Over the past 164 years, many Monmouth College graduates have gone on to fame and fortune, but few have given back to their alma mater to the extent of architect Dan Everett Waid.
A local boy who had moved to Monmouth at the age of 14, Waid was a member of the Class of 1887 and a college chum of future Monmouth College president T.H. McMichael. Their fathers were also close friends—Andrew Jackson Waid, a prominent local dentist, and Jackson B. McMichael, the president of Monmouth College.
As a teenager, Dan Waid spent hours in the workshop behind the family home on North Third Street creating beautiful wooden objects with a scroll saw. Recognizing his potential, Waid’s father encouraged him to pursue a career as an architect.
Upon earning his bachelor’s degree, Waid found a job as a bookkeeper at the site of the construction of a large grain elevator at Dubuque, Iowa, where he gained knowledge of practical construction methods. He then moved to Chicago, securing a position as draftsman in the office of prominent architects Jenney & Mundie, where he rose to the position of head draftsman. In 1894, after taking a course in the Art Institute of Chicago, he decided to become an independent architect.
Waid’s early commissions were modest ones, but his career took off when he was commissioned to draw the plans and specifications for the Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, Illinois. In 1896 he embarked on what would be a lifelong relationship with Monmouth College, designing its Auditorium, an Old English-style chapel seating 900.
In 1898 Waid and an associate submitted the winning design in a competition for the Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. Working as their own draftsmen and specification writers, they moved to Brooklyn, where they toiled day and night until the job was completed. Waid then opened a small office on Fifth Avenue in New York and shortly thereafter was appointed architect for the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, which had offices in the same building. Over the years, Waid would design for the board hospitals in Puerto Rico and Alaska, and school buildings in Cuba and the western United States.
During World War I, Waid served as deputy director of production for the organization of architects that designed and built housing structures for 25 shipbuilding yards.
Waid’s career reached its pinnacle when he became chief architect for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and moved his offices to the Metropolitan Tower at One Madison Avenue. His initial job was rating and valuing buildings that had been offered as security for loans, but soon he was designing buildings for the company, the most notable of which was the new Home Office Building at 11 Madison Avenue, designed with his friend Harvey Wiley Corbett. Originally planned to be the tallest building in the world at 100 stories, it was a victim of the Depression and was capped off at 29 floors in 1933.
The high esteem in which Waid was held by his fellow architects was reflected in his election as president of the American Institute of Architects in 1924.
While his stature as an architect grew, Waid never forgot his Monmouth roots or his friendship with the McMichael family. When Monmouth College’s Old Main burned in 1907, he personally supervised the selection of architects for the new Wallace Hall. He helped in the planning of the McMichael Science Hall and designed and supervised construction of the college’s first dormitory, McMichael Home during 1913-1914. In 1925, he designed the gymnasium and donated the $10,000 necessary to install its swimming pool. When Waid’s wife and college sweetheart, Eva, died in 1929, he endowed a fine arts department at Monmouth College in her memory.
Waid’s death came ten years later, but his influence at Monmouth College continued for years to come. His associate, Arthur O. Angilly, designed Grier Hall (1940), Winbigler Hall (1946) and Fulton Hall (1951).
For Maple City Memories, I’m Jeff Rankin.
