: at
MIT in 1866, and at
Columbia in 1881. Hunt's first New York project, a pair of houses on 37th Street for
Thomas P. Rossiter and his father-in-law
Dr. Eleazer Parmly, required Hunt to sue Parmly for non-payment of the supervisory portion of his services. The jury awarded Hunt a 2-1/2% commission, at the time the minimum fee typically charged by architects. According to the editors of
Engineering Magazine, writing in 1896, the case, "helped to establish a uniform system of charges by percentage." It was in these early years that Hunt suffered his greatest professional setback, the rejection of his formal, classical proposal for the "Scholars' Gate", the entrance to New York's
Central Park at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue. According to Central Park historian Sarah Cedar Miller, the influential Central Park commissioner
Andrew Haswell Green supported Hunt's design, but when the park commissioners adopted it, the park's designers,
Frederick Law Olmsted and
Calvert Vaux (advocates of a more informal design), protested and resigned their positions with the Central Park project. Hunt's plan was ultimately rejected, and Olmsted and Vaux rejoined the project. Nevertheless, one work of Hunt's can be found in the park, albeit a minor one: the
rusticated Quincy granite pedestal on which
John Quincy Adams Ward's bronze statue
The Pilgrim stands, on
Pilgrim Hill overlooking the park's
East Drive at
East 72nd Street. Hunt's extroverted personality, a factor in his successful career, is well-documented. After meeting Hunt in 1869 the philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal of "one remarkable person new to me, Richard Hunt the architect. His conversation was spirited beyond any I remember, loaded with matter, and expressed with the vigour and fury of a member of the Harvard boat or ball club relating the adventures of one of their matches; inspired, meantime, throughout, with fine theories of the possibilities of art." Hunt was said to be popular with his workmen, and legend has it that during a final walk-through of the
William K. Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue, Hunt discovered a mysterious tent-like object in one of the ballrooms. Investigating, he found it covering a life-sized statue of himself, dressed in stonecutters' clothes, carved in secret as a tribute by the project's stonecutters. Vanderbilt permitted the statue to be placed on the roof over the entrance to the house. Hunt was said to be pragmatic; his son Richard quoted him as having said, "the first thing you've got to remember is that it's your client's money you're spending. Your goal is to achieve the best results by following their wishes. If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it's up to you to do it." Hunt's professional trajectory gained impetus from his extensive social connections at
Newport, Rhode Island, the resort where in 1859 Hunt's brother William bought a house. There in 1860 Hunt met the woman he would marry, Catharine Clinton Howland, the daughter of
Samuel Shaw Howland, a New York shipping merchant, and his wife, Joanna Hone. On April 2, 1861, they married at the Church of the Ascension, on Fifth Avenue at Tenth street, and according to a newspaper reporter, the bride brought a dowry to the marriage of $400,000. Many of Hunt's early wood-frame houses, and many of his later more substantial masonry houses, were built at Newport, some of the latter for the Vanderbilts, the family of railroad tycoons with whom Hunt had a long and rewarding relationship.
New York later years Beginning in the 1870s, Hunt acquired more substantial commissions, including
New York's
Tribune Building (built 1873–75, one of the earliest buildings with an elevator), and the pedestal of the
Statue of Liberty (built 1881–86). Hunt devoted much of his practice to institutional work, including the Theological Library and Marquand Chapel at
Princeton; the
Fogg Museum of Art at
Harvard; and the
Scroll and Key clubhouse at
Yale, all of which except the last have been demolished. Before Hunt's
Lenox Library was completed in 1877 on Fifth Avenue, none of his American works were designed in the Beaux-Arts style with which he is usually associated, of which his entrance façade for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art's
Fifth Avenue building (completed posthumously in 1902) is perhaps the chief example. Late in life he joined the consortium of architects selected to plan
Chicago's 1893
World's Columbian Exposition, considered to be an exemplar of
Beaux-Arts design. Hunt's design for the fair's Administration Building won a gold medal from the
Royal Institute of British Architects. The last surviving New York City buildings entirely by Hunt are the Jackson Square Library and a charity hospital he designed for the
Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females, completed in 1883 at Amsterdam Avenue between 103rd and 104th Streets. The red-brick building was renovated in the late 20th century and is now a
youth hostel. The Jackson Square Library, built in 1887 with funds from George Vanderbilt III (Grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt) still exists as well. This particular library — one of the first purpose-built free and open public library buildings in New York (only the Ottendorfer Library on Second Avenue in the East Village is extant and older) — was also one of the first libraries to introduce the innovation of open stacks. This allowed the public to actually pick books off the shelves themselves, rather than having to find a card number in a catalog and ask a librarian to retrieve the book for them, which was to this point standard practice, based in part upon fear of theft. The building continued to operate as a library until it was decommissioned in the early 1960s.
Professional advocacy Referring to Hunt's efforts to elevate his chosen profession, the architecture critic
Paul Goldberger wrote in
The New York Times that Hunt was "American architecture's first, and in many ways its greatest, statesman." In 1857, Hunt co-founded the New York Society of Architects, which soon became the
American Institute of Architects, and from 1888 to 1891 served as the institute's third president. Hunt advocated tirelessly for the improved status of architects, arguing that they should be treated, and paid, as legitimate and respected professionals equivalent to doctors and lawyers. In 1893, Hunt co-founded New York's
Municipal Art Society, an outgrowth of the
City Beautiful Movement, and served as the society's first president. Many of Hunt's proteges had successful careers. Among the employees who worked in his firm was the Franco-American architect and graduate
Emmanuel Louis Masqueray who went on to become Chief of Design at the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition in
St. Louis. Hunt encouraged artists and craftsmen, frequently employing them to embellish his buildings, most notably the sculptor
Karl Bitter who worked on many of Hunt's projects. ==Death and legacy==