Charles Wellford Leavitt

[4] Charles Wellford Leavitt Jr. married Clara Gordon White at Essex Fells, New Jersey in 1899, and the couple subsequently had four children.

By 1897 Leavitt had set up his own practice in New York City, and began to take on large projects in the area of landscape design, civil engineering and architecture.

Most of Leavitt's landscape commissions were in the New Jersey hunt country and the North Shore of Long Island, but he also worked as far afield as Pasadena, California and Duluth, Minnesota.

[13] Leavitt's landscape designs ranged from enormous Italianate gardens (Charles Schwab estate, Loretto, Pennsylvania), to more intimate wildflower enclosures (J.

"The only failure seems to have been in the area of publicity", he said, "Engineering training, although thoroughly practical in many ways, is evidently visionary and weak when it comes to the matter of the creation of headlines.

Leavitt's design hewed to the Beaux Arts style but paid close attention to the axial relationship of buildings to open space.

In the late 19th century, Leavitt teamed with Philadelphia businessman Anthony S. Drexel to create the New York Suburban Land Company.

He served as chief engineer for the Palisades Interstate Park Commission[25] and designed urban plans for Long Beach; Garden City, Long Island, New York; Monument Valley Park in Colorado Springs, Colorado;[26] the lieutenant governor's residence in Toronto, Ontario; he also designed the stadium grandstand at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field,[27] and was the primary landscape architect for Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

[30] Like many architects, especially in the era in which Leavitt practiced, he often bounced between his professional responsibilities and the social contacts which furnished him a steady stream of well-heeled clients.

[33] In its obituary of Leavitt, The New York Times noted his design of disparate structures, including country clubs,[34] race tracks, private estates, as well as his work on the Palisades and town planning.