''Basically,'' Ms. White added, ''I think Suzannah is a polemicist. 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. He was a predatory seducer of teenage girls, seeking out actresses or dancers who were from impoverished families. I saw them, in a sense, for the first time. In 1897, when he was in particularly difficult financial straits, he ordered extensive improvements to a hideaway above F.A.O. Schwarz, on West Twenty-fourth Street: he put in a marble mantel that had to be raised on the outside of the building and brought in through the window; he also had the famous swing attached to the high ceiling by red velvet ropes. But on New Years Day, 1989, Beatrice, Madeleine, Isabella, and IFelicity was not able to be there, and Trudi arrived latergathered in a room in my house which we called the studio. 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. 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). The Washington Square Arch, the Metropolitan Club at East 60th Street, the Judson Memorial Church at 55 Washington Square, the Villard Houses at 455 Madison Avenue, the Players at 16 Gramercy Park South, and the Bowery Savings Bank are just some of his achievements. Brendan Gill, another quondam biographer of Stanford, later wrote of the difficulty of reconciling the big, bluff, open, lovable man of superb talent and the predatory . Madison Square Garden Theater, where Thaw shot White in 1906. 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. The primary injury that the movie inflicted on the family, I learned, was not that it misrepresented the story but that it raised the subject at all, and it was from this emphasis that I got the idea that the bad thing that had happened in the family was not murder but publicity. I saw how different the meaning of Stanfords legacy was for her from what it was for me. In 1903, he covered the entire building in pebble dash (rocks pressed into mortar). In this way, what happened at night was put out of consciousnessnot only his but ours. This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Sometimes during the day he would sit at a drawing board near the piano and copy out his music for hours with a tiny quill pen and India ink as we tried not to run and jiggle the floor. There were also steep debts to jewellers and florists. (The bushes had also slid down a bank into the woods on one side, in a dissolute-looking way.) (This was a view that many composersStravinsky among themshared at the time.) They all inspire me, older and younger designer/non designer. The murder and the circumstances surrounding it became a sensational ongoing newspaper story, with Stanford Whites sex life at the center of it. My mother had told her about the fragments, of course, and passed on to me that my grandmother had guessed immediately that they came from Stanfords Madison Square Presbyterian Church, and that my grandfather must have salvaged them from the demolition site with the idea of somehow using them to embellish the Rond Point. Skip Ancestry main menu Main Menu. Stanford kept his supply of girls flowing, sending notes and gifts and flowerscourting, luring, seducing, drawing them in. Cynthia's husband, Robert Jay (1921-1998), who grew up in France and became a banker in Paris and New York, was a self-taught painter and collector of art. . The story of Stanford Whitehis scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. tear into your alcove, perhaps push you off your stool with his body while he reached for pencil and tracing paper and in five minutes make a dozen sketches . ''In fact, many people think it is the Stanford White structure, that it was saved somehow from the fire.''. ''I didn't really understand the point of the Chanler story in a book supposedly about Stanford White,'' one relative said. (The names of some of my family members have been changed, to protect their privacy.). This book turns the telescope around. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. Another recollection that partially escaped the cloister walls was of lying in bed in the corner bedroom and seeing the glass doorknob turning. ''We still have people coming to see where Stanford White is buried,'' the Rev. 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. Stanford White's Legacy Lives On With Great-Great Granddaughter Genevieve White Carter I was lucky enough to interview Genevieve White Carter, one of the talented descendants of the iconic architect Stanford White. Whites dissipated dark side was no secret to his friends. 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. 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. The scandal exploded so fast that a funeral scheduled to be held in St. Bartholomews Church had to be cancelled, because crowds of sensation seekers threatened to overwhelm it. 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. 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. By the time Laura Chanler saw Stanford in his little red car, there was a penumbra of depravity surrounding the celebrated architect. Stanford White helped add to it in 1895. It seems that the same split format with which I kept my actual family experience separate from my picture of family life pertained to Stanfords architecture as well: I could easily know something and yet absolutely not know it at the same time. The tower had seven stories, and then there was an upper loggia, out of which a winding staircase led up to a chamber. Peter White said Ms. Lessard had sent copies of the book to every family member. My great Aunt Cynthia Jay put together an art show called the "Lively Eye" that included descendants of Stanford White. It was clear that sexual violation (mercifully, of a limited sort) had been a part of our life in the Red Cottage. I saw how far the mire extended, how deep it was, how impossible escape was for me. 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. 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 incidental use of classical musicin restaurants, for examplewas trying for him, too. A brief family narrative written by Cynthia Jay "THE LIVELY EYE: five generations of a family in the Arts". White's most significant contribution to New York City and American architecture was vision, says Bach. Suzannah never forwarded me the chapter to proof. 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. He built a large home in hopes that it would be filled with grandchildren whom he could adore, and he was a great friend to many people. His wife said Box Hill has had attempted robberies, and Claire White said sightseers had trespassed, trying to see Stanford White's house. 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. 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 the environment, too. ''Suzannah talks an awful lot about herself in the book and then makes very selective disclosures about what she claims happened in the past. We had all, in a sense, become somnambulists. . January 3, 2021By 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. A good example is his approach to the design of the libraries at the various clubs he builtlike New York's Metropolitan Club, which was founded in 1891 by J.P . He was the most convinced authoritarian I have ever encountered. My grandfather was elegant, even in his overalls and an old, crumpled hata tall man, a robust man, yet one girded in an armor of privilege and cultivation, through which little evidence of a life of feeling escaped. 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. Rememberson, 5. 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. My husband Cy worked there as well which was a great segway into working together now. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. On the far side of the Rond Point there was a Propylona glorIous tall structure of white wooden columns, placed in a shallow curve, supporting a terra-cotta cast of a Greek frieze. Nordiska Kompaniet dining chairs, 1950, offered by MY MODERN. Then he comes around from the furnace with a change in his eyes that made him strange and that I noted with the dispassionate objectivity of children. His wife, Laura Chanler White, was a serious painter, trained at the Academie Julien in Paris. 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. 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. Uncle Willie threw his leg at Maxim's in Paris, and not, as Ms. Lessard wrote, at Delmonico's in New York, he said. There are a lot of us. But he did a lot of good things, too. Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, lost their only child, Leland, Jr., to typhoid in 1884, they decided to build a university as the most fitting memorial, and deeded to it a large . And yet, despite everything, I did not regret having made the decision to do this. Her parents, Daisy and Winthrop Chanler, were social lions and knew all the choicest people (Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Edith Wharton, and even Theodore Roosevelt), and Laura knew Stanford before she knew my grandfather, Larry White. 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 soon as I acknowledged this, my aversion left me, and I found myself working strenuously to bring that set-apart reality out of darkness and into the golden light of the bank. She was a friend of my grandfather, a neighbor, and a lady, and she had loved my great-grandmother. Family members who saw the program said they were satisfied by her performance during the program but were bitterly disappointed by the treatment of the same subject in her book, and that the family had received quite a few reactions. I keep a painting studio in our garage and paint whenever I get a chance. 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. The architect/designer/artist genes are very strong in the White Family as well as the attraction to others in the arts. They had the fortune of working with the talented team at Commune Design before starting their own firm. There was also a theatre that could seat twelve hundred; a concert hall; and the Roof Garden, a partly outdoor restaurant surrounded by a colonnade and equipped with a stage for light entertainmentall beneath a tower that soared three hundred and forty-one feet above it. 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. 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.. Sometimes he would jump up in the middle of the night and rush down to the piano to compose some music that had come into his head. Hanging on one of the anaglypta-covered walls is a 19th-century American eagle mirror, restored several years ago for an exhibition in Newport. Other family members saw to it that the taxes on it were paid and that the land was to some degree maintained: of all the parts of the subdivided Place, Johnnys field was thus the most communal. White himself did not spring from old New York or from new money either. Challenged, he would get out a sketchbook and do thumbnails of all that he had walked by so quickly. The drive was romantic, but the Rond Point was drearyeven distraught-seeming. Paul Jay's son, Florian Jay, having studied at the School of Fine Arts at Hunter, is a fabricator in metal, who, along with his own pieces, has worked for sculptors Louise Bourgeois, Keith Sonnier and Dennis Oppenheim . 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. Its all about texture., When it came to the interiors, Stanford was a compulsive purchaser whose appetite for beauty respected no borders, Samuel writes. When he opened the door of the furnace the light inside was a deep, pulsing orangethrough a vent in the door I could see the coals pulsing. 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. ''We tried to rebuild the cupola as close to the first one as we could.'' A biography by Charles Baldwin that focussed principally on Stanfords professional life was published in 1936, and thereafter, though there were many attempts, no biography was completed for half a century. Research genealogy for Stanford White of New York, USA, as well as other members of the White family, on Ancestry. He collected temple ornaments from Japan, carpets from Turkey, tiles from Holland and mashrabiya screens from Morocco. Then, he filled rooms with as many pieces as could fit. What is the next chapter for Carter Design?We have been enjoying doing consultations where we put together specifications and inspiration images for projects and let others carry them out. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. ; James and Ellen White were the co-founders of the Seventh day Adventist Church in the 1840's.; Stanford White was a well-known American architect, sensationally murdered in 1906.; Harry Dexter White was an economist and Treasury official who was the prime mover behind the 1944 . The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family. He didnt see music as being in any way related to the heart or the soul, to anything other than itself.
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