In 1893, a young heir to a paint fortune returned from Germany convinced that the color of New York’s buildings was making people sick. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
The New York Chromatic Society was founded on April 14, 1893 — three weeks after the Civic Art Society — by Cornelius Hexham Willard III, the 29-year-old heir to a modest paint and pigment fortune (Willard & Sons, est. 1847, Hoboken) who had recently returned from two years at the University of Heidelberg, where he had attached himself to Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental psychology laboratory and become consumed by the emerging science of chromatics.
Willard was, by all surviving accounts, a man of absolute conviction and limited self-doubt. He had gone to Germany intending to study philosophy and returned believing he had discovered something more important: that the color of the built environment had a direct, measurable effect on the health and temperament of urban populations. He was not the first person to think this — Goethe had written about color and mood a century earlier — but Willard was almost certainly the first person to believe it with enough family money to do something about it.
Back in New York, Willard was appalled by the palette of industrial Manhattan — the soot-grays, muddy browns, and factory blacks that defined the 1890s city. He became convinced that New York’s drabness was not merely an aesthetic failure but a public health emergency, and he said so to anyone who would listen, including at several dinner parties hosted by his increasingly exasperated mother.
“Cornelius, the problem with the city is not that it needs more color. The problem is that it needs more plumbing.”— Cornelius Willard II, reportedly, 1892
Willard published his ideas in a self-funded pamphlet titled On the Influence of Architectural Color upon the Health and Temperament of Urban Populations (1892), which was received with polite bewilderment by the medical establishment and genuine interest by a small circle of architects and civic reformers. With $8,000 of his own money and smaller contributions from four friends — two architects, a physician, and a wallpaper manufacturer named Augustus Pennfield who frankly saw a business opportunity — Willard incorporated the Society and installed himself as its first president, a role he would hold until his death in 1931.
What saved the Society from being a rich man’s vanity project was Willard’s one genuine scholarly instinct: he believed in data. In its first decade, the Society published a quarterly journal, Chromatica, organized public lectures at Bleecker Hall, and commissioned a series of demonstration projects — painting the façades of six residential buildings on Hester Street in carefully selected palettes and tracking resident health outcomes over three years.
The Hester Street Color Study (1896–1899) remains, despite its methodological limitations, the earliest known longitudinal study of color’s impact on urban health outcomes. The original patient logs are held in the Society’s archive at the City Archive.
Willard spent the rest of his life growing the Society, refining its methods, and annoying city officials with unsolicited color recommendations for public buildings. He was not a great scientist, but he was a relentless advocate, a surprisingly competent fundraiser (mostly from his own social circle), and — crucially — right enough about the core idea to keep serious people engaged. The Society’s later rigor was built on the foundation of his slightly ridiculous certainty.
Under its second president, architect James Alden Colfax — a protégé of Stanford White and a member of the City Beautiful movement — the Society shifted from research to advocacy. Colfax believed that color could do for public health what sanitation had done for infectious disease.
In 1911, the Society successfully lobbied the Board of Aldermen to include color specifications in the city’s first public school construction standards. The resulting “Colfax Palette” — a range of warm yellows, soft blues, and muted greens — was used in 47 public schools built between 1912 and 1928. Several survive with original interiors, most notably PS 117 in Tribeca.
In 1917, the Society published Color and the City: A Practical Guide for Municipal Planners, the first handbook connecting color planning to public health outcomes. Reprinted four times, copies were distributed to every borough president’s office.
The Society established the Annual Chromatic Survey in 1923 — a systematic, block-by-block documentation of color in New York’s built environment. Now in its 102nd consecutive year, it is the longest-running color audit of any city in the world.
In 1939, the Society consulted on the color design of the World’s Fair pavilions. The recommendation to paint the Trylon and Perisphere in pure white — rather than the originally proposed beige — became its most publicly visible, if counterintuitive, intervention. The internal debates fill three boxes in the archive.
Like many civic organizations, the Society entered a period of institutional drift in the postwar years. The prevailing architectural movements — International Style, Brutalism — were actively hostile to applied color, favoring exposed concrete, glass, and steel.
In 1963, Dr. Ruth Cheng-Solomon published The Gray Report, documenting the dramatic reduction in color variety in the postwar city. She coined the term “chromatic deficit” — the measurable narrowing of the color palette of entire neighborhoods. The report received respectful Times coverage and a dismissive two-sentence mention in Architectural Forum. It has since been cited in over 200 academic papers.
In 1974, during the fiscal crisis, the Society nearly dissolved. Its endowment had dwindled to $180,000, the staff was down to a director and a part-time archivist, and the board met twice a year in the back room of a Murray Hill restaurant. The Society survived because of a single bequest — $250,000 from the estate of Miriam Pennfield Schloss, granddaughter of co-founder Augustus Pennfield — and the stubbornness of board chair Dorothy Ives Nakamura, who refused to allow the organization to be absorbed into the Civic Art Society.
In 1985, Dr. Marcus Adeyemi, an environmental psychologist who had recently completed a joint appointment at the Kessler School of Public Health and its Graduate School of Architecture, was invited to join the board. Adeyemi had been conducting research on color and cognitive function in elderly care facilities and was stunned to discover the Society’s century of accumulated data — particularly the Annual Chromatic Survey, which he later described as “the most extraordinary dataset nobody had ever heard of.”
Adeyemi became board chair in 1988 and executive director in 1990. Under his leadership, the Society launched the Chromatic Intervention Pilot in 1991 — painting interior and exterior surfaces of 12 residential buildings in Brooklyn and Queens. Results, published in 1998 in the Journal of Urban Health Research, showed statistically significant improvements in self-reported well-being, a 12% reduction in maintenance complaints, and a measurable reduction in cortisol levels. The Brooklyn Housing Study remains the Society’s most-cited research contribution and the foundation of its current theory of change.
The built environment is never neutral. Every surface — every wall, pathway, façade, and public space — communicates something to the people who encounter it. Decades of research, including the Society’s own longitudinal studies, demonstrate that the color of urban environments has a measurable impact on stress levels, mood, social interaction, perceived safety, and economic activity.
Most cities are not designed with color in mind. The result is what Ruth Cheng-Solomon called “chromatic deficit”: environments dominated by gray, beige, and institutional white that actively suppress well-being.
The New York Chromatic Society works to reverse chromatic deficit through evidence-based color interventions — community-driven projects that transform the visual character of neighborhoods and produce measurable improvements in health, economic, and social outcomes. We believe that color is infrastructure: a low-cost, high-impact tool for improving quality of life that has been systematically overlooked by urban planners, architects, and public health professionals.
Core premise: The color of the built environment has a measurable impact on health, economic, and social outcomes. Most cities are chromatically deficient. Intentional color intervention is a low-cost, high-impact tool for improving quality of life.
In 2012, Priya Subramanian was hired as executive director — the Society’s youngest leader ever at 34 and its first without a background in medicine, architecture, or fine art. Subramanian had spent eight years in city government, most recently as a deputy commissioner at the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. She brought a fundamentally different orientation: less academic, more practitioner; less about proving color matters and more about doing something about it.
Under her leadership, the Society has tripled its budget from $2.7 million to $8.2 million, grown staff from 11 to 34, launched the Color Works community program (47 projects across all five boroughs), secured a partnership with the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, established the Willard Fellowship, and published The Pink Paper — the research report that launched the Central Park Pathways Initiative.
“Nobody ever changed a neighborhood with a literature review.”— Priya Subramanian
Read about the research behind our work, or see how we’re putting 130 years of evidence into action.
This is a fictional nonprofit.
The New York Chromatic Society is a fictional nonprofit used as a teaching aid in the How to Raise Money fundraising workshop.