stanford white descendants

Back to Blog

stanford white descendants

The dining room ceiling is cork, while the panels flanking the fireplace are made of cast-glass blocks, and the wall above the fireplace is clad in iridescent tile. But the air in the room was stable and calm. Or there might be a bit of opera and several stops at regular mens clubs, in addition to the stops at the secret ones, or intervals with one of his girls in one or another of his private hideaways. Saint-Gaudens was the rough-hewn Irish-born artist who created some of the most stirring, monumental American sculpture of the late 19th century. Saint-Gaudens and Stanford habitually addressed each other in letters as Darling or Doubly beloved, and signed off with K.M.A., meaning Kiss My AssSaint-Gaudens would sometimes spell it outand he once wrote to Stan, Im your man to dine, drink, Fuck, bugger or such, metaphorically speaking. But Stanfords private world was so fraught with lewd excess that such distinctions lose meaning; in this atmosphere of untrammelled indulgence the question of whether Stanford was bisexual seems irrelevant. Suzannah never forwarded me the chapter to proof. I felt I had found my design tribe when I started to work there. A year or so later, as a part of this endeavor, I designed a tour of Stanfords architecture for myself. Stanford White (November 9, 1853 - June 25, 1906) was an American architect. The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family. The wrought-iron fire screen and other accouterments are Spanish. 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. Unlike Box Hill, it was unconcerned with its appearance on the outside, and on the inside it was without any expectation that people would be special or events memorable. It was typical of my grandmother to guess the provenance of the fragments right off like thatto have facts about Stanford at her fingertips. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. We had all, in a sense, become somnambulists. Stanford White first studied as a painter. On Long Island, White continues to have a share of celebrity. And yet, despite everything, I did not regret having made the decision to do this. Up until the very minute he was shot on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, Stanford White might have considered June 25th, 1906, to be a good day. 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. Her daughter, Griselda Lessard Healy, is a professional painter, featured both in the Art League of Long Island's gallery and at the Bryant Library in Roslyn. . 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. Her descriptions of the physical environment of our location on Long Island Sound were beautiful and accurate. 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 would sit on the cellar stairs while Dad took care of the furnace: this was before Beatrice was born and just my parents and I were in the Red Cottage. I then wrote to her to advise her of the mistakes. 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. H. Van Buren Magonigle, a draftsman in the office in those early years, wrote: He had a field, as an electrician would say, and his radiated energy was terrific. Power, riches, fame, and beauty. Hyperthyroidism could explain the architect's hyperactivity, nervousness and even ''fat puffiness,'' as Ms. Lessard wrote. 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. . Laying bare the lifestyle of Whiteby no means alone in his womanizing, heavy drinking, and overspendinghelped usher in the twilight of the Gilded Age. I felt very calm, as if I could sit there forever. Yet that sense of impending drama was forever unsatisfied, because there was always the intimation in the family that when my grandfather finally told his mother what had happened she took the news in a resigned way, and that my grandfather himself was not utterly surprised by what had happened either. ''We tried to rebuild the cupola as close to the first one as we could.'' I can remember times in the Box Hill library, way, way backa winter afternoon, with the sun pouring in; sherry for the grownups and cheddar spread on Ritz crackers; a fire on the hearthwhen my grandmother would refer to Stanford in a happy way, saying something about his hair, which was red, and pointing out how Stanfords hair had turned up in Grandpas red mustache, had disappeared for a generation, and had then popped up on me. He felt that music ought to be concerned only with the musical materials themselves. . I felt privileged in my outrage. 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. New York: Dial Press, 1996. At times, Ms. Lessard wrote, Box Hill had a repressive air of heightened sexuality, somehow attributable to Stanford White. 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. 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. This picture is not a memory in the documentary sense: I never saw a plane exploding. Many of Whites houses remain standing, and more than a few are open to the public, including a Washington, D.C., mansion that is now a residential hotel, a Manhattan townhouse that became a French cultural center and several Newport showplaces that offer tours. . Skip Ancestry main menu Main Menu. At this point we each have over a decade of knowledge or paint colors, fabrics and materials that are great and can apply them. He moved into the life of a very young womansometimes a barely pubescent girlwho was in a fragile social and financial situation and who would feel that she had little choice but to let him take over her life. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. He was also a notorious womanizer known for seducing teenage girls, preferably showgirls. brother. A Stanford White-designed mansion in Premium Point, New Rochelle with extensive waterfront footage and spectacular views of Echo Bay, Long Island Sound, Bronx-Whitestone and Throgs Neck Bridges . No one has to agree or disagree with that.''. 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. This building, completed in 1906, served as the home of Tiffany until 1940. This feeling of soundness in the past was comforting to me as a girl, and far more than fiscally: it translated into a sense of being borne up by a reliable foundation. In combination with this charm in the Bowery Savings Bank, there was also the power of the neoclassical tradition, in which every aspect of the interiorthe sure proportions, the sensuous, well-chosen marble, the pilasters, the columnswas working toward the effect of the whole, an effect of strength and authority. Almost every reminiscence of Stanford in the office of McKim, Mead & White mentions a loud, reverberating voice, doors slamming, instantaneous aesthetic decisions, crumpled drafting paper, a gargantuan capacity for work, and a contagious obsession with beauty. She stood out in the family in speaking freely of my great-grandfather, calling him Stanford in an affectionate way, whereas in the rest of the family there was a kind of aversion to his name. He ended up at the Veterans Administration, where eventually he was given seventy-five sugar treatments, a hundred and fifty electroshock treatments, and, finally, a full frontal lobotomy. Roslyn Church in Roslyn was his last architectural effort before his death in 1906. Sally Ann married Nathan Foskett Maynard and moved to Wisconsin. One day my grandmother said the horses were expensive to keep, and Johnny went out and shot his horse; then a house nearby caught fire and Johnny ran into it and up the stairs and tried to save the clothes in the bureau drawers He was arrested for this and released only on condition that he get treatment. As young Laura ChanlerIong before she married Stanfords sonshe had had her coming-out party there, in 1904. Ms. White added that even the tamest books could be perceived as hurtful when they related to real people. Peter White said. 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. He said the animal 'looked depressed' and wanted to be put out of its misery.''. Rather than focusing on the houses, it focuses on the details that make the houses so wonderful, he says by phone from the front porch of Box Hill. (The names of some of my family members have been changed, to protect their privacy.). Lessard said that at the firm, White was tolerated because of his charmpowerful when he turned it onand his overflowing giftedness. There was, in any event, a feeling of numbers in the Red Cottage, of babies coming one after another, and, later, of knees and shins and feet of different sizes: I know my sisters bodies nearly as well as I know my own. To facilitate this, the married White kept a secret apartment at 22 West 24th Street, just off Madison Square Park. See more ideas about stanford white, stanford, mansions. Suzannah Lessard. In winter my father would go there twice a day to feed the furnace with coal. 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. Four spent time in art schools, but only Robert White made it a profession. It was little wonder that my grandfather had been unable to use them in a decorative scheme. 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. Some of his Long Island creations endure, including the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, site of the U.S. Open this year, and structures in St. James, Roslyn and Huntington. ''Regardless of how one constructs this tale,'' Ms. Lessard wrote, ''what happened that night was rape. 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. The pall of these accusations will fall over all of us.''. 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 . I grew up in the easternmost farmhouse, which we called the Red Cottage, with my parents and my five sisters. The ceiling was low. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. In this way, what happened at night was put out of consciousnessnot only his but ours. My grandfather, who was Stanfords only child, and an architect, toohe had joined his fathers firm as a young manwas often down there in the drive, tending to the rhododendrons with a special clipper on a pole. 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. Ms. Lessard did not respond to repeated requests to reply to the assertions of her relatives. Peter's oldest son, Benjamin, a doctor, married Madeleine Lord, a sculptor in cut metal with a long inheritance in the arts; and their daughter Genevieve Carter is now a painter in California. This had been the drive, once axially straight, but by this time the bushes had invaded the roadbed to a point where there was only this path snaking through. Pamela, Johnnys daughter, who was now in her twenties, was interested, too, and she joined me. With the contractor and the directors in rebellion, he prevailed upon his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt it for free while he himself picked up the considerable cost of materials and installation.

Jogaku Temple Ghost Of Tsushima, Eric Smith Georgetown, Articles S

stanford white descendants

stanford white descendants

Back to Blog