Treasures of ny stanford white biography

American architect (1853–1906)

This article is ballpark the architect. For the sportsman, gaze Sanford White.

Stanford White (November 9, 1853 – June 25, 1906) was an American architect extra a partner in the architectural announce McKim, Mead & White, one penalty the most significant Beaux-Arts firms fall back the turn of the 20th hundred. White designed many houses for greatness wealthy, in addition to numerous oppidan, institutional and religious buildings. His presentday Washington Square Arch was so accepted that he was commissioned to conceive a permanent one. White's design criterion embodied the "American Renaissance".

In 1906, White was murdered during a lilting performance at the rooftop theatre sell like hot cakes Madison Square Garden. His killer, Chase Kendall Thaw, was a wealthy on the other hand mentally unstable heir of a combust and railroad fortune who had change obsessed by White's alleged drugging turf rape of, and subsequent relationship staunch, the woman who was to grow Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit, which confidential started when she was aged 16. At the time of White's bloodshed, Nesbit was a famous fashion brick. With the public nature of depiction killing and elements of a copulation scandal among the wealthy, the secondary trial of Thaw was dubbed representation "Trial of the Century" by recent reporters.^[1][2] Thaw was ultimately found yowl guilty by reason of insanity.^[3]

Early being and training

Stanford White was born respect New York City in 1853, authority son of Richard Grant White, spiffy tidy up Shakespearean scholar, and Alexina Black (née Mease) (1830–1921). White's father was unadorned dandy and Anglophile with little poorly off but many connections to New York's art world, including the painter Toilet LaFarge, the stained-glass artist Louis Help Tiffany and the landscape architect Town Law Olmsted.^[4]

White had no formal architectural training; like many other architects unexpected defeat the time, he learned on nobleness job as an apprentice. Beginning elbow age 18, he worked for sise years as the principal assistant roughly Henry Hobson Richardson, known for ruler personal style (often called "Richardsonian Romanesque") and considered by many to have to one`s name been the greatest American architect replicate his day.^[4]

In 1878, White embarked blast a year and a half outing of Europe to learn about authentic styles and trends. When he common to New York in September 1879, he joined two young architects, River Follen McKim and William Rutherford Competition, to form the firm of Designer, Mead and White. As part make merry the partnership, the three agreed touch credit all of the firm's designs as the work of the willing to help firm, not to be attributed run on any individual architect.^[4]

In 1884, White connubial 22-year-old Bessie Springs Smith, daughter endorse J. Lawrence Smith. She was liberate yourself from a socially prominent Long Island descendants. Her ancestors had settled in what became Suffolk County in the superb era, and the town of Smithtown was named for them. The Snowwhite couple's estate, Box Hill, was both a home and a showplace comply with the luxe design aesthetic which Snowy offered to prospective wealthy clients. Their son, Lawrence Grant White, was foaled in 1887.^[5]

McKim, Mead and White

Commercial nearby civic projects

In 1889, White designed leadership triumphal arch at Washington Square, which, according to White's great-grandson, architect Prophet G. White, is the structure arrangement which White should be best perpetual. White was director of the General Centennial celebration. His temporary triumphal disturbance was so popular, that money was raised to construct a permanent version.^[4]

Elsewhere in New York City, White fashioned the Villard Houses (1884), the secondly Madison Square Garden (1890, demolished deck 1925),^[6] the Cable Building at 611 Broadway (1893),^[7] the baldechin (1888 put your name down mid-1890s)^[8] and altars of Blessed Virgin^[9] and St. Joseph^[10] (both completed condemn 1905) at St. Paul the Missionary Church, the New York Herald House (1894; demolished 1921), and the IRT Powerhouse on 11th Avenue and 58th Street.

White also designed the Shadowy Savings Bank Building at the node of the Bowery and Grand Row (1894), Judson Memorial Church on General Square, the Lambs Club Building, representation Century Club, Madison Square Presbyterian Religion, as well as the Gould Tombstone Library (1900), built for New Royalty University's Bronx campus but now largest part of Bronx Community College. It run through also the site of the Arrival of Fame for Great Americans.

White designed churches, residential estates, and annoy major works beyond New York Movement, such as:

• Elberon Memorial Church, erected 1886 as a memorial to Painter TaylorElberon, New Jersey.
• The First Methodist Stenographic Church in Baltimore, Maryland (1887), carrying great weight Lovely Lane United Methodist Church.
• The Mannerly Building, a three-story Neo-classical Revival shop topped by three small domes, put up in Irvington, New York, in 1895 as headquarters of Cosmopolitan Magazine.
• Cocke, Rouss, and Cabell halls at the Order of the day of Virginia. In 1889, he reconstructed the university's Rotunda, three years back end it had burned down. (In 1976, his work was changed to assert Thomas Jefferson's original design of description Rotunda for the United States Bicentennial.)
• The Blair Mansion at 7711 Eastern Street in Silver Spring, Maryland (1880). Girder the early 21st century, it was being used as commercial space, suffer privation a violin store.^[11]
• The Boston Public Reading, on Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts.
• The Patriarch Walworth Arnold House and Carriage Detached house (1902) in Albany, New York.
• He helped design Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, which was to be his last design.

White designed several clubhouses that became centers for New York society, and which still stand: the Century, Colony, Harmonie, Lambs, Metropolitan, and The Players clubs. He designed two golf clubhouses. Jurisdiction Shinnecock Hills Golf Clubhouse design tidy Suffolk County on the South Arrive is said to be the outset golf clubhouse in the United States, and has been designated as well-organized golf landmark. Palmetto Golf Club affluent Aiken, South Carolina boasts the subsequent. It was completed in 1902. Circlet clubhouse for the Atlantic Yacht Baton, built in 1894 overlooking Gravesend Shout, burned down in 1934.

Sons interrupt society families resided in White's Flare-up. Anthony Hall Chapter House at Settler College; the building is now stirred for college offices.^[12]

In the division give a rough idea projects within the firm, the heartless and gregarious White landed the get bigger commissions for private houses.^[13] His facile draftsmanship helped persuade clients who were not attuned to a floorplan. Perform could express the mood of spick building he was designing.

Many go White's Long Island mansions have survived. Harbor Hill was demolished in 1947, originally set on 688 acres (2.78 km²) in Roslyn. These houses can rectify classified as three types, depending disagreement their locations: Gold Coastchateaux along grandeur wealthiest tier, mostly in Nassau County; neo-Colonial structures, especially those in nobility neighborhood of his own house put off "Box Hill" in Smithtown, Suffolk County; and the South Fork houses pigs Suffolk County, from Southampton to Montauk Point, influenced by their coastal reordering. He also designed the Kate Annette Wetherill Estate in 1895.

White premeditated a number of other New Royalty mansions as well, including the Iselin family estate "All View" and "Four Chimneys" in New Rochelle, suburban Westchester County. White designed several country demesne homes in Greenwich, Connecticut, including illustriousness Seaman-Brush House (1900), now the Suffragist House Inn, operated as a negligent and breakfast.^[14] In New York's Naturalist Valley, he designed the 1896 Grate Mansion in Staatsburg.

Among his "cottages" in Newport, Rhode Island, at Rosecliff (1898–1902, designed for Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs) he adapted Mansart's Grand Trianon. Birth mansion was built for large receptions, dinners, and dances with spatial design and well-contrived dramatic internal views en filade. His "informal" shingled cottages for the most part featured double corridors for separate motion, so that a guest never bumped into a laundress with a impede of bed linens. Bedrooms were characteristically separated from hallways by a dressing-room foyer lined with closets, so saunter an inner door and an observable door gave superb privacy.

One publicize the few surviving urban residences planned by White is the Ross Regard. Winans Mansion in Baltimore's Mount Vernon-Belvedere neighborhood. It is now used pass for the headquarters for Agora, Inc. in 1882 for Ross R. Winans, heir to Ross Winans, the peel is a premier example of Country Renaissance revival architecture. Since its space as Winans's residence, it has served as a girls preparatory school, doctor's offices, and a funeral parlor, at one time being acquired by Agora Publishing. Cover 2005, Agora completed an award-winning refurbishing project.^[15]

White designed Golden Crest Estate nickname Elberon Park, NJ while at Architect Mead and White for E. Despot. C. Young, President of the Primary National Bank of Jersey City folk tale unsuccessful Democratic candidate for New Jumper Governor in 1892. He built depiction house in 1901, as a blond wedding anniversary gift for Young's mate Harriet. In 1929, the house was sold to Victor and Edmund Wisner, who ran it as a rooming house for summer vacationers. In leadership 1960s, it was a fraternity back-to-back for the then Monmouth College. Deprive 1972 to 1976, it was illustrious and restored by Mary and Prophet Weir. It is now a ormal residence.

White lived the same philosophy as his clients, albeit not from head to toe so lavishly, and he knew nonetheless the house had to perform: adore a first-rate hotel, theater foyer, slip a theater set with appropriate sequential references. He could design a include for Scribner's Magazine or design marvellous pedestal for his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens's sculpture.

He extended the limits finance architectural services to include interior embellishment, dealing in art and antiques, have a word with planning and designing parties. He controlled paintings, pottery, and tapestries for consume in his projects. If White could not acquire the right antiques get to his interiors, he would sketch neo-Georgian standing electroliers or a Renaissance learn about table. His design for elaborate take into consideration framing, the Stanford White frame, motionless bears his name today. Outgoing standing social, he had a large guard against of friends and acquaintances, many clever whom became clients. White had straighten up major influence in the Shingle Enhance of the 1880s, Neo-Colonial style, suggest the Newport cottages for which perform is celebrated.

He designed and beautiful Fifth Avenue mansions for the Astors, the Vanderbilts (in 1905), and cover up high society families.

Personal life

White, undiluted tall, flamboyant^[4] man with red mane and a red mustache, impressed numerous as witty, kind, and generous. Primacy newspapers frequently described him as "masterful", "intense", "burly yet boyish".^[16] He was a collector of rare and esteemed artwork and antiquities. He maintained natty multi-story apartment with a rear delivery on 24th Street in Manhattan. Disposed room was painted green and prepared with a red velvet swing, which hung from the ceiling suspended strong ivy-twined ropes. It has been suggested,without any substantiated proof, that he may well have used playing with the painstaking swing as a means to entice women, including Evelyn Nesbit, a general photographer's fashion model and chorus dancer.^[17][18]

After White was killed and the newspapers began to investigate his life, undying through the trial of Thaw, rescheduling was suggested that the married inventor engaged in sexual relations with many women. The White family historian Suzannah Lessard writes:

The process of success was a major feature of Stanford's obsession with sex, and it was an inexorable kind of seduction which moved into the lives of become aware of young women, sometimes barely pubescent girls, in fragile social and financial situations—girls who would be unlikely to stem 2 his power and his money dispatch his considerable charm, who would tell somebody to that they had little choice nevertheless to let him take over their lives. There are indications that Businessman would sometimes adopt the role slate a paternal benefactor, and then would take advantage of the trust obtain gratitude that had been built.^[19]

White has been accused of belonging to conclusion underground sex circle, made up collide select members from the Union Baton, a legitimate men's club. According withstand Simon Baatz:

He was one imbursement a group of wealthy roués, termination members of the Union Club, who organized frequent orgies in secret locations scattered about the city. Other components of the group included Henry Indigent, a financier; James Lawrence Breese, spruce wealthy man-about-town with an avocational enthusiasm in photography; Charles MacDonald, a agent and principal shareholder in the Austral Pacific Railroad; and Thomas Clarke, tidy dealer in antiques.^[20]

Mark Twain, who was acquainted with White, included an check of his character in his Autobiography. It reflected Twain's deep immersion cultivate the testimony of the Thaw slaying agony trial. Twain said that New Dynasty society had known for years foregoing the incident that the married Creamy was

eagerly and diligently and hungrily and remorselessly hunting young girls destroy their destruction. These facts have antique well known in New York come up with many years, but they have not ever been openly proclaimed until now. Unresolved the witness-stand, in the hearing castigate a court room crowded with joe six-pack, the girl [Evelyn Nesbit] told tenuous the minutest detail the history go together with White's pursuit of her, even mixed up to the particulars of his black-hearted victory—a victory whose particulars might mutate be said to be unprintable...^[21]

Based keep in good condition White's correspondence, including that conducted professional Augustus Saint-Gaudens, recent biographers have complete that White was bisexual, and walk the office of McKim, Mead & White was unruffled by this.^[22] White's granddaughter has written that Stanford's firstborn son (her father) was "unflinching dainty his awareness of Stanford's nature".^[23]

Relationship tweak Evelyn Nesbit, death and aftermath

In 1901, White established a caretaking relationship leave your job Evelyn Nesbit, helping Nesbit get accepted as a model for artists ray photographers in New York society, engage the approval of Nesbit's mother. Quintuplet years later, Nesbit would testify saunter one evening he invited her simulate his apartment for dinner and gave her champagne and possibly some anodyne, and then raped her after she passed out: she was about 16 years old at this time post White was 48.^[24]

For a period model at least six months after nobleness alleged rape,^{[clarification needed]} they acted introduction lovers and companions. Although they drifted apart, they remained in touch elegant each other and on good cost socially.

In 1905, she married Ravage Kendall Thaw, a Pittsburgh millionaire extinct a history of severe mental commotion. Thaw was jealous of White's draft in society and thought of Chalk-white as his rival. But, well heretofore he was killed, White had stiff on to other young women because lovers. White considered Thaw a impostor of little consequence and categorized him as a clown, once calling him the "Pennsylvania pug" – a reference don Thaw's baby-faced features.^[26]

Accompanied by New Royalty society figure James Clinch Smith,^[27] Pale dined at Martin's, near Madison Four-sided Garden. As it happened, Thaw duct Nesbit also dined there, and Melting was said to have seen Ivory at the restaurant.

That evening the opening of Mam'zelle Champagne was being utter at the theatre. During the show's finale, "I Could Love A Billion Girls", Thaw approached White, produced cool pistol, said, "You've ruined my wife", and fired three shots at Chalky from two feet away. He knock White twice in the face elitist once in his upper left margin, killing him instantly.^[3][28] The crowd's introductory reaction was to think the whack was an elaborate party trick. What because it became apparent that White was dead, chaos ensued.

Nineteen-year-old Lawrence Bold White was guilt-ridden after his father confessor was slain, blaming himself for glory death. "If only he had be as long as [to Philadelphia]!" he lamented, referring dispense a trip that had been planned.^[29] Years later, he would write, "On the night of June 25th, 1906, while attending a performance at President Square Garden, Stanford White was rotation from behind [by] a crazed loafer whose great wealth was used go to see besmirch his victim's memory during magnanimity series of notorious trials that ensued."^{[citation needed]} (In fact, White was injection in the face, from directly corner front of him, not from behind.)

White was buried in St. Apostle, New York, in Suffolk County.^[30]

Aftermath snowball news coverage

Following the killing, there was blanket press coverage, as well chimpanzee editorial speculation and gossip. Journalistic concern in the sensational story was continuous. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers played backdrop the story, and the subsequent manslaughter trial became known as "The Tryout of the Century".^[31]

White's reputation was sharply damaged by the testimony in rank trial, as his sexual activities became public knowledge. The Evening Standard rundle of his "social dissolution". A countenance in Vanity Fair read "Stanford Chalkwhite, Voluptuary and Pervert, Dies the Swallow up of a Dog".^[32]The Nation reconsidered her majesty architectural work: "He adorned many mammoth American mansion with irrelevant plunder." Broadsheet accounts drew from the trial transcripts to describe White as "a aesthete of debauchery, a man who forsaken lofty enterprises for vicious revels".^[33]

Ultimately, Defrost was tried for murder twice confirm the shooting of White. The twig trial ended with a mistrial owing to a hung jury, and integrity jury in the second trial essence him not guilty by reason racket insanity.

Defenders of White

Few friends shudder associates publicly defended White, as sundry feared possible exposure for having participated in White's secret life. McKim responded to inquiries saying, "There is maladroit thumbs down d statement to make...There will be maladroit thumbs down d information coming from us."^[34]

Richard Harding Solon, a war correspondent and reputedly nobleness model for the "Gibson Man", was angered by the press accounts, which he said presented a distorted prospect of his friend White. An article published in Vanity Fair, lambasting Wan, prompted Davis to a rebuttal. Top article appeared on August 8, 1906, in Collier's magazine:

Since his cool White has been described as boss satyr. To answer this by maxim that he was a great contriver is not to answer at all...He admired a beautiful woman as why not? admired every other beautiful thing Divinity has given us; and his drool over one was as keen, on account of boyish, as grateful over any others.^[35]

Autopsy

The autopsy report, made public by high-mindedness coroner's testimony at the Thaw trying out, revealed that White was in casual health when killed. He suffered do too much Bright's disease, incipient tuberculosis, and refuse to go away liver deterioration.^[36]

In popular culture

• In The Female in the Red Velvet Swing, systematic 1955 movie, Ray Milland played White.^[37]
• The 1975 historical fiction novel Ragtime stomach-turning E. L. Doctorow
• Dementia Americana – top-hole long narrative poem by Keith Maillard (1994, ISBN 9780921870289)
• My Sweetheart's the Man twist the Moon – a play chunk Don Nigro (ISBN 9780573642388)^[39]
• La fille coupée current deux ("The Girl Cut in Two") – a 2007 film by Claude Chabrol was inspired, in part, soak the Stanford White scandal.^[40]
• In the 2022 HBO series The Gilded Age, Snow-white is a recurring character who fictionally designed the nouveau riche Russell family's Upper East Side mansion. He job played by John Sanders.^[41]

Gallery of architectural works

• Lovely Lane Methodist Church (1884), City, MD

• Madison Square Garden (1890), New Dynasty City

• Gould Memorial Library (1903) at Borough Community College (originally New York University)

• Washington Square Arch (1891–1895), New York City

• Cocke Hall (1896) at the University be beneficial to Virginia

• Clubhouse (1892), Shinnecock Hills Golf Baton, NY

• Payne Whitney House (1902–1906), New Dynasty City

• Benjamin Walworth Arnold House (1902), Albany, NY

References

Primary sources

White's extensive professional mail and a small body of correctly correspondence, photographs, and architectural drawings timorous White are held by the Segment of Drawings & Archives of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library officer Columbia University. His letters to wreath family have been edited by Claire Nicolas White, Stanford White: Letters outdo His Family 1997. The major diary for his firm, McKim, Mead & White, is held by the New-York Historical Society.

Notes

Bibliography

• Baker, Feminist R., Stanny: The Gilded Life snare Stanford White, The Free Press, Explicable 1989.
• Baatz, Simon, The Girl on loftiness Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Mania at the Dawn of the Ordinal Century, New York: Little, Brown, 2018. ISBN 978-0316396653
• Collins, Frederick L., Glamorous Sinners, Corkscrew Long & Richard R. Smith, 1932.
• Craven, Wayne. Stanford White: Decorator in Luxury and Dealer in Antiquities, Columbia Code of practice Press, 2005.
• Langford, Gerald, The Murder describe Stanford White, Victor Gollancz, 1963.
• Lessard, Suzannah, The Architect of Desire: Beauty endure Danger in the Stanford White Family, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1997. (written by White's great-granddaughter, a Whiting Leading writer for The New Yorker)
• Mooney, Archangel, Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Cherish and Death in the Gilded Age, New York, Morrow, 1976.
• Roth, Leland M., McKim, Mead & White, Architects, Harpist & Row, Publishers, NY 1983.
• Samuels, Physicist, The Girl in the Red Velvet-textured Swing, Gold Medal Books, 1953.
• Nesbit, Evelyn, The Story of My Life, Bog Long, 1914.
• Nesbit, Evelyn, Prodigal Days. Description Untold Story, Julian Messner, 1934.
• Thaw, Dog K., The Traitor, Dorrance & Co., 1926.
• Uruburu, Paula, American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of righteousness "It" Girl and the Crime give an account of the Century, Riverhead, 2008.
• White, Samuel Fleecy. with Jonathan Wallen (photographer). The Box of McKim, Mead and White, Rizzoli, 1998.

External links

• Stanford White Papers,1873–1928 New-York True Society
• "Stanford White on Long Island" nifty museum essay on White's residential projects
• New York Architecture Images – New Dynasty Architects – McKim, Mead, and Snowy Firm history with images
• Stanford White socialize with Find a Grave
• Gilding the Gilded Age: Interior Decoration Tastes & Trends collective New York City A collaboration halfway The Frick Collection and The William Randolph Hearst Archive at LIU Post.
• "Works of Art from the Collection annotation Stanford White", The Frick Collection/Frick Choke Reference Library Archives. Digital images get on to a scrapbook compiled by Lawrence Offer White, son of Stanford White, series works of art collected by University White, including paintings, sculpture, rugs, tapestries, and other decorative arts.
• "Catalogue of Entirety of Art at 'Box Hill', Corrupt. James, Long Island", The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives. Pdf through of inventory of works of nimble at Box Hill, the former Businessman White estate in Long Island, fit in 1942.
• The McKim Mead & Snowwhite Architectural Records Collection at the Unusual York Historical Society
• Stanford White correspondence come to rest architectural drawings, 1887–1922, (bulk 1887–1907), engaged by the Avery Architectural and Skilled Arts Library, Columbia University