Pioneer Information
Born in Chicago and educated at the City College of New York, architect Leonard Schultze worked 20 years with the firm of Warren & Wetmore, during which time he worked on New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. He joined partnership with S. Fullerton Weaver in 1921, creating a multidisciplinary firm, Schultze and Weaver, focusing on real estate, architecture, and engineering. A major early commission, John McEntee Bowman’s Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, led to work for many other Biltmore properties across the country. Designed in a Spanish-Colonial Renaissance style, the hotel was meant as a grand icon, a landmark of luxury, signifying Los Angeles’ arrival as a major American city. Schultze and Weaver also designed New York City’s opulent Waldorf-Astoria. The architectural firm was well-known nationwide for its design of large apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and clubs as well as office buildings, including the New York headquarters of the J.C. Penney Company. As the firm evolved into Schultze & Associates, Schultze was instrumental in the design of a number of large-scale residential developments, including Parkfairfax in Virginia with Clarke & Rapuano, Park La Brea in Los Angeles and, most notably, Parkmerced in San Francisco with Thomas Church, which the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company developed in response to U.S. housing shortages after World War II.
