In 1877 the architects Charles William Clinton and James W. Pirrson commissioned King to do the masonry work for their Queen Insurance Company Building (37–39 Wall Street).

[17] King also promised that in no event was he going to charge more than the sum initially stipulated, and that he would return to the executive committee, as his contribution to the Statue fund any profits which he might have made on the work.

[20] From 1878 to 1881 King completed the Long Island Historical Society building on the corner of Pierrepoint and Clinton Streets, which was designed by George B.

[26] When Cornelius Vanderbilt II purchased two brownstone houses on the southwest corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue to build his palatial mansion there he commissioned Post as an architect.

In 1879, on Post's suggestion, the two buildings were not demolished, and material not sold, but instead King took them down, piecemeal, "every part having been previously marked and numbered" and reconstructed on the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, another ground belonging to Vanderbilt, halving the costs of construction.

[27] In the early 1890s Vanderbilt decided to enlarge his already spacious residence, bought two "costly" brownstone houses so that his property could face 58th Street.

[28] Upon completion of the "largest and finest private residence in America"[28] in 1893 (demolished 1927), styled loosely after Louis XII's wing of Château Royal de Blois, The New York Times dubbed King a "master mind" who had been fitted to fulfill Mr. Vanderbilt's wishes and praised his "system of work" as being "nearly perfect as human calculation could make it.

[34] Following King's success with the plinth of the Statue of Liberty, in April 1890, a committee of citizens, formed to raise funds and commission a permanent replacement of the then wood and plaster Washington Square Arch (1889), designed by Stanford White, awarded King the contract for building the Washington Square Arch, "exclusive of the curving upon it".

[44] Apart from typical working-class tenements of a density of two to four working families to a floor, in 1885 King developed 'Tenements' at 167–173 West 83rd Street, designed by McKim, Mead & White, meant for "professional and business people of modest means".

[47] In 1899, on the pages of Architectural Record, Montgomery Schuyler praised retaining "the uniformity of a single block front" in King's development as a "redeeming feature of the brownstone period.

"[48] The visionary character of the development also manifested itself in the fact that King was able to assure future purchasers "that no nuisances could spring up near these buildings and that one [needed] have no fear of a stable, factory, tenement or over-shadowing hotel rising beside his home.

"[49] Since wealthy whites began to leave Harlem and economic depression hit in 1895 and Equitable would not sell to African-Americans, by 1895 it had to foreclose on the majority of homes.

The collection also comprised Hepplewhite, Chippendale, Sheraton as well as French 17th and 18th century furniture, clocks, oriental rugs and many other important decorative objects.

The bulk of the nineteenth century paintings were French and included the adepts of academicism, realism, naturalism, romanticism, historicism, orientalism and, above all the School of Barbizon.

[5][4] French old masters in King's collection were represented by the painters of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism such as François Clouet, Philippe de Champaigne, François-Hubert Drouais, Jean-Germain Drouais, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Nicolas Lancret, Nicolas de Largillière, Jeanne-Philiberte Ledoux, Charles André van Loo, Pierre Mignard, Jean-Marc Nattier, Antoine Vestier, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun and Antoine Watteau.

[4][5] The nineteenth century French artists in King's collection were: Jean Béraud, Étienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Charles Cazin, Charles Joshua Chaplin, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Honore Daumier, Édouard Detaille, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Marie Dieterle, Gustave Doré, Jules Dupré, Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, Henri-Joseph Harpignies, Jean Jacques Henner, Charles-Émile Jacque, Gustave-Jean Jacquet, Stanislas Lépine, Henry Lerolle, Léon Augustin Lhermitte, Luigi Loir, Ernest Meissonier, Adolphe Monticelli, Aimé Nicolas Morot, Amble-Louis-Claude Pagnest, Théodule Augustin Ribot, Ferdinand Roybet, Constant Troyon, Jehan Georges Vibert.

Alberto Pasini, Francesco Carlo Rusca (Italian–Swiss), Filadelfo Simi, Gustavo Simoni, Rafaello Sorbi were Italian painters representing nineteenth century art in King's collection.

Spanish artists of the time that King bought[vague] were Francisco Domingo Marqués, Martín Rico y Ortega, Emilio Sala y Francés.

Two sales of furniture and decorative objects took place respectively on the two consecutive afternoons of February 18 and 19 at the American Art Galleries in Madison Square South.

[5] Another two sales of King's collection took place on March 31, 1905: antique furniture, oriental rugs, etchings, engravings and watercolors at American Art Galleries and paintings at Mendelssohn Hall at 113-119 West 40th Street.

This happened to the Self-Portrait of Rose Adélaïde Ducreux which had been thought to be Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun's "Marquise de Saffray" (1905 sale, lot 69).

[4][64] Nattier's "Portrait of a Woman with her Dog" at the time of the 1905 sale (lot 62)[4] was thought to depict the wife of Antoine-René de Voyer d'Argenson, marquis of Paulmy, minister of war under Louis XV and French ambassador to Poland.

His son, Col. Van Rensselaer Choate, Harvard '01, received the British DSC, and French Legion of Honor for serving in engineers during the First World War.

[73] Through Van Rensselaer Choate, King Jr. became a father-in-law of Isabel Davis Rountree[71] (died during childbirth, together with the only child), the daughter of George Rountree,[74] one of the leaders of the Wilmington massacre of 1898 and a sponsor of the "Grandfather clause" aimed to disenfranchise the black population of North Carolina; later of a women's suffragist, Sarah Jewett Minturn,[75] the granddaughter of a railroader and politician, Hugh J. Jewett and Elizabeth Guthrie, a descendant of Thomas Welles, Chad Brown, Abraham Pierson, and several other prominent colonial figures.

Alexander Wood, a historian of American architecture and urbanism, credits King with revolutionizing and rationalizing construction in three important ways.

[7] As subscriptions for civic projects, both from the wealthy and the general public, proved difficult in the last decades of the 19th century, by waiving his commissions and offering the return of profits he could have retained, King, driven by altruistic and purely patriotic motives, made the completion of the most important monuments that are now symbols of the city of New York possible.