Daniel D. Badger

[4] Christopher Gray of The New York Times remarks: "Most cast-iron buildings present problems of authorship – it is hard to tell if it was the founder or the architect who actually designed the facade.

"[1] Badger's illustrated catalogues of cast-iron architectural elements provided the most extensive and ambitious offering of them in 19th-century America.

Originally intended as an advertising device, the catalogue issued in 1865 was reprinted in 1981, with an introduction by Margot Gayle,[5] and was digitized in 2011 by the Internet Archive with the support of the New York chapter of the Victorian Society of America.

[8] He was described as a "housesmith" in Boston, Massachusetts, when he set up a storefront of cast-iron columns and lintels in 1842, with the provision in the contract that if the untried new material were to prove unsuccessful he would substitute the usual granite piers.

[10] His later foundry occupied the whole block in the East Village from 13th to 14th Streets and Avenues B to C.[12] Badger's Architectural Iron Works sent prefabricated cast-iron elements as far afield as Havana and Cairo.