Daniel D. Badger

Daniel D. Badger (15 October 1806–1884) was an American founder, working in New York City under the name Architectural Iron Works. With James Bogardus, he was one of the major forces in creating a cast-iron architecture in the United States.Christopher Gray of the New York Times remarks: "Most cast-iron buildings present problems of authorship – it is hard to tell if it was the founder or the architect who actually designed the facade."

Badger's illustrated catalogues of cast-iron architectural elements provided the most extensive and ambitious offering of them in 19th-century America. Originally intended as an advertising device, the catalogue issued in 1865 was reprinted in 1981, with an introduction by Margot Gayle, and was digitized in 2011 by the Internet Archive with the support of the New York chapter of the Victorian Society of America.

Badger was born in 1806 to a shipbuilding family on Badger's Island in the harbor of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and worked in a blacksmith's shop in Portsmouth until he set up in Woburn, Massachusetts, as a maker of saws. Following a fire, he invested his savings in a foundry and rolling mill in Boston, where he was very successful. As a "black and white smith", he was admitted in 1837 as a member of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. He was described as a "housesmith" in Boston, Massachusetts, when he set up a storefront of cast-iron columns and lintels in 1842, with the provision in the contract that if the untried new material were to prove unsuccessful he would substitute the usual granite piers. Later he claimed grandly that he was "the first person who practically used Iron for the building material of an exterior", though the historian of cast-iron architecture in America, Margot Gayle, observes "the claim clearly cannot stand scrutiny". Badger acquired the patent of Arthur L. Johnson of Baltimore for rolling iron shopfront shutters, which he made ubiquitous as "Badger fronts". In 1846 he moved to New York, where his Boston partner Charles Reed soon joined him. An early handbill shows Badger's early four-storey brick factory at 44 Duane Street, New York, as it was shortly after 1848. His later foundry occupied the whole block in the East Village from 13th to 14th Streets and Avenues B to C.

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