The architectural firm of Schultze and Weaver was established in New York City in 1921. The partners were Leonard Schultze and S. Fullerton Weaver.
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.[1] 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 and 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 and 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 and 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.[2]
Schultze went on to form Leonard Schultze and Associates after World War Two, designing the Parkmerced development for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.