The name Stanford White has entered into American lore, and not in a good way. For many social commentators White symbolizes an era of excess, of the too-large meal at Delmonico's, the cacophonous din of the Wurlitzer, the bloated voluptuary Jim Brady and the mother-of-pearl handlebars of his inamorata Lillian Russell's gold-plated bicycle, let-them-eat-cake parties at the Waldorf, the fatuous social pronouncements of Ward McAllister, the girl in the cake--in short, everything that right-thinking people have been taught to abhor in the vulgar materialism of the laissez-faire America of the turn of the 20th century.
That White was fatally shot by Harry Thaw in the roof garden of White's own Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906, seems the icing on the cake of a shabby era. E.L. Doctorow, in Ragtime, told us as much.
But is it a true picture? Historians will argue. The English novelist Arnold Bennett was a man of probity, the opposite, it would seem, of Stanford White in temperament. In 1912 the brilliant author of The Old Wives' Tale and Riceyman Steps, two of my favorite novels of all time, wrote Your United States, in my opinion the best book any European ever wrote about America. Bennett wrote of New York,
When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare I had ever seen anywhere.
He went on:
Fifth Avenue...always reminds me of Florence and the Strozzi...The cornices, you know.
The specific occasion was his viewing the Gorham Building, a Stanford White masterpiece still standing on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 36th Street. The ground floor was mutilated in the 1960s, and the cornice has lost its rich polychromatic enameling, but the building still possesses a stately majesty equaled by few other buildings in the city. White may have lived a life of sybaritic excess in a shabby age, but he also designed buildings that in their balance combined with radiance were equal to anything being done in the world at the time.
McKim, Mead & White vied with Chicago's D.H. Burnham & Co. for the title of world's largest architectural office, measured in dollar value of commissions. For many of us, it is axiomatic that McKim, Mead & White was New York's greatest architectural firm of all time. Though a building was credited to the firm, generally it was either McKim or White (or another designer in the firm) who designed it--just as it was usually either Lennon or McCartney, not the two together, who wrote all those great Beatles songs. McKim designed the Columbia campus, Pennsylvania Station, the Boston Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the University Club, and the Brooklyn Museum. White designed Madison Square Garden, the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Metropolitan Club, the Joseph Pulitzer house, the Tiffany Building, and the Gorham Building.




White was a total designer. Here is a picture frame he designed:

And here is the man himself:

This Sunday, June 25, 2006, marks the one hundredth anniversary of the murder of Stanford White. To commemorate the event, this Thursday, June 22, the Madison Square Park Conservancy is featuring talks by Suzannah Lessard, White's great-granddaughter and author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (1996) and Paula Uruburu, author of a forthcoming biography of White's mistress Evelyn Nesbit, introduced by Miriam Berman, author of Madison Square: The Park and Its Celebrated Landmarks. The event convenes at the Admiral Farragut Monument, just in from 26th Street about midway between Fifth and Madison Avenues, in Madison Square, at 6:30pm.
White collaborated with his close friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the design of the exedra of the Farragut Monument, before there was such a thing as McKim, Mead & White. An interesting bit of trivia is that the biographical inscriptions on the exedra were composed by Richard Grant White, Stanford's father and one of the leading men of letters of 19th-century New York. Alas, then as today you could be a leading man of letters yet be hard up for money. Stanford White could never afford to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. (Though the training there was free, the student still needed living and traveling expenses.) Ironically, the one other architect whom we associate with the Beaux-Arts generation who never actually attended the Ecole was Cass Gilbert, a onetime McKim, Mead & White employee, whose (excellent) New York Life Insurance Building now stands on the site of Madison Square Garden.
David Lowe wrote the best book on Stanford White.
(For a sense of White's versatility as a designer, see this earlier post of ours.)
Does anyone know if there are any organizations that specifically work on interpretation, appreciation and historic preservation of Stanford White buildings?
Please email if you have any leads.
[email protected]
Posted by: Cheryl | January 07, 2009 at 05:48 PM
There was a synagogue built in California
whose design was based on Sanford White's Madison Square Presbyterian Church. Does
anyone know where it was or if it still exists?
Posted by: Okey Moffatt | June 20, 2010 at 04:27 PM