- See also Ralph M. Parsons founder of Parsons Corporation, another large civil engineering firm)
William Barclay Parsons (April 15, 1859 - May 9, 1932) was a famous American civil engineer. He founded the firm that became Parsons Brinckerhoff, one of the largest American civil engineering firms. Parsons received a bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1879, and a second from Columbia's School of Mines in 1882. Parsons designed the Cape Cod Canal. He was also Chief Engineer of the New York Rapid Transit Commission, and as such responsible for the construction of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway line. A part of 158th Street in Queens New York City was named after him as Parsons Blvd.
Personality
- Like many otherwise distinguished New York gentlemen of his day, Parsons is believed to have harbored strong feelings of anti-Semitism. Much of this perception is because as chief engineer of the IRT, he built the system to run up the West Side of Manhattan. Supposedly, Parsons did this to frustrate any attempts of Eastern European immigrants from the Lower East Side to move further north, to the Upper East Side, where the cream of Manhattan society dwelled. As chairman of the trustees of Columbia University, he is also reported to have collaborated with the university's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, in curtailing the number of Jewish students who were enrolled during the early part of the twentieth century. Parsons eventually married and had five children.
