Stanford White (November 9, 1853 – June 25, 1906) was an American architect. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. He designed many houses for the wealthy, in addition to numerous civic, institutional, and religious buildings. His temporary Washington Square Arch was so popular that he was commissioned to design a permanent one. His design principles embodied the "American Renaissance".
In 1906, White was shot and killed at the rooftop theatre of
Madison Square Garden by Harry Kendall Thaw, in front of a
large audience during a musical theatre performance. Thaw was a wealthy but
mentally unstable heir of a coal and railroad fortune who had become obsessed
by White's alleged drugging and rape of, and subsequent relationship with, the
woman who was to become Thaw's wife, Evelyn
Nesbit, which had started when she was about 16, four years before her 1905
marriage to Thaw. By the time of the killing, Nesbit was a famous fashion model
who was performing as an actress in the show. With the elements of a sex
scandal among the wealthy and the public killing, the resulting sensational
trial of Thaw was dubbed "The Trial
of the Century" by contemporary reporters. Thaw was ultimately found
not guilty because of insanity.
Early life and
training
White was born in New York City in 1853, the son of Richard Grant White, a Shakespearean
scholar, and Alexina Black (née Mease) (1830–1921). His father was a
dandy and Anglophile with little money but with many connections to New York's
art world, including the painter John
LaFarge, the stained-glass artist Louis
Comfort Tiffany, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
White had no formal architectural training; like many other
architects at the time, he learned on the job as an apprentice. Beginning at
age 18, he worked for six years as the principal assistant to Henry Hobson Richardson, known for his
personal style (often called "Richardsonian
Romanesque") and considered by many to have been the greatest American
architect of his day.
In 1878, White embarked on a year-and-a-half tour of Europe,
to learn about historical styles and trends. When he returned to New York in
September 1879, he joined two young architects, Charles Follen McKim, and William
Rutherford Mead, to form the firm of McKim,
Mead and White. As part of the partnership, they agreed to credit all of
the firm's designs as the work of the collective firm, not to be attributed to
any individual architect.
In 1884, White married 22-year-old Bessie Springs Smith, daughter of J. Lawrence Smith. She was from a socially prominent Long Island
family. Her ancestors had settled in what became Suffolk County in the colonial
era, and Smithtown was named for them. The White couple's estate, Box Hill, was both a home and a
showplace for the luxe design aesthetic that White offered to prospective
wealthy clients. Their son, Lawrence Grant
White, was born in 1887.
McKim, Mead, and White
Commercial and civic
projects
In 1889, White designed the triumphal arch at Washington Square, which, according to
White's great-grandson, architect Samuel
G. White, is the structure for which White should be best remembered. White
was the director of the Washington
Centennial celebration. His temporary triumphal arch was so popular, that
money was raised to construct a permanent version.
Elsewhere in New York City, White designed the Villard
Houses (1884), the second Madison Square
Garden (1890, demolished in 1925), the Cable
Building at 611 Broadway (1893), the
Baldechin (1888 to mid-1890s) and altars
of Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph
(both completed in 1905) at St. Paul the
Apostle Church, the New York Herald
Building (1894; demolished 1921), and the IRT Powerhouse on 11th Avenue and 58th Street.
White also designed the Bowery
Savings Bank Building at the intersection of the Bowery and Grand Street
(1894), Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, the Lambs Club Building,
the Century Club, Madison Square
Presbyterian Church, as well as the Gould
Memorial Library (1903), originally for New York University. It is now part of the campus of Bronx Community College and is the site
of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.
White was also commissioned for churches, estates, and other
major buildings outside New York City:
Elberon Memorial
Church was erected in 1886 as a memorial to Moses
Taylor Elberon, New Jersey.http://elberonmemorialchurch.com
The First Methodist
Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland (1887), now Lovely Lane United Methodist Church.
The Cosmopolitan
Building, a three-story Neo-classical
Revival building topped by three small domes, was built in Irvington, New York,
in 1895 as the headquarters of Cosmopolitan
Magazine.
Cocke, Rouss, and
Cabell halls at the University of
Virginia. In 1889, he reconstructed the university's Rotunda, three years
after it had burned down. (In 1976, his work was changed to restore Thomas Jefferson's original design of
the Rotunda for the United States Bicentennial.)
The Blair Mansion
at 7711 Eastern Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland (1880). In the early 21st
century, it was being used as commercial space, for a violin store.
The Boston Public
Library, on Copley Square,
Boston, Massachusetts.
The Benjamin Walworth
Arnold House and Carriage House (1902) in Albany, New York.
He helped to develop Nikola
Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, his last design.
White designed several clubhouses that became centers for
New York society, and which still stand: the Century, Colony, Harmonie, and Lambs, Metropolitan, and The Players clubs. He designed two golf
clubhouses. His Shinnecock Hills Golf
Clubhouse design in Suffolk County on the South Shore is said to be the
oldest golf clubhouse in the United States and has been designated as a golf
landmark. Palmetto Golf Club in
Aiken, South Carolina boasts the second. It was completed in 1902. His
clubhouse for the Atlantic Yacht Club built in 1894 overlooking Gravesend Bay,
burned down in 1934.
Sons of Society families resided in White's St. Anthony Hall Chapter House at Williams College; the building is now
used for college offices.
Residential
properties
In the division of projects within the firm, the sociable
and gregarious White landed the most commissions for private houses. His fluent
draftsmanship helped persuade clients who were not attuned to a floor plan. He
could express the mood of a building he was designing.
Many of 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 be classified as three types, depending on their locations: Gold Coast chateaux along the
wealthiest tier, mostly in Nassau County; neo-colonial structures, especially
those in the neighborhood of his own house at "Box Hill" in Smithtown, Suffolk County; and the South
Fork houses in Suffolk County, from Southampton to Montauk Point, influenced by
their coastal location. He also designed the Kate Annette Wetherill Estate in
1895.
White designed several other New York mansions as well,
including the Iselin family estate "All
View" and "Four
Chimneys" in New Rochelle, suburban Westchester County. White designed
several country estate homes in Greenwich, Connecticut, including the
Seaman-Brush House (1900), now the Stanton House Inn, operated as a bed and
breakfast. In New York's Hudson Valley, he designed the 1896 Mills 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. The mansion was built for large
receptions, dinners, and dances with spatial planning and well-contrived
dramatic internal views en filade. His "informal"
shingled cottages usually featured double corridors for separate circulation,
so that a guest never bumped into a laundress with a basket of bed linens.
Bedrooms were characteristically separated from hallways by a dressing-room
foyer lined with closets so that an inner door and an outer door gave superb
privacy.
One of the few surviving urban residences designed by White
is the Ross R. Winans Mansion in
Baltimore's Mount Vernon-Belvedere
neighborhood. It is now used as the headquarters for Agora, Inc. Built in 1882 for Ross
R. Winans, heir to Ross Winans,
the mansion is a premier example of French
Renaissance revival architecture. Since its period as Winans's residence,
it has served as a girl’s preparatory school, doctor's offices, and a funeral
parlor, before being acquired by Agora
Publishing. In 2005, Agora completed an award-winning renovation project.
White designed Golden
Crest Estate in Elberon Park, NJ while at McKim Mead and White for E.
F. C. Young, President of the First National Bank of Jersey City and
unsuccessful Democratic candidate for New
Jersey Governor in 1892. He built the house in 1901, as a golden wedding
anniversary gift for Young's wife Harriet.
In 1929, the house was sold to Victor
and Edmund Wisner, who ran it as a
rooming house for summer vacationers. In the 1960s, it was a fraternity house
for the then-Monmouth College. From
1972 to 1976, it was owned and restored by
Mary and Samuel Weir. It is now
a private residence.
White lived the same life as his clients, albeit not quite
so lavishly, and he knew how the house had to perform: like a first-rate hotel,
theater foyer, or theater set with appropriate historical references. He
could design a cover for Scribner's
Magazine or design a pedestal for his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens's sculpture.
He extended the limits of architectural services to include
interior decoration, dealing in art and antiques, and planning and designing
parties. He collected paintings, pottery, and tapestries for use in his
projects. If White could not acquire the right antiques for his interiors, he
would sketch neo-Georgian standing electroliers or a Renaissance library table. His design for elaborate picture
framing, the Stanford White frame,
still bears his name today. Outgoing and social, he had a large circle of
friends and acquaintances, many of whom became clients. White had a major
influence in the Shingle Style of the
1880s, the Neo-Colonial style, and the Newport cottages for which he is
celebrated.
He designed and decorated Fifth Avenue mansions for the
Astors, the Vanderbilts (in 1905), and other high-society families.
Personal life
White, a tall, flamboyant man with red hair and a red
mustache, impressed some as witty, kind, and generous. The newspapers
frequently described him as "masterful",
"intense", and "burly yet
boyish". He was a collector of rare and costly artwork and
antiquities. He maintained a multi-story apartment with a rear entrance on 24th
Street in Manhattan. One room was painted green and outfitted with a red velvet
swing, which hung from the ceiling suspended by ivy-twined ropes. He used
playing with the elaborate swing as a means to groom underage girls for a
sexual relationship, including Evelyn
Nesbit, a popular photographer's fashion model and chorus dancer.
After White was killed and the newspapers began to
investigate his life, continuing through the trial of Thaw, the married
architect's sexual relations with numerous underage girls were revealed. The
White family historian Suzannah Lessard
writes:
The process of
seduction was a major feature of Stanford's obsession with sex, and it was an
inexorable kind of seduction that moved into the lives of very young women,
sometimes barely pubescent girls, in fragile social and financial
situations—girls who would be unlikely to resist his power and his money and
his considerable charm, who would feel that they had little choice but to let
him take over their lives. There are indications that Stanford would sometimes
adopt the role of a paternal benefactor, and then would take advantage of the
trust and gratitude that had been built.
White belonged to an underground sex circle, made up of
select members from the Union Club,
a legitimate men's club. According to Simon
Baatz:
He was one of a group
of wealthy roués, all members of the Union Club, who organized frequent orgies
in secret locations scattered about the city. Other members of the group
included Henry Poor, a financier; James Lawrence Breese, a wealthy
man-about-town with an avocational interest in photography; Charles MacDonald,
a stockbroker and principal shareholder in the Southern Pacific Railroad; and
Thomas Clarke, a dealer in antiques.
Mark Twain, who
was acquainted with White, included an evaluation of his character in his Autobiography. It reflected Twain's
deep immersion in the testimony of the Thaw murder trial. Twain said that New
York society had known for years preceding the incident that the married White
was eagerly diligently ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls
to their destruction. These facts have been well-known in New York for many
years, but they have never been openly proclaimed until now. On the witness stand, in the hearing of a courtroom crowded with men, the girl [Evelyn Nesbit] told in the minutest
detail the history of White's pursuit of her, even down to the particulars of
his atrocious victory— a victory whose particulars might well is said to be
unprintable...
Based on White's correspondence, including that conducted
with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, recent
biographers have concluded that White was bisexual and that the office of McKim, Mead & White was unruffled
by this. White's granddaughter has written that Stanford's eldest son (her
father) was "unflinching in his awareness
of Stanford's nature".
Relationship with
Evelyn Nesbit, death and aftermath
"The Trial of the
Century"
In 1901, White established a caretaking relationship with
Evelyn Nesbit, helping Nesbit get established as a model for artists and
photographers in New York society, with the approval of Nesbit's mother. Five
years later, Nesbit would testify that one evening he invited her to his apartment
for dinner and gave her champagne and possibly some drug, and then raped her
after she passed out: she was about 16 years old at this time and White was 48.
For at least six months after the alleged r***,
they acted as lovers and companions. Although they drifted apart, they remained
in touch with each other and were on good terms socially.
In 1905, she married Harry
Kendall Thaw, a Pittsburgh millionaire with a history of severe mental
instability. Thaw was jealous of White's acceptance in society and thought of
White as his rival. But, well before he was killed, White had moved on to other
young women as lovers. White considered Thaw a poseur of little consequence and
categorized him as a clown, once calling him the "Pennsylvania pug" – a reference to Thaw's baby-faced
features.
Accompanied by New York society figure James Clinch Smith, White dined at Martin's, near Madison Square Garden. As it happened,
Thaw and Nesbit also dined there, and Thaw was said to have seen White at the
restaurant.
That evening the premiere of Mam'zelle Champagne was being performed at the theatre. During the
show's finale, "I Could Love a
Million Girls", Thaw approached White, produced a pistol, said, "You've ruined my wife", and
fired three shots at White from two feet away. He hit White twice in the face
and once in his upper left shoulder, killing him instantly. The crowd's initial
reaction was to think the incident was an elaborate party trick. When it became
apparent that White was dead, chaos ensued.
Nineteen-year-old Lawrence
Grant White was guilt-ridden after his father was slain, blaming himself
for the death. "If only he had gone
[to Philadelphia]!" he lamented, referring to a trip that had been
planned. Years later, he would write, "On
the night of June 25th, 1906, while attending a performance at Madison Square
Garden, Stanford White was shot from behind [by] a crazed profligate whose
great wealth was used to besmirch his victim's memory during the series of
notorious trials that ensued." (In fact, White was shot in the face,
from directly in front of him, not from behind.)
White was buried in St. James, New York, in Suffolk County.
Aftermath and news
coverage
Following the killing, there was blanket press coverage, as
well as editorial speculation and gossip. Journalistic interest in the
sensational story was sustained. William
Randolph Hearst's newspapers played up the story, and the subsequent murder
trial became known as "The Trial of
the Century".
White's reputation was severely damaged by the testimony in
the trial, as his sexual activities became public knowledge. The Evening
Standard spoke of his "social
dissolution". The Nation reconsidered his architectural work: "He adorned many an American mansion
with irrelevant plunder." Newspaper accounts drew from the trial
transcripts to describe White as "a
sybarite of debauchery, a man who abandoned lofty enterprises for vicious revels."
Ultimately, Thaw was tried for murder twice for the shooting
of White. The first trial ended with a mistrial due to a hung jury, and in the
second trial, he was found not guilty because of insanity.
Defenders of White
Few friends or associates publicly defended White, as some
feared possible exposure for having participated in White's secret life. McKim
responded to inquiries saying, "There
is no statement to make...There will be no information coming from us."
Richard Harding Davis,
a war correspondent and reputedly the model for the "Gibson Man", was angered by the press accounts, which he
said presented a distorted view of his friend White. An editorial published in Vanity Fair, lambasting White, prompted
Davis to a rebuttal. His article appeared on August 8, 1906, in Collier's
magazine:
Since his death, White
has been described as a satyr. To answer this by saying that he was a great
architect is not to answer at all...He admired a beautiful woman as he admired
every other beautiful thing God has given us; and his delight over one was as
keen, as boyish, as grateful over any others.
Autopsy
The autopsy report, made public by the coroner's testimony
at the Thaw trial, revealed that White was in poor health when killed. He
suffered from Bright's disease, incipient tuberculosis, and severe liver
deterioration.
In popular culture
In The Girl in the
Red Velvet Swing, a 1955 movie, Ray
Milland played White.
The 1975 historical fiction novel Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
The 1981 film Ragtime, was adapted from the novel of the same name. White was played by writer Norman Mailer, Thaw by Robert Joy, and Nesbit by Elizabeth McGovern.
The 1996 musical Ragtime, is based on the novel.
Dementia Americana
– a long narrative poem by Keith
Maillard (1994, ISBN 9780921870289)
My Sweetheart's
the Man in the Moon – a play by Don
Nigro (ISBN 9780573642388)
La fille coupée en
deux ("The Girl Cut in
Two") – a 2007 film by Claude
Chabrol was inspired, in part, by the Stanford
White scandal.
In the 2022 HBO series The
Gilded Age, White is a recurring character who fictionally designed the
nouveau riche Russell family's Upper East Side mansion. He is played by John Sanders.
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