In addition to familial objections, the book moves between real names and pseudonyms and makes what seem to be impossible conjectures about occurrences outside the time frame. Suzannah Lessard. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. His charming personality and reputation for lavish living brought him wide public visibility, including among Americans who otherwise may not have known about his architecture or heard much about his exploits., Whites rise and fall are echoed in the tragedies of certain public figures in the 21st century. But I think it was a displaced body memory, because, as I began to come to terms with my childhood, instead of seeing the silent explosion of the plane in the sky I would experience a sense of interior exploding, an inchoate overload of mixed feelings, including rageagain, a wish to kick viciouslyand all this in chaos, as if blowing out a nervous system too small-gauged to contain it. Stanford figures just lightly as a friend to the children and later the business partner of Archie and Wintie, the two oldest orphas. My cousin Benjy and I conspired in this pretense, spurting out of the front hall onto the wooden piazza and then onto the lawnI can remember the springy feeling of running and of the grass underfoot. ''I read The New Yorker excerpts, where Ms. Lessard talks about that story,'' a longtime neighbor, the owner of a farm near Box Hill, said. Once, when I was seven, Dad played a boogie-woogie on the piano and I thought I would pass out with joy. ''But Ebenezer wouldn't budge. On the night of the unveiling of Diana, eight thousand lights outlined Madison Square Garden, and she stood, shooting her bow, eighteen feet high and weighing eighteen hundred pounds, on a crescent moon of plate glass, which was twelve feet wide and was lit from within by sixty-six lights. My sisters, in contrast, had protection in numbers, or so it seemed to me. (The bushes had also slid down a bank into the woods on one side, in a dissolute-looking way.) The car was driven by a chauffeur, but Stanford was in the front seat, leaning forward as if to make the car go faster. The main arena could accommodate fourteen thousand people, had a floor that could be flooded for aquatic spectacles, was bright with hundreds of electric lights (still a novelty in those days), and had a huge skylight that could be opened to the air. . With thirty years separating us, we were the oldest and the youngest of Stanfords great-granddaughters, and we both had red hair, as Stanford did, though mine was partly gray by this time, and Pamelas was strawberry blond, quite unlike Stanfords chestnut. She and I had an ongoing conversation since I was about 11 about replicating the Peacock wallpaper in her bedroom. To the end, there is this winning rough authenticity in Stanford. ''There were some passages in 'Architect of Desire' that I found very nice,'' Peter White said. A testament to a true architectural legend. He said the animal 'looked depressed' and wanted to be put out of its misery.''. I guess people who still know him associate him with New York.''. The long-handled iced tea spoons if that is what they are are a showstopper., This lamp has a lot of personality whether turned on or off and would look fabulous in a big space with a mid-century setting., Simple, graceful, elegant and because it expands incredibly versatile., Even Stanford White would have liked this bowl. My mother, Mary, was a singer, a mezzo-soprano, and my father, Frank, was a composer from a Western working-class family; my mothers brother Bobby was a sculptor, and his wife, my Aunt Claire, was a poet. Fitting neoclassical forms into a somewhat informal house was tricky. The Tiffany and Company Building is the landmarked former home of the Tiffany and Company store at 401 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York City, New York. In one anecdote, Uncle Johnny White, who was insane, shot a horse at Box Hill after his mother had made a comment that the horses were becoming expensive to keep. He is known for the murder of architect Stanford White at Madison Square Garden in 1906. Flanking the mirror are several faience plates. Anyone can read what you share. When she was fifteen he had got into her bed and lain on top of herand then, after a time, had gone away. Jake Warga. But hers is not necessarily the final judgment. I obtained it from another family member. Stanford White. No one has to agree or disagree with that.''. There, in my great-grandfathers charmed hall, the symmetries and harmonies that were the underpinnings of our sense of family blessedness seemed to slip and become skewed and thin, like a stage set gone awry. Ms. White added that even the tamest books could be perceived as hurtful when they related to real people. As the oldest, I was exposed. Although he married 22-year-old Bessie Springs Smith when he was 33-years-old, he famously had an "affair" with 16-year-old Evelyn Nesbit when he was in his 40s. Yet White's architecture with both Richardson and McKim stands alone, perhaps as lavish and flamboyant an expression as his own personality. I watched her go, and with her went everyone: Stanford and Bessie, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my cousins, my parents, my sisterseach of whom would write a version of the family history different from this one. He played effortlessly, his body still and relaxed, looking all the while around the room in an abstracted way and smiling occasionally at the music, as if it were independent of his playing and had surprised him. My experiences, again in contrast, were largely unarticulated and unstructured. I am related to Sally Ann White.She was born 15 Apr 1833 in Jefferson County,Ny. The owner of the current Garden City Hotel, Kathy Milken, said the new building tried to retain elements of the original White building that burned down. My maiden name was White. Larry White, as he was widely known and loved, carried on his father's gift for judicious ornament, if with a less explosive, more disciplined approach. When they toured museums together she would be horrified at the fast pace he took on his way through the galleries she was lingering in. In the show, the promises and tensions of emerging modern life can be seen most vividly through the eyes of two invented characters: Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), Agnes' poor niece who has come. ''You have to look at the whole man to judge him and you have to look at a whole family to judge it, too. My house was not completed until two years after we had started. I gathered that there had been a sexual scandal, and that a man called Harry K. Thaw, who later became Evelyn Nesbits husband, had shot Stanford. In the library, Stanford tied the elements together with a datum a continuous line 18 inches below the ceiling. Johnny looked good with a gunthe brown stock and the metal barrel rested naturally in his strong brown arm. We spent the night, and the next morning was beautiful and summery. This was an architecture of stability and security, of lawfulness, of institutional justice. Hanging on one of the anaglypta-covered walls is a 19th-century American eagle mirror, restored several years ago for an exhibition in Newport. Kingscote, a Newport mansion that he enlarged in the 1870s for the King family of New York, represents another example of Stanfords experimentation with exotic materials. He loved houses, and he kept doing houses all his life, says Samuel White, Stanfords great-grandson and an author and architect in his own right. I saw them, in a sense, for the first time. The room reverberated with architectural terms. Stanford married Unknown. Peter White said. By the turn of the century, Stanford was in deep financial trouble, but he continued to expand Box Hill: he added the barns and the stables, the icehouse, the pump house, and planned a fancy pergola for the Box Garden. He designed many houses for the rich, in addition to numerous civic, institutional, and religious buildings. The process of seduction was a major feature of Stanfords obsession with sex. Stanford White was the center of an underage sex scandal. He had only one surviving child, Lawrence Grant White (1887-1956), who, following Harvard and formal training at the Beaux Arts in Paris, would eventually take over the by-then-venerable firm. The suggestion itself was revolutionary; indeed, in the past the prospect would have generated such stress and resistance that the plan would have fallen apart. I felt connected to my sistersa true familial connectedness. There were nodes on the Placea temple in a laurel wood, a fountain at the center of a boxbush mazethat were connected, either explicitly, by roads and pathways, or implicitly, by the way they were placed in relation to each other. 119, McKim, Mead & White was planning a handsome new mansion for Henry A. Taylor at No. By the late eighties, Stanford was also regularly going out on the town for sexual adventurehe went to dives to watch sex as well as to have sex himself later, accompanied by his bohemian cronies or by rich friends he had met as clients. During the period when Stanford became involved with Evelyn Nesbit, for example, he appears to have been fighting off a breach-of-promise suit by the young actress who had introduced Evelyn to him in the first place. The three grandsons of Robert White--Duncan White and Christian's two sons, Zachary and Schuyler White--show great promise as designers and artists. [1] Early life [ edit] Dial Press, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978--385-31445-9. Known to the world as the Astor Orphans, the Chanlers became famed for collective familial insanity. It helps explain where I fit in the picture. A consensus appears to agree that the book is well written. You can view an original Mayflower passenger list here. Just as frequently, however, she says that because of the scandal of White's adulterous affairs and death, her great-grandfather was never spoken about at the house. The piano room had a wavy wooden floor that pitched down, and the plaster walls were wavy, too. On February 1, 1908, Thaw was acquitted on grounds of insanity and sent to a mental institution. Eight years later, Laura and Larry married, and they were together for forty yearsuntil my grandfathers death, in 1956. I was lucky enough to interview Genevieve White Carter, one of the talented descendants of the iconic architect Stanford White. . . The gilded and coffered ceiling inside the bank had a skylight at its center, with panes of deep-yellow glass. Salas O'Brien announced today that Raleigh-based engineering firm Stanford White has joined the company, creating a combined firm of 35 offices with more than 825 team members, 190 registered professionals and clients including the most significant companies, institutions and government agencies in the United States. Alden, Johnship's crew, 21. Mr. Aldrich said that among the inaccuracies was that Ms. Lessard called William Blackhouse Astor William Waldorf Astor when the two men were three generations apart. I calculated that my grandfather would have been thirty-one at the time. Sometimes our client is my mother. Nancy Bilyeau, a former staff editor at InStyle, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, has written a thriller set in the 18th century art and porcelain world titled 'The Blue.' Its a very amiable subject.. He had a small studio there painted umber, sienna, vermillion, and chrome yellow (one cannot tell the story of Stanford without litanies of this sort): it was furnished with carved chairs and divans, tapestries, Oriental rugs, leopard and tiger skins, a crystal globe, some Japanese fish in a bowl, a cardinals hat that served as a lampshade, and a copy of MacMonnies Bacchantea bronze statue of a nude young woman leaping upward ecstatically and carrying an infant who reaches for the grapes his mother holds above him. Another sister, Suzannah Lessard, is a writer (The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family and, from 1975 to 1995, a staff writer for The New Yorker) who paints on the side. As New York was becoming a world capital of finance, fashion, and culture at the close of the 19 th century, the architects gave form to the City's aspirations through public buildings that revived and reinterpreted the . January 3, 2021 By the time he died, in 1906, the great American architect Stanford White was well-known for his public buildings in New York and other East Coast cities. Then came a sound that sliced me vertically, effortlessly, like a blade. It was unsafe safetysomething similar to the mood of serene catastrophe in my dream. Birth of Richard Mansfield White. But it is nearly impossible to wipe out a trail as wide as the one that Stanford left. We circled especially tightly during the days when The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing played at a theatre nearby. For my part, starting from the time of The Red Velvet Swing and well into my adulthood, the mere mention of my great-grandfatherespecially in public, unexpectedlycould jolt my system, overloading my circuits with a smoking mixture of pride and shame. The milieu of my mothers family, into which I was born, was embodied in our environment: sixty acres of land on the North Shore of Long Island which we called the Place. We students would snicker about the pink marble he had used to refinish the space: it embarrassed us, I think; it was so unrestrainedly sensuous, so soft-seeming, with its alternately swirling and mottled grain, that it almost overwhelmed the architectonic characteristics of the hall. I saw, too, that Stanfords improvidence was indicative of a kind of absence; it was a failure to locate himself in reality which meant, in essence, that this larger-than-life person, whose presence had been everywhere on the Place, had not really been there at all. ''I am not saying that I believe Suzannah's experiences are true or not,'' Ms. White said. Also in attendance was celebrity Stanford White, the venue's architect, and former . It was daytime, and from the sense of my length and skinniness in the bed I would guess that I was about six. On February 7, 1907, the defense called their star witness, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, who spoke of her rape at the hands of the murder victim, Stanford White. He was laid out in the parlor at Box Hill, a room of angels and ornaments, red velvet and gilt. He felt that music ought to be concerned only with the musical materials themselves. When and why did you decide to go into design?I decided to go into design when I was working at an art gallery run by a design firm called Otto Design Group. The papers identified Thaws wife as the former Evelyn Nesbit, whom Stanford White had put on the stage when she was in her teens; and even discounting for sensationalism, it became evident that Stanford had loved if not a thousand, perhaps a hundred girls. As The Gilded Age opens, horse-drawn carriages transport European decorative treasuresfurniture, tapestries, statuaryto the still-under-scaffolding white limestone mansion architect Stanford. liked to sit down at a draftsmans table, usually in his hat and immaculate shirt sleeves, and design out loud. Our Christmas presents were hand selected art books. After all, they were not Stanford White.''. Stanford had 8 siblings: Joseph P. White, Penelope White and 6 other siblings. His prodigious memory allowed him to do exact renderings of rooms he had observed at a remove of time and place. Through large, arched windows, we could see the blue ocean on the other side of the house. A first hand look into the lives of the elite through a few of the rare surviving letters. The owner let me know he would help me in anyway in replicating the peacock wallpaper as it was intricate and rare. He was the pastor of a fashionable Brooklyn churchand a ladies man. If you have a party there, Samuel says, the room does half the work. During Rosecliffs heyday the first Gilded Age ladies would descend the heart-shaped stairway in their ball gowns, he notes, adding, Its geometry is extraordinary. In the sixties, my grandmother had divided up the Place among her children, and this pasture was part of Johnnys share; we called it Johnnys field. . Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. (A small funeral was held instead at the Episcopal church near Box Hill.) Another recollection that partially escaped the cloister walls was of lying in bed in the corner bedroom and seeing the glass doorknob turning. Once a year we would have a retreat day, and the whole firm would do something together like visit Shindler's house. '', ''Suzannah is talented,'' Claire White said. Stanford White designed any number of New York City landmarks, including the Washington Square Arch (pictured), the Metropolitan Club, the Bowery Savings Bank, and the Judson Memorial Church. But other shocks were revealed. Mario Bellini Cab lounge chair, 1970s, offered by Villa Vintage etc. Unquestionably it was a statutory rape, because the age of consent was 18, and it was morally rape, because Stanford was immeasurably more powerful than she was and a benefactor on whom she and her entire family were dependent'', ''I don't think Suzannah is doing Stanford credit,'' Claire White said. Although most of what I discovered about Stanfords life was, in some fundamental way, unsurprising to meit was as if the essence of that story had been there on the Place all alongone thing that did surprise me utterly was the conditions of improvidence, of reckless overextension, under which Box Hill came into being. And theres nothing millionaires hate more than having to pay money to the government., The granite mansion commissioned by Payne and Helen Whitney at 972 Fifth Avenue contains what Samuel calls one of the great rooms in America, citing it as proof that his great-grandfather never lost the ability to turn the volume up to the absolute maximum., The Venetian Room, Helen Whitneys favorite, was where the couples guests waited. (This statue had been commissioned for the courtyard of the Boston Public Libraryone of the firms great successesbut a scandalized public had forced it to be withdrawn.) He designed many houses for the rich, in addition to numerous civic, institutional, and religious buildings. Along with working on projects they have a line of wallpaper which includes their Tumbleweed collection inspired by the tumbleweeds that blow across the west. I don't envy Suzannah her current position.''. White families were more likely to be millionaires, and Black families more likely to have negative wealth, meaning their debts were greater than their assets. Shortly after you turned onto it from the public road, it passed through a circular clearing, also lined with rhododendrons, called the Rond Point. It was like that on the Place: the frightening aspect of things didnt fully register. I transferred my feelings of sadness about Johnny to his field; there was something superb about it in the echt way that Johnny was superb. One of Stanfords later works, this Newport mansion was commissioned in 1899 by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a Nevada silver heiress, as a setting for elaborate parties. I recounted my visions of the cellar stairs, the exploding airplane, and another memory, far firmer, of an embrace when I was fifteen, to which, like Beatrice, I had attributed no significance. I felt I had found my design tribe when I started to work there. The land and building were sold by the Vanderbilt family to "The Madison Square Company," which had formed in May 1886, and was comprised of such notable names as Morgan, Carnegie, and Astor. The book expresses the firm conviction that White's first sexual encounter with Miss Nesbit, who was 16, was definitely against her will. It made me want to flee, but instead I pursued the dread, and it led me to an inchoate sense of another reality, encompassing the cloistered experiences of the Red Cottage. ''Ironically,'' Mr. White said, ''the doctors that did the autopsy said Stanford wouldn't have lived much longer anyway.''. But a murder trial turned her into a notorious footnote of U.S. legal history. I think she wants to 'make it' at all costs, even by using the public's prurient interest in the Stanford White legend. What she found, however, was a mechanical progression of sexual compulsion that gradually destroyed her liking for Stanford and, with it, her will to continue. It was not just the architecture of Madison Square Garden that reflected Stanford; it was the way he impelled it into being, working on it night and day from mid-1887 until mid-1890, fundraising, pouring money into it himself (his wifes money), negotiating with strikers, badgering the directors, and then mercilessly pressuring them when they began to balk at runaway costs. White in fact had no formal architectural training, which was not that unusual for the 19th century. Ms. Lessard wrote at length about Archie Chanler's stay in an asylum and Willie Chanler's habit of throwing his wood leg at waiters to get their attention. Quite ordinary sounds hurt thema radio on the beach, for example, or a truck rattling on the road, or we children getting raucous. Initially, I was able to postpone the worst of the violations, which was the closing off of the Rhododendron Drive. Larry White's youngest daughter, Anne Octavia, became an architect and married fellow architect, Harry Buttrick. All of our lives changed drastically within the year. Stanford kept his supply of girls flowing, sending notes and gifts and flowerscourting, luring, seducing, drawing them in. . They would sit outside for hours, until finally they had to come in. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. On June 25, 1906, her then-husband, railroad heir Harry Kendall Thaw, murdered New York architect Stanford White,. My husband Cy worked there as well which was a great segway into working together now. I was lucky enough to interview Genevieve White Carter, one of the talented descendants of the iconic architect Stanford White. Even when she told this story in old age, my grandmother was grateful to Stanford for saving her. He emerged unharmed. A lobotomy, I learned, was supposed to turn you into a vegetable, and it showed what fine stuff Johnny was made of that he could go through a full frontal lobotomy and not be a vegetable at all. Stanford White designed any number of New York City landmarks, including the Washington Square Arch (pictured), the Metropolitan Club, the Bowery Savings Bank, and the Judson Memorial Church.. Anything else you would like to add?Here is a family narrative that my great Aunt Cynthia Jay put together when she put together the art show: "THE LIVELY EYE: five generations of a family in the Arts". You had to guess what and which he meant. One house not open to the public is Stanfords own weekend residence, Box Hill, in Saint James, on the north shore of Long Island. Laying bare the lifestyle of Whiteby no means alone in his womanizing, heavy drinking, and overspendinghelped usher in the twilight of the Gilded Age. The October trial ended in a hung jury, so the process was repeated the following year. He and his wife, Laura Chanler White, had eight children, most of whom spend at least part of the year on or near the. One of the ironies of Stanford White is that the man whose life was raked over in an ugly and sordid trial had devoted decades to celebrating what was most beautiful in architecture and artand to celebrating New York City, the city he adored. ", What The Gilded Age Gets Right About Infamous Architect Stanford White. There were Corinthian columns all around, some of ochre marble, with red and black veins, and, in combination with the skylight, they gave the room a sombre glow. Stanford White's investments in art and antiques, destined for eager clients were by far more successful than his speculation in the stock market. On June 25, 1906, New York City power couple Harry Thaw, a millionaire and heir to a mine and railroad fortune, and Evelyn Nesbit, a chorus girl in the musical Florodora, were at Madison Square Garden for opening night of the musical Mamzelle Champagne. Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, tells Town & Country, The artistry, size, ornament and structures of [Whites] buildings embody the energy and optimism that many felt the Gilded Age held for the United States. In other words, he was the perfect man for his era. What have you preserved from your ancestry and put into use in your work?Stanford was a genius at working with many different artisans and being a bridge between their talents and his clients. A portrait of Senator Leland Stanford, Jane Lathrop Stanford, Leland Stanford Jr. taken in 1878. As a result, he jokes, what you see today is the Mies van der Rohe version of these rooms.. Cite. Roslyn Church in Roslyn was his last architectural effort before his death in 1906. Find Dr. White's phone number, address, insurance information, hospital affiliations and more. It was a large room, about twenty by twentyan addition to the eighteenth-century corewith a pine floor and two bay windows that looked south across Johnnys field. Luckily, he has access to free architectural services, jokes Samuel, referring to the role he has played in the restoration. The moon was balanced on a rotating ball, so that Diana would respond as a weathervaneand she did, even when the breeze was no more than the lightest puff of air. Suzannah never forwarded me the chapter to proof. Then I saw my fathers brown wool wrapper, and his foot with the brown birthmark coming in. Stanford attended public schools, a fact he denied later, saying he had been privately tutored. She gets an idea and manipulates the truth to fit that idea. You have quite the background, tell us about your relationship to Stanford White?Stanford White was my Great Great Grandfather. Stanford White first studied as a painter. A section of the Privet Path also had to be scooped up by the bulldozer as the house passed through an outer pasture to Johnnys field. My great Aunt Cynthia Jay put together an art show called the "Lively Eye" that included descendants of Stanford White. I felt very calm, as if I could sit there forever. He was known to believe that he should live as well or better than his wealthiest clients, says Bach. The incidental use of classical musicin restaurants, for examplewas trying for him, too. It was clear now that these memories, which had seemed isolated to each of us on her own and thus somehow irrelevant, had a context.
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