Vertner Tandy

Vertner Woodson Tandy was born on the seventh of May 1885 at Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Henry Allen Tandy — a brick contractor of Lexington who had built large portions of the University of Kentucky campus — and Emma Brice Tandy. He was raised at the family construction-yard on Race Street, Lexington and educated at the Chandler Junior High School and the Lexington Russell School.

He was admitted at nineteen in 1904 to the Tuskegee Institute and studied architecture and mechanical industries there under Robert R. Taylor (placed in this archive) for the academic years 1904–1905. He transferred in 1905 to the Cornell University College of Architecture at Ithaca, New York and completed the Bachelor of Architecture in 1908 — the first African American graduate of the Cornell architecture school.

He became at the close of his Cornell tenure in 1906 one of the seven founding members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at Cornell — the first inter-collegiate Black-Greek-letter organization in the United States.

He was registered in 1908 as the first African American architect of the state of New York. He entered partnership in 1909 with George W. Foster Jr. (placed in this archive) in the Manhattan firm of Tandy & Foster.

He designed during the partnership the Saint Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church on 134th Street and Seventh Avenue at Harlem (1911) and the Saint Philip’s Parish House at 215 West 133rd Street, Harlem.

He designed in 1916, after the dissolution of the partnership at Foster’s death, the Villa Lewaro at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, for Madam C. J. Walker (placed in this archive) — the thirty-four-room Italian Renaissance country estate that was at the time of completion in 1918 the most prominent Black-owned country house in the United States.

He served the New York National Guard between 1916 and 1919 as a first lieutenant of the 369th Infantry Regiment — the Harlem Hellfighters — at the western European front.

He died at New York on the seventh of November 1949 of a heart attack, at sixty-four.

He is honored here as the first registered African American architect of New York.