Leonard B. Schultze was born in
Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1877. He was educated at the City College of New York and ranks high among the most successful pupils of Franco-American architect
Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, founder of the Atelier Masqueray. Schultze had been an employee of the firm of
Warren & Wetmore, and during his twenty years in that company's office he had worked on the designs for such projects as New York's
Grand Central Terminal. Weaver's primary responsibilities in the new firm were in engineering, business, and real estate. Schultze & Weaver's first major commission was from
John McEntee Bowman's
Biltmore Hotels, for the large
Los Angeles hotel today known as the
Millennium Biltmore. Their later work included several other projects for the same company, including the
Atlanta Biltmore Hotel, and the
Coral Gables Biltmore Hotel. The firm also designed the
Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach and the Miami Nautilus Hotel. In addition to their work outside New York, they designed several noted landmark hotels within the city, including The Park Lane Hotel, The Lexington Hotel (now the Radisson Lexington Hotel),
The Pierre Hotel and its neighbor, the
Sherry-Netherland. Schultze & Weaver architect Lloyd Morgan (1892–1970), in 1929, designed the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel which, upon its completion in 1931, was the world's largest, with 2,200 rooms. Schultze & Weaver redesigned and renovated the Grand Ballroom in New York City's
Plaza Hotel in the autumn of 1929. Though best known for their work on luxury hotels, Schultze & Weaver also designed schools, hospitals, residential developments, and office buildings such as the 1925 New York headquarters of the
J.C. Penney Company. Among their other buildings are the
Hunter-Dulin building on Sutter Street in San Francisco and
Miami's Freedom Tower. They also designed the
U.S. Post Office at
Scarsdale, New York, as consulting architects for the
Office of the Supervising Architect. After Weaver died in 1940 Schultze reorganized the firm under the name Leonard Schultze and Associates. During this period the firm designed three large apartment complexes for the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and a fourth that served as housing for
United Nations employees in New York. These are listed below. ==List of works==