George Washington Foster Jr.

George Washington Foster Jr. was born on the eighteenth of December, 1866, in Virginia, and carried to Newark, New Jersey, as a small child of about four years. His father worked as a carriage stripper, a hand-trade of exacting patience, and it was into that world of skilled making that the boy grew. He learned his profession the harder way, studying architecture at night school at Cooper Union while the daylight hours were given to a draftsman's board.

By his own account and the record of his colleagues, Foster gained early experience in the office of the noted architect Henry Hardenbergh, whose firm produced such New York landmarks as the Dakota, the Plaza Hotel, and the Waldorf-Astoria. Whatever the exact measure of his hand in those works, the training placed him among the disciplined draftsmen of a demanding age and prepared him for the barriers he would soon press against.

In 1908 he became one of the first African-American architects licensed by the State of New Jersey, and he was later admitted to practice in New York as well. That same year he joined Vertner Woodson Tandy, New York's first registered Black architect, to form the firm of Tandy & Foster. Together they served a rising Harlem, and their names are bound to St. Philip's Episcopal Church (1910–11), one of the enduring monuments of Black New York.

He died on the twentieth of December, 1923, and was laid to rest in New Jersey, the state he had made his home. In an era that shut its doors against him, George Washington Foster Jr. drew his own way through and left standing walls that still keep faith with his people. We honor the quiet craftsman who built a place for those who came after.