Aymar Embury II

Military career

Embury served for fourteen months during World War I as a captain in the Fortieth Engineers, United States Army Corps of Engineers where he helped establish a unit of eight professional artists to document the activities of the American Expeditionary Force in France. During this time, Capt. Embury designed the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal. Later, in 1932, he became a lieutenant colonel in the Officers Reserve Corps. He designed the Hope Valley Country Club Clubhouse at Durham, North Carolina, in 1927.

In 1930 he was appointed consulting architect by the Port of New York Authority He consulted on the Authority's Inland Terminal. As of the Authority's 1933 annual report, he was listed as Architect.

Work with Robert Moses

In 1934, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Robert Moses as sole commissioner of a newly unified Department of Parks for New York City, commencing a seven-year period of construction and renovation of city parks. Embury, along with landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke, was a senior member of the 1,800-member design and construction team that Moses had assembled at the Arsenal in Central Park.

In the following years, Embury was chief or consulting architect for numerous projects in the New York City area. Exact figures are not available, but it is possible that Embury supervised the design of over six hundred public projects. Surviving examples include zoos such as the Central Park Zoo and Prospect Park Zoo; parks such as Bryant Park, Betsy Head Park, Crotona Park, Jacob Riis Park, McCarren Park, Red Hook Park, and Sunset Park; bridges including the Triborough Bridge and Henry Hudson Bridge; and other features including the New York City Building at the 1939 New York World's Fair (now the Queens Museum), Orchard Beach, Prospect Park Bandshell, and the Hofstra University Campus.

The eastern shore of Conservatory Water in Central Park in Manhattan, New York City, contains the Kerbs Memorial Boathouse, designed by Embury, where patrons can rent and navigate radio-controlled and wind-powered model boats. The 1954 boathouse, in picnic Georgian taste with red brick and a green copper hip roof and steeple, outside which is a flagstone patio, houses resident model sailboats as well as the radio-controlled model yachts of the Central Park Model Yacht Club.

He remained active throughout the 1950s, turning over his firm to his son, Edward Coe Embury, in 1956. Remaining active as a consulting architect, Embury served on the architectural advisory committee for the old New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle; was a consulting architect for the New York Aquarium at Coney Island; designed the campus playhouse for Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island; designed the William Church Memorial Playground near Fifth Avenue; and designed the Donnell Library Center in Manhattan.