. 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. To the right of the fireplace are a 19th-century European marquetry chest and a bench that is straight out of Salem, Mass., says Samuel, noting that the entire space reveals Stanfords penchant for mixing periods and styles. The walls are covered in quarter-inch strips of split bamboo White also had a penchant for experimenting with unusual materials. The club met in a rented room in the Benedict, an apartment building for bachelors on Washington Square, and it is almost certain that the principal activity there was sexualscenes of mirth and physiological interest and investigations was how Dewing described the activities of the Sewers successor club, the Morgue, which maintained a number of hideaways for use by its members. Stanford was really cheap, says his great-grandson, using the walls of Box Hills dining room to prove the point. Yet architecture pervades the family. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. If I could not sleep at night I would rearrange my whole bedroom, bureau and all. Several years after the house was completed, my grandmother died, at the age of ninety-six. Henrietta Lacks was a poor, African-American tobacco farmer and mother in the 1950s when physicians, following protocol at the time, took a tissue sample of her . See more ideas about stanford white, stanford, mansions. After I woke up, I recognized that the scene had about it an atmosphere of serene catastrophe which was profoundly familiar. As a result, Samuel points out, the Venetian Room escaped the most destructive period in American cultural history. . My father was tall and lanky, with a big head, a mischievous, catlike expression, and receding curly dark hair. Carter Design Consultations is a branch of the company that will expand in the next year. But White's infamy may live again, thanks to a book by a great-granddaughter, Suzannah Lessard, ''The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family'' (November, the Dial Press). When Stanford White was murdered on June 25, 1906, the story made newspaper headlines around the world. Birth of Richard Mansfield White. Shortly after you turned onto it from the public road, it passed through a circular clearing, also lined with rhododendrons, called the Rond Point. A gala festivity that Stanford arranged in 1895 came to be known as the Pie Girl Dinner. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Bobby and Claire lived with their four children in another farmhouse over by the cluster of barns. It was completed in 1897 and White soon . Ad Choices. 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. She passed out to find herself naked in bed next to a naked Stanford White. You had to guess what and which he meant. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. . It ought to be only aesthetic. She was a friend of my grandfather, a neighbor, and a lady, and she had loved my great-grandmother. It was in that charged quiet that he occasionally sat down at the Steinway and played. 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. Architecture, then, was his profession and his livelihood; but he was a man of enormous energies, who used every hour of his waking day in a dizzying array of activities. There are carved wooden doors at Box Hill that were meant for the Morgan Library, but the client changed their mind and wanted brass doors instead. John White of Dorchester was the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony which sent the Pilgrims to America. She and I had an ongoing conversation since I was about 11 about replicating the Peacock wallpaper in her bedroom. My White family is also a brickwall for me. Ms. Lessard did not respond to repeated requests to reply to the assertions of her relatives. Johnny looked good with a gunthe brown stock and the metal barrel rested naturally in his strong brown arm. Alcoholism, too, figures heavily in the accounts of sexual abuse and, later, the rape of a cousin whom she calls Pamela by another cousin, William. The analyst had suggested that she speak to her sisters about it. Flanking the mirror are several faience plates. New York, United States. Four spent time in art schools, but only Robert White made it a profession. I craved being part of a larger visual conversation than running a gallery. We were by then more or less financially ruined, my marriage was wrecked, and my relationship with the extended family on the Place was in serious disrepair. 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. Peter White said. Starting at age 18, Stanford apprenticed with the acclaimed Romanesque revival architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Thus the trial became, in effect, a trial of Stanford White. The passage describes elaborate stag parties and, of course, the well-known sculpture of Diana, said to be modeled after Miss Nesbit. The building was commissioned in the 1880s by railroad magnate Henry Villard and completed in 1884 (with the help of McKim, Mead & Whites chief designer, Joseph Wells). Stanford "Stanny" White Born 9 Nov 1853 in New York City, New York, United States Ancestors Son of Richard Grant White and Alexina Black (Mease) White Brother of Richard Mansfield White Husband of Elizabeth Springs (Smith) White married 7 Feb 1884 in New York City, New York, United States Father of Lawrence Grant White It is a funny tradition to carry on, but a true one. Stanford, his great-grandson says, was able to express that spirit in architectural terms. He modeled the exterior after the Grand Trianon at Versailles; inside is a mirrored ballroom with elaborate plaster ornaments. Up on my ladder, I sensed the story in a subverbal formin the rooflines of the barns silhouetted in the setting sun; in the soft, light-absorbent marble of the fountain in front of Box Hill; in the lines of the swamp maple behind the fountain, towering over the house; and, of course, in the gabled mass of Box Hill itself. Detailed hand-written notes describe the places that certain objects have traveled to . I calculated that my grandfather would have been thirty-one at the time. satyr. He wrote that biographers became repelled by Whites monstrous insatiability, and their projects ground to a halt because they came to dislike him and had a reluctance to admit that his amoral multifariousness had defeated them.. But the McKim, Mead & White partner also designed more than 100 residences, including some of the great shingle-style mansions of Long Island and New England and structures whose classical forms are reminiscent of his civic architecture. Repeated freezing and thawing Box Hill had no heating system until 1938 caused the paint on the anaglypta to develop a crackle finish. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Among his growing expenses were the costs of his girls: he did things like pay their dental bills (he would try to perfect his girls as if they were works of art), and he once put Evelyn Nesbit and her mother up in a hotel for more than a year. It was as if the murder and the circumstances surrounding it had no significance for the family, which was burdened only by the unfortunate obsessions of others. The drive proceeded under the Propylon and then rose through the woods in a perfectly graded and straight line, densely hedged by rhododendrons until it broke out dramatically into a field. The Place was largely the work of my great-grandfather Stanford White; and that he was a famous neoclassical architect, notorious for being murdered in scandalous circumstances, was a part of. This widens the location of the projects we are able to work on. And when it became clear that a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania millionaire named Harry K. Thaw had shot him because, Thaw claimed, White had been responsible for the "ruination" of many young girls, the story became sensational. There came a moment when I was up on a ladder painting some outdoor trim and I suddenly saw myself in a detached wayup on the ladder in the middle of my family past, with disaster massing around me. . The former owner of the St. James General Store, Andy Havrisko, recalled an anecdote that the previous owner had told him. 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. In June Ms. Lessard appeared on ''The American Experience'' series on PBS as the chief spokesman in a segment entitled ''Murder of the Century'' about the Stanford White slaying. The gilded and coffered ceiling inside the bank had a skylight at its center, with panes of deep-yellow glass. White would have been dead within the year if not murdered. ''Johnny didn't shoot one of their horses. 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. Mary Norriswife, 30. I am still in touch with many of the designers that I worked with there and celebrate in their successes, as well as all of Communes successes. He also married Bessie Smith from a prominent Long Island family. I knew that it was important to cause as little disturbance as possible in bringing the house in, but it would have to enter the Place through the massive stone posts that flanked the South Gate by the White Cottage, and one of them would have to be demolished to accommodate its width. There were also steep debts to jewellers and florists. He was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where his four children absorbed the life of the ancient stones. When I asked myself why, what came to mind was a sense of the great, groaning novel of the family, an unfolding story of which I was irrevocably a part and to which I was now committed. I feel she chose to focus exclusively on the unhealthy elements of the family.''. But the detail on which he lavished the most effort and expense was the statue of Diana. The three grandsons of Robert White--Duncan White and Christian's two sons, Zachary and Schuyler White--show great promise as designers and artists. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. The firms Boston buildings included the Algonquin Club, the Boston Public Library, Harvard Stadium, and the Symphony Hall. Stanford White (November 9, 1853 - June 25, 1906) was an American architect. The Book of the Month Club published his rendering in verse, with Gustave Dore's illustrations, in a fine large edition. '', His wife, Gehanne, agreed, saying: ''Some of Suzannah's declarations are accurate, and some untrue. This picture is not a memory in the documentary sense: I never saw a plane exploding. She had begun her project with the preconception that Stanford was a charming, charismatic figure, who had had affairs, yes, but was no worse than many, and had done nothing that a sophisticated person would find untoward. Anyone can read what you share. Problems include a roof that leaks Stanford alternated large and small dormers for effect, creating the most complicated roof Ive ever seen, says Samuel and a 125-year-old kitchen. It is a curiosity of my life that I have, repeatedlywithout any conscious choice or even full consciousness on my partended up in environments replete with family history. In 1899, he took a flyer in sugar, which left him heavily in debt to brokers; his health was increasingly poor; and yet he negotiated for the lease to a far grander town house than the one he and Bessie had been living in, and when he got it he decorated it opulently and threw a party for hundreds, catered by one of the fanciest restaurants in town. ''Many of my in-laws felt the book was patterned after them,'' said Ms. White, a niece of Aldous Huxley. Isabella, whose expression was usually veiled, was also in tears. Ms. White added that even the tamest books could be perceived as hurtful when they related to real people. Early Life. Charley. The one period in which Stanford was frequently a topic around Box Hill was in 1955, when The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing was released. Ever so minutely, the cosmos shifted, and in that moment I knew that it was the family melodrama about lies and betrayal, and not the Hollywood one, that was untrue. Like his father before him, he traveled always with paint box and sketchbook; and his drawings and watercolors allow one to share his delight in the buildings and landscapes he came across. Joep was a painter and designer of stained glass, who did some of his finest work on his return to the Netherlands, replacing the windows of the Old Church in Delft. The murder trial of Thaw, husband to gorgeous young showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, was the first to take on the description Trial of the Century. The courtroom revelations of Whites brutal seduction of Nesbit when she was 16 shocked and horrified America. As the series The Gilded Age, now streaming on HBO, makes clear, in the 1880s, Stanford Whitewhos played on the series by John Sanders, and is summoned to supply his architectural magic for established society and gatecrashers alikewas the man to call in when someone with a fortune wanted to build a deeply impressive home. ''I've always felt her to be a good writer. 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. Ms. Lessard describes the eight Chanler siblings who were orphaned when the oldest was 13. Then notes would roll through the house and up the stairs and out the windows, and we would all be awash in it. Thus there was hardly a spot on the Place in which Stanford was not implicitly present. I also learned that one of the parts was played by Cornelia Otis Skinner, an actress who enjoyed considerable fame at the time and who lived down the road. He and my grandmother had eight children (of which my mother was the fourth) and, eventually, thirty-five grandchildren, who were on and off the Place; of these, I was the oldest girl. 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. Stanford White (1853-1906) was the stylistic energy behind the celebrated architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. As a result, he jokes, what you see today is the Mies van der Rohe version of these rooms.. While the doorknob is turning, the room, in my memory, is squared off properly, but, as he comes in, it becomes skewed, like a partly collapsed box. In the nineties, Stanfords spending was seriously out of control. The house is right near the Long Island Sound, and there are wonderful beach pebbles that really capture the light, says Samuel. I think she wants to 'make it' at all costs, even by using the public's prurient interest in the Stanford White legend. 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. When, as a young woman, I attended Manhattanville College, in Westchester, for example, the fact that Stanford had designed the interior of the latter-day Norman castle that served as the colleges administration building was not unknown to me, but the knowledge was compartmentalized, remaining at bay in my conscious mind. Her aura was purely feminine. Magonigle also left some amusingly contrasting descriptions of Stanford and his partner Charles Follen McKim. Its not true that Stanford was never mentioned. Visitors continue to visit the Whie grave at the St. James Episcopal Church on Route 25A. This was a dirt-floored cellar, walled with a foundation of boulders cemented together, and it was gloomy, with cobwebs and mildew and a moldy smell of old earth. In reality, White lived a scandalous life that ended in murder. The next day, my grandmother and everyone else in America read in the newspapers that Stanford had gone on Monday evening to see Mamzelle Champagne, a musical that was being put on at the Roof Garden, and that while listening to a song entitled I Could Love a Thousand Girls he was approached by Harry K. Thaw, a millionaire from Pittsburgh, who pulled out a pistol and fired into his face from a range of three feet. 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. One chapter of the book was excerpted in The New Yorker in July, and some members of the far-flung White family are not too happy with her memoir. citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">Lowe, David. I was ten at the time the movie was released, and it was the first I had heard of sexual complications having to do with the murderit may have been the first Id heard of the murder at all. When my mother called me about the fragments, I only dimly recognized the name of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church. "The work was fairly . But the McKim, Mead & White partner also designed more than 100 residences, including some of the great shingle-style mansions of Long Island and New England and structures whose classical forms are reminiscent of his civic . There was going to be a terrible crash, but I felt no dread. Peter White said he had been mistaken by a former classmate as the uncle identified as Bobby. slam his hand down on one of themor perhaps two or three of them if they were close togethersay Do that! and tear off again. Usually, Ms. Lessard said, the incest occurred when the male relative had been drinking heavily. It looks as ifelaborate seductions notwithstandingStanford went through girls pretty fast, along with having several affairs going on at the same time, but he often seduced the girls deeply, so that they fell in love with him and even thought he was going to many them. This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Everything in the environment had meaning for me that no one there understood; no one even knew that I was connected to the place. The replacement Diana was five feet shorter, slimmer, and smaller breasted, and was made in part from plaster casts taken by Saint-Gaudens from a models living body; this one stood directly on the swivelling orb, balancingalmost leapingon the ball of one foot, with the other outstretched behind, about to absorb the powerful recoil of her fully drawn bow. It was clear that sexual violation (mercifully, of a limited sort) had been a part of our life in the Red Cottage. I felt I had found my design tribe when I started to work there. Stanford White is Genevieve's Great Great Grandfather, which will leads us into our interview. It was a stag event that took place in a friends studio, at which nearly nude young women served the winea blonde for the white and a brunette for the redand one jumped naked, or clad in gauze (the accounts differ), out of a pie, accompanied by canaries. For more information, see www.nancybilyeau.com. 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. On June 25, 1906, her then-husband, railroad heir Harry Kendall Thaw, murdered New York architect Stanford White,. She simply put forth her view of life in the Stanford White family as she saw it. Even after he was hooked on buying excessive quantities of luxurious clothing that he couldnt afford (silk shirts in exotic colors, moosehide shoes), he might show up at a formal dinner with tails thrown over workaday trousers at the last moment. 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". Laura met Stanfords son Larry at a dance classshe later described him in this period as a callow youth, whereas Stanford was bristling with life. Callow or not, Larry was a handsome, polished young man, and he and his fatherwho, not having had the kind of privileged upbringing that his son had had, was not so polishedwere irritable with each other. My maiden name was White. Gianfranco Frattini for Bernini model 522 dining table, 1960s, offered by Imprio dos Sentidos, Georg Jensen Acorn sterling-silver flatware, 1917, offered by Jon Beasley Antiques, Waylande Gregory lava lamp, new, offered by Nest Casa, Niels O. Mller for J.L Mllers Mbelfabrik dining table, 1960s, offered by Atypical Find LLC, Carlo Scarpa for Venini Romane bowl, new, designed in 1940, Tiffany & Co. tourmaline and gold earrings, 1940s, offered by Wilson's Estate Jewelry. His constant sliding back and forth through that door wore a trough through the wooden flooring that had to be repaired all the time. Suzanne Nicolas, was a sculptor. Stanford White was the center of an underage sex scandal. Because the Drive ran very close to the house, my husband made closing it a condition of our choice of that particular lot: this became an issue between us, which represented whether our wishes with respect to our property had to be subordinated to the wishes of the family. Samuel White is an architect in New York City who has, with his wife Elizabeth, written several splendidly illustrated books: The Houses of McKim, Mead & White, McKim Mead & Whte: The Masterworks, and Stanford White, Architect. Charles McKim was busy with institutional projects, Samuel says, and William Mead wasnt interested in residential work. He and his wife, Laura Chanler White, had eight children, most of whom spend at least part of the year on or near the.