Herman Lee Meader

Herman Lee Meader (December 21, 1874, New Orleans  – February 14, 1930) was an American architect and author.

Meader was born in New Orleans, the son of Herman Frederick Louis Meader and Susanne Lee Meader (née Equen). Meader was educated at Soulė College and Tulane, Cornell and Harvard Universities, and received a Bachelor of Science from Harvard in 1898. He worked as an architect in New York, first in the office of Ernest Flagg until 1905, and then Raymond Almirall afterwards for about four years. Both Flagg and Almirall were known for terra cotta and color effects in their architecture.

Meader married Queenie Ethel Carr in New York on March 17, 1909. After travelling abroad, he returned to New York in 1913 to start his own practice, receiving commissions to design several prominent buildings in Manhattan, both commercial and residential. He also did much work for the Astor estate, including the Waldorf Hotel at 8 West 33rd Street, then the heart of the fashionable shopping district. Meader lived in the Waldorf Hotel penthouse, where he created a surrounding rooftop Italian garden. There he held elaborate parties which attracted musicians, artists, writers, prizefighters, chess players and others – at one, Meader staged a fight between a black snake and a king snake.

Meader was a member of the Harvard Club, the Strollers Club, the Astor Masonic Lodge, the National Geographic Society and the New York Southern Society. He was also a yachtsman.

Meader was intensely interested in Mayan and Aztec architecture and made regular expeditions to Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán and other sites. Among the buildings he designed are:

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