The milieu of my mothers family, into which I was born, was embodied in our environment: sixty acres of land on the North Shore of Long Island which we called the Place. Aline Saarinen, an art historian and the wife of Eero Saarinen, was among those who tried: her papers, left to the Smithsonian, make clear what happened in her case. 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. Lawrence Grant White (September 26, 1887 - September 8, 1956) was an American architect, a partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, co-founded by his father Stanford White, and for five years the president of the National Academy of Design. ''We acknowledge that some of his actions were not good. Usually, Ms. Lessard said, the incest occurred when the male relative had been drinking heavily. He suffered from Brights disease, his liver was in terrible shape, and he had incipient tuberculosis. This is what was never done in the family. Before she died, in 1944, Helen had it disassembled and stored in crates. . Her parents had tossed her a challengea challenge that she roundly deserved for having such grandiose ideas. 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. Even his death in 1906 at the hands of Harry K. Thaw, husband of his former lover, Evelyn Nesbit, and the sensational trial in which Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity has been overtaken in notoriety by the O. J. Simpson case. The parlor was the only part of the house that had a cellar underneath. The abundance of gold leaf in this room makes it feel very special, Samuel says. Along with working on projects they have a line of wallpaper which includes their Tumbleweed collection inspired by the tumbleweeds that blow across the west. To facilitate this, the married White kept a secret apartment at 22 West 24th Street, just off Madison Square Park. White in fact had no formal architectural training, which was not that unusual for the 19th century. Stanford was fifty years old when Laura met him, and she was sixteen, but he had befriended her in her own right, making a connection with her that remained vivid to her for the rest of her life. ''Basically,'' Ms. White added, ''I think Suzannah is a polemicist. Behind the columns were four windows, one and a half stories high, set in complex, protruding frames, which cast deep shadows and created a dramatically inflected surface. Will There Be a Gossip Girl Reboot Season Two? 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. The emotion scared me. Stanford was shot in 1906, and I was born nearly forty years later, in 1944. He designed Rosecliff and several other houses in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Frederick Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York. One of my mothers other brothers, Johnny, who had served in the Second World War on some ships that had gone down in the Pacific, was also around. 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.. 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. Another writer, Claire Nicolas White, Ms. Lessard's aunt by marriage, said the book was dangerous in many ways. Yawning underneath the Gilded Age veneer was a canyon of debts. My experiences, again in contrast, were largely unarticulated and unstructured. It ought to be only aesthetic. 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. The wooden lions are believed to be Venetian. 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. When he ordered champagne, there would be three deliveries, at leastone to his home, one to the Tower, and one to a hideawayand, of course, he had to pay rent on his various retreats. But there I am, on Great-Grandma Whites lap; there we are taking a walk, her large hand holding mine. Word of this dinner reached the newspapers, and the publicity dogged Stanford. A spinning wheel, Samuel says, was the King familys way of signaling that weve been around a long time that is, a symbol of old money. With thirty years separating us, we were the oldest and the youngest of Stanfords great-granddaughters, and we both had red hair, as Stanford did, though mine was partly gray by this time, and Pamelas was strawberry blond, quite unlike Stanfords chestnut. She was a handsome, big-boned woman with thick white hair parted to one side. Exclusive: How HBO Almost Lost Succession, At the 'White Lotus' Premiere with Beatrice Grann. 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. He was a gifted and prolific sculptor in bronze, wood and clay, a master at depicting classical and religious figures in an age when the palms went to the abstractionists. ''For one thing, I simply don't think he had the time to prey on hundreds of young girls, and besides, I don't doubt that in his way he loved Evelyn. A brief family narrative written by Cynthia Jay "THE LIVELY EYE: five generations of a family in the Arts". It was unsafe safetysomething similar to the mood of serene catastrophe in my dream. Random acts of kindness, senseless acts of beauty. The drive cut through a rise here, which was wooded on the northern side; on the other side there was a swaying, gently descending pasture. . Thus there was hardly a spot on the Place in which Stanford was not implicitly present. At the end of our day in the city, Pamela and I drove up to Newport to have a look at the Gilded Age palaces Stanford had built thereprincipally Rosecliff, the white confection that he designed for the society matron Tessie Oelrichs. 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. Jake Warga. Rememberson, 5. Like so many hallmarks of American aesthetics, the shingled residences of architecture firm Ike Kligerman Barkley are casual, individualistic and worthy of being passed on for generations. Yet there is support for the book. The former owner of the St. James General Store, Andy Havrisko, recalled an anecdote that the previous owner had told him. The tumbleweed repeated is an actual tumbleweed from the HC Cattle Company belonging to Cy's family ranch. If you couldnt afford leather, you would use lincrusta [a wallcovering made by spreading a paste of linseed oil and wood flour onto a paper base], and if you wanted something even less expensive, you used anaglypta, which is paper pressed to look like paneling. Stanford chose anaglypta. Mary Norriswife, 30. A clock with bronze zodiac figures by the great sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens graces a marble wall in the main stairway, which was part of Villards own residence. Then, when trust had built up, he would have sex with her, and not long afterward he would dump her. In 1903, he covered the entire building in pebble dash (rocks pressed into mortar). Initially, I was able to postpone the worst of the violations, which was the closing off of the Rhododendron Drive. In 1906, White was shot and killed by the mentally unstable millionaire . Peter White said. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. It was daytime, and from the sense of my length and skinniness in the bed I would guess that I was about six. 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. Even without the connection to Stanford, how amusinghow disturbingthe contrast was between that voluptuary pink and the nuns who ran the college, gliding back and forth in their floor-length black habits, their faces narrowed by starched white bonnets, their blue-veined hands transparent against the gold rings that symbolized their marriage to Christ. A bolt raced down the line, blew up the phone and shot out the front of the store to strike three men on the porch. Looking back though, I was always thinking of space, fabrics and furniture placement. 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. White's most significant contribution to New York City and American architecture was vision, says Bach. Stanford White helped add to it in 1895. 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. There, at the bottom of the stairs, were the life-size wooden Baroque lions: my grandfather was always shooing us children off when we sat on them, because we might break their backward-curling tails, which we did. This book turns the telescope around. 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. 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. 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. Within the mute, somatic realm where the explosion took place, I intuitively understood that with that explosion, whatever it was (and it was something, it was not nothing), a long, slow shattering was initiated, which had extended outward through the years, fracturing both the little things in my lifea household task, a wish to read a book from start to finishand the large. By the time Laura Chanler saw Stanford in his little red car, there was a penumbra of depravity surrounding the celebrated architect. In the library, Stanford tied the elements together with a datum a continuous line 18 inches below the ceiling. Stanford often bought fragments of genuine antiques and had them restored by local stone carvers; an example is Box Hills 18th-century Italian fireplace, whose right-hand figure is a reproduction. He was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where his four children absorbed the life of the ancient stones. His son Christian, with the genes of four grandparents in the arts, has made his name as a painter of the Long Island landscapes he knows so well. (A small funeral was held instead at the Episcopal church near Box Hill.) And yet, as I learned when I began to excavate the family story, the most curious feature of Stanfords posthumous life in the public eye was that while he remained well known (for a long period, more for the circumstances of his murder than for his architecture), the biographers who sought to dig deep into his life inevitably faltered. I transferred my feelings of sadness about Johnny to his field; there was something superb about it in the echt way that Johnny was superb. She was spontaneous, and her moods had a global quality. ''Is Suzannah blaming the alleged acts of incest by her father and uncle that came later on some latent effect of Stanford's own sexual debauchery or on the Chanlers' insanity?''. The papers identified Thaws wife as the former Evelyn Nesbit, whom Stanford White had put on the stage when she was in her teens; and even discounting for sensationalism, it became evident that Stanford had loved if not a thousand, perhaps a hundred girls. I keep a painting studio in our garage and paint whenever I get a chance. In contrast, my mother was a person of the inspiration of the moment, and of a mysticism that did not recognize borders or limits. Experiences of insolvency were not unfamiliar on the Place in my timewe in the Red Cottage, in some ways, led a threadbare existencebut the idea was firmly established in my mind that there had been sound, solid money at one point, and sounder and solider the farther back one went. This work, which had taken its author ten years to research and write, coherently documented the course of Stanfords compulsions as well as his professional achievements. At the piano my father seemed supernally calm. 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. She wanted to talk to us about our childhood, she said. 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. I calculated that my grandfather would have been thirty-one at the time. One cousin, from the Emmett family, also of established Long Island ancestry, related to the Whites through the Chanler line, said: ''I don't doubt that what Suzannah has written is true. On the new HBO series, he fares betterso far. The details of Nesbits trauma were coaxed from her at court to help build a defense for her mentally unstable husband. My great Aunt Cynthia Jay put together an art show called the "Lively Eye" that included descendants of Stanford White. He and his wife, Laura Chanler White, had eight children, most of whom spend at least part of the year on or near the. There was also a cluster of barns designed by Stanford, along with some barns and farmhouses from earlier times. A prime example is New York Citys Villard Houses, a complex of five townhouses that appears from the outside to be a single great palazzo. I felt I had found my design tribe when I started to work there. This was an architecture of stability and security, of lawfulness, of institutional justice. For a more complete view of this lecture, check out Stanford White Architect, authored by Samuel White and his wife Elizabeth White. 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. I guess people who still know him associate him with New York.''. The piano was a Steinway parlor grand that had been Stanford Whites and had come from Box Hill, but its importance in the household stemmed not from its provenance or its sheer size but from the importance of music in our family life. He was a grandson of the architect Stanford White . On Grand Street, we came upon the monumental neoclassical faade of the Bowery Savings Bank, which was designed by Stanford in 1892. Its mirrored walls were topped with a cornice of basket-weave metal sporting delicate porcelain roses. 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. . The White family strove to conceal what became generally regarded as a blemish on the White family name. If it hadnt been in storage, it would probably have been cut up when they installed air-conditioning., These chairs combine tradition and modernity in a single elegant package, and they look extremely comfortable as well., If ever a chair said, Take a seat, this is it., I like the high-low quality of this table vernacular form with very stylish legs., I have always liked this classic pattern. My father found it difficult to go to movies, because of soundtracks, or to shops where Muzak played. Even after the lobotomy Johnny could be frightening. 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 (Image credit: Stanford University Archives) When railroad magnate and former California Gov. But hers is not necessarily the final judgment. Quite ordinary sounds hurt thema radio on the beach, for example, or a truck rattling on the road, or we children getting raucous. After the death of her father left her family destitute, Nesbit was able to make money as an artist's model starting around the age of 14. 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. 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 . Tiffany and Company Building. 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. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. 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. It was a kind of cave, where an adult could stand, where the light was colorless and gray, and there, sunk in the mulch and dulled by nearly a century of sediment, were eight fragments: four lions; two medallions, one of them with a fishlike creature embossed in the center, the other with a flower; and two leafy marble formations in an Ionic motif. As Bach says, His extravagant lifestyle, and lack of discretion or concern for those who were impacted by his actions, despite producing outstanding work, has much in common with some of the high profile, publicity-seeking business and artistic innovators who exploit media attention today.. 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. There, in my great-grandfathers charmed hall, the symmetries and harmonies that were the underpinnings of our sense of family blessedness seemed to slip and become skewed and thin, like a stage set gone awry. 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. 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". He outfitted the space with gold-leafed wooden panels, several carved into fish scales, one of his favorite motifs. 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. A testament to a true architectural legend. I know well the spot on the second-floor landing at Box Hill where my grandfather sat outside his mothers door, waiting for her to wake. 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. It was like that on the Place: the frightening aspect of things didnt fully register. Laying bare the lifestyle of Whiteby no means alone in his womanizing, heavy drinking, and overspendinghelped usher in the twilight of the Gilded Age. Yet architecture pervades the family. The tower had seven stories, and then there was an upper loggia, out of which a winding staircase led up to a chamber. Stanford figures just lightly as a friend to the children and later the business partner of Archie and Wintie, the two oldest orphas. His work on the University of Virginia is considered one of his few misfires. Research genealogy for Stanford White of New York, USA, as well as other members of the White family, on Ancestry. Some family members said Ms. Lessard had unfairly relied on newspaper reports of the trial, which attacked White, and not Thaw. One of Stanfords later works, this Newport mansion was commissioned in 1899 by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a Nevada silver heiress, as a setting for elaborate parties. Then notes would roll through the house and up the stairs and out the windows, and we would all be awash in it. The main arena could accommodate fourteen thousand people, had a floor that could be flooded for aquatic spectacles, was bright with hundreds of electric lights (still a novelty in those days), and had a huge skylight that could be opened to the air. So when Harry Thaw, the scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh family,. 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. ''I found over 20 factual errors in the chapter about the Chanler family,'' said J. Winthrop Aldrich, a Chanler cousin and an owner of Rokeby. The architect/designer/artist genes are very strong in the White Family as well as the attraction to others in the arts. After befriending her and her mother as a supposed benefactor, White paid for the mother to visit relatives out of town and then insisted Evelyn, 16, drink a great deal of champagne, which may have been drugged as well. 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. 3 East 72 nd Street. I saw that underneath his latency on the Place there was only the emptiness of abdication, and understanding this restored the full register of feelingstruncated until nowengendered by my complex childhood world. He didnt get there until the wee hours of the morning, however, and decided not to wake her. Great-great-grandchildren of John Jacob Astor, the youngsters lived without the presence of grown-ups at the 500-acre Beaux-Arts Rokeby in Barrytown. He was at home with music and the Steinway in a way that he was not at home with his girls. In some ways his activities dont even seem to be sexual in the usual sense. Pamela flew toward this pretty palace, her hands spread flat, her strawberry-blond hair bouncing. You have quite the background, tell us about your relationship to Stanford White?Stanford White was my Great Great Grandfather. Peter White said he had been mistaken by a former classmate as the uncle identified as Bobby. During the period when Stanford became involved with Evelyn Nesbit, for example, he appears to have been fighting off a breach-of-promise suit by the young actress who had introduced Evelyn to him in the first place. Stanford White is Genevieve's Great Great Grandfather, which will leads us into our interview. 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. For more information, see www.nancybilyeau.com. Stanford White first studied as a painter. Stanford White in MyHeritage family trees (Martin Web Site) view all Immediate Family Evelyn Nesbit ex-partner Elizabeth Springs Smith wife Lawrence Grant White son Alexina Black White mother Richard Grant White father Richard Mansfield White brother Russell William Thaw ex-partner's son Gene Barrymore ex-partner's son About Stanford White We spent the night, and the next morning was beautiful and summery. The passage describes elaborate stag parties and, of course, the well-known sculpture of Diana, said to be modeled after Miss Nesbit. That is the most information I can find on the family. If she was sad, there was no space in which to stand outside her sadness. Bartholomewson, 7. Often he would have a line redrawn many, many times. 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. 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 . . But other shocks were revealed. 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). A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction. The historic home on Deforest Road in the Hamptons is now available for . The principal focus of the family talk, furthermore, was that my beloved great-grandmother Bessie, who had recently died, was also portrayed in the movie, and that the producers had waited for her death so that she couldnt sue them about the lies. 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 . 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. A Family Narrative Stanford White, whose parents were involved with literature and music, instead grew up wishing to paint, but was persuaded by John La Farge that, as that was a perilous way to support oneself, he should rather choose architecture. . It was said of Johnny after the war that he was crazy, but the word didnt seem to mean much. Stanford designed every detail of his Palace of Delight, as it was called, right down to the ushers orange swallowtail coats with red waistcoats and silver buttons. Challenged, he would get out a sketchbook and do thumbnails of all that he had walked by so quickly. Ms. White added that even the tamest books could be perceived as hurtful when they related to real people. Several years after the house was completed, my grandmother died, at the age of ninety-six. Its not true that Stanford was never mentioned. I felt connected to my sistersa true familial connectedness. Stanford White. ''I thought,'' Peter White said, ''there was information about Stanford White in the book -- his thoughts, his intentions, his private moments -- that none of us could claim to know, least of all Suzannah, who was born 38 years after his death.''. 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. In the late seventies, when I was in my thirties and living in New York City, my mother called from the Red Cottage to tell me that she had found some architectural fragments under a rhododendron bush in the Rond Point. It was not merely that my old sense of safety was undercut by my new understanding; rather, I recognized that what I had taken for safety was in truth something else. It remains to be seen what paths in the arts the sixth generation will follow. Larry White's daughter Alida White Hare has also shared and passed on the genes. 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. He was, however, rarely mentioned in the family. Charley hardly ever drew; instead, he would talk his way through a design, instructing a draftsman to draw a line and then, after much thought, telling him to erase it and draw it somewhere else. I obtained it from another family member. There, in place of the pendulum, ornamental objects from all over the house were falling in a slow, spiralling motion down the stairwell. Another of Alida's daughters, Jennie Lessard, is a Master Goldsmith and known jewelry designer, and a granddaughter is currently an architectural student. I saw them, in a sense, for the first time. 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. 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. view all Richard Mansfield White's Timeline. He shot one of mine. What was it like working with Commune Design?Working at Commune was fantastic.
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