Hasta La Ideas

My grandfather, Alfred Easton Poor, was a New York City architect with many major projects to his credit, including the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Manhattan and the restoration and extension of the US Capitol Building’s East Front in Washington, DC. The Wright Brothers Memorial was his earliest major design win, and perhaps his most visible. One of my treasured possessions is a letter from Orville Wright to my grandfather, thanking him for a print of a photograph he had taken of the memorial.

It was a fitting project, as he was an early aviator himself. He learned to fly when in high school, but was too young to enter combat when the World War broke out. Instead, he went down to the Florida Keys where he taught pilots to fly floatplanes. For World War II, he was too old to fight, and spent at least part of the war overseeing aircraft production in Ohio.

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