Illinois
Henry Ives Cobb (1859-3/27/1931) Chicago and New York (F.A.I.A.)
Senior partner in the firm of Cobb & Frost in Chicago, he was a well-known architect in that city for a number of years, and later carried on an independent and highly successful practice in New York.
Born at Brookline, Massachusetts, and educated in Boston Schools, he completed a preparatory course in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after being graduated at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, spent a year, in 1870, in Europe in Supplementary study and travel.
Returning to the U.S., the young man began his career in the Boston office of Peabody & Stearns, and while employed there prepared a design which he entered in the competition for a new Union Club in Chicago. Successful in winning the commission for the building, in 1882 Mr. Cobb moved to Chicago to supervise its erection, subsequently joined Charles S. Frost in a partnership of which he remained a member until 1889. During that period the firm of Cobb & Frost established a high professional reputation as the designers of a number of important buildings in Chicago, outstanding examples of which were: Newberry Library, begun in 1887 on site of the Malcolm Ogden house; Historical Society Building at Dearborn and Ontario Streets, 1887; Chicago Athletic Club; the old Post Office (1888-1905), converted into the U.S. Court House in 1934; Horticulture Hall and the Fisheries Building at the World's Colombian Exposition.
In residential work, Cobb & Frost won wide recognition following the completion of the Potter Palmer mansion at the corner of Lake Shore Drive and Banks Street, for which a permit was taken out for $90,000. Other residences of note designed by the firm included the Dr. Gill home on Drexel Boulevard and the Cass house, Chicago, also the Studebaker residence at South Bend, Indiana.
In the second phase of his career, Mr. Cobb opened an office in New York in 1902, and continued in independent practice the rest of his life. His works in Manhattan were mainly office and commercial buildings, including the Harriman Bank Building, 55 Liberty Street, 1910, erected on the site of the old home of the poet, William Cullen Bryant; Sinclair Oil Building; Office Building at 42 Broadway; and the Booth Memorial Theater. In later years he was commissioned to design a number of buildings for the American University at Washington, D.C., also the Durand Art Institute at Lake Forrest University, Indiana.