stanford white descendants
''Everyone in the family speaks of Stanford with great respect.'' 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. I had known that Box Hill was thin in its lightness and its insouciance, and even in that, structurally, it was a summer and not a winter house; but I hadnt known that it was thin in the sense of representing something that could not be paid for. Cite. 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 . ''We still have people coming to see where Stanford White is buried,'' the Rev. 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. It was the right place for Stanford, who moved in both worlds. The October trial ended in a hung jury, so the process was repeated the following year. He was also a family man and Evelyn knew there was little hope for marriage. You had to guess what and which he meant. There was my grandfather in his coffin, and the scent of the white flowers. The partners knew of people that were household names for me as a child, like Corita Kent. Stanford generally went after girls, but there may have been boys, too; it is hard to say. I feel she chose to focus exclusively on the unhealthy elements of the family.''. There, in place of the pendulum, ornamental objects from all over the house were falling in a slow, spiralling motion down the stairwell. 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 was also a notorious womanizer known for seducing teenage girls, preferably showgirls. At Box Hill, the density of decorative arts was much greater when he was alive, says Samuel. In it Ms. Lessardgives an account of a girl raised at a family homestead in St. James under the shadow of an ignoble ancestor and under the secrecy of incest, insanity and alcoholism. 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. Beatrice instantly, explosivelyalmost before Madeleine had finished speakingburst into tears, and then said that she, too, had been visited by our father in the night. Though we never thought of her this way, she was Mrs. Stanford White. ''But Ebenezer wouldn't budge. Just before Christmas in 1988, my sister Madeleine, who was living in Europe, called each of us sisters and asked that we meet by ourselves over the holidays. Looking back though, I was always thinking of space, fabrics and furniture placement. Stanford White And His Life Under Scrutiny Of Descendant, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/22/nyregion/stanford-white-and-his-life-under-scrutiny-of-descendant.html. It continued through the field in the same rising line until, balancing the Rond Point, it circled the fountain in front of the house. He shot one of mine. In Henry Hobson Richardson's office where he apprenticed, his lively eye and great gift for design became quickly apparent; and as partner with Charles McKim and William Rutherford Mead, he helped change the face of New York City and much of the country as it exploded in the aftermath of the Civil War. 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. Her son, Paul Jay is an artist working in many mediums-music, performance, writing, design, photography and sculptor-whose assemblage of beach flotsam is in this exhibit. Research genealogy for Stanford White of New York, USA, as well as other members of the White family, on Ancestry. He said the animal 'looked depressed' and wanted to be put out of its misery.''. It is not a history that the family agrees on. 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. The book switches among Ms. Lessard's memories, White's life and death and chapters about seemingly unrelated branches of the family. His charming personality and reputation for lavish living brought him wide public visibility, including among Americans who otherwise may not have known about his architecture or heard much about his exploits., Whites rise and fall are echoed in the tragedies of certain public figures in the 21st century. 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 . He couldnt afford to restore it to what it had been, so his solution was to truncate what was left of the columns and use them as high pedestals for large urns. I used to search for the story of Stanford and Larry and Bessie in the picture of this vigilfor the family story inside the public one, which was so big and yet also elusive. Mr. Rousseau, who was married to Stanford White's granddaughter Mary and who lives in the adjoining Three Village area, would not comment on the book. 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. 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. 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. Larry White's youngest daughter, Anne Octavia, became an architect and married fellow architect, Harry Buttrick. By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you're agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. 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. . Another of Alida's daughters, Jennie Lessard, is a Master Goldsmith and known jewelry designer, and a granddaughter is currently an architectural student. 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. . 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 recessive quality coexisted with the energy, the brashness. They had the fortune of working with the talented team at Commune Design before starting their own firm. Johnny himself had for many years continued to suffer from an infernal combination of vigor and ineffectuality. ''We acknowledge that some of his actions were not good. On the Sunday night before Stanford was shot, Laura was out at Box Hill having dinner with the family, and Larry was crankyhe didnt like this, and he didnt like thatand then at one point Stanford poked Laura in the ribs with his elbow and said to Larry, Well, you like this, dont you? The remark mortified Larry, who fell silent for the rest of the meal. Many of his designs endure: at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, All Souls Episcopal Church in Stony Brook, the Nathan Hale memorial in Huntington and houses in St. James, including his own. 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. Those with an asterisk by their name (*) are passengers who died at Sea. Detailed hand-written notes describe the places that certain objects have traveled to . His wife, Laura Chanler White, was a serious painter, trained at the Academie Julien in Paris. There are a lot of us. '', ''Suzannah is talented,'' Claire White said. 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. Not only was his health nearly destroyed by his way of life, but he was close to broke. Her parents had tossed her a challengea challenge that she roundly deserved for having such grandiose ideas. There was a cloistered part of our life in the Red Cottage that didnt show up on our mental blueprint of the house. He and his wife, Laura Chanler White, had eight children, most of whom spend at least part of the year on or near the. I am related to Sally Ann White.She was born 15 Apr 1833 in Jefferson County,Ny. . The emotion scared me. ''I don't know if they are. You can seealmost feelthe artist in Stanford in photographs of him as a young man, standing with his legs apart in a studio, for example, his hair sticking up, all of him charged with a kind of straight-up energy; he is dressed plainly, in a rough suit and sturdy shoes. ''Regardless of how one constructs this tale,'' Ms. Lessard wrote, ''what happened that night was rape. view all Richard Mansfield White's Timeline. Early Life. The strength of this perception disrupted a spell. 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. She had not grown up on the Place, and she was only proud of her great-grandfather, eager to honor him for his achievement and to bask in the reflection of his fame. 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. 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. 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. Then I learned that the flowers had been sent by Cornelia Otis Skinner, but for some reason my impression of them did not change: they still seemed lovely to me. 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. Pamela flew toward this pretty palace, her hands spread flat, her strawberry-blond hair bouncing. Even when she told this story in old age, my grandmother was grateful to Stanford for saving her. 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. My father was a person of clefs and measures, sharps and flats, and of discipline and boundariesespecially the boundaries between children and adults. Samuel G. White, Stanford White's great-grandson, is currently the chair of Save Gould Memorial Library, which is studying the conditions in the 116-year-old building along with the. 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 remember the concentration on his face as he lifted the silver trumpet to his lips. 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. My grandmother wrote her a note disinviting her to a family wedding; it was clear that the family would never speak to Cornelia Otis Skinner again. 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 drive was romantic, but the Rond Point was drearyeven distraught-seeming. Martha was born circa 1833, in Tennessee, United States. But he did a lot of good things, too. I gathered that there had been a sexual scandal, and that a man called Harry K. Thaw, who later became Evelyn Nesbits husband, had shot Stanford. Stanford White's New York. . Suzannah Lessard. ''I am not saying that I believe Suzannah's experiences are true or not,'' Ms. White said. On the night that Stanford was shot, my grandfather went home to the family house on Gramercy Park, and it was there that he learned of his fathers deathfrom reporters, who were lying in wait near the front door. Those disclosures are Ms. Lessard's allegations that her father, a music professor and composer whom she calls Frank Rousseau in the book, molested her and her five sisters throughout her childhood. Larry White's oldest son, Peter, had eleven children, all of whom grew up in Box Hill, which their father inherited and which his son Daniel has restored. 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. 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. 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. 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. As I watched Pamela walk toward me across the mosaic floor, the richness of the ochre marble had a depth of sadness that I hadnt seen before. Mr. Vanderbilt wrote the firm placing the sum of $50,000 at the disposal of Stanford White to purchase articles of furniture and architectural salvage obtained in Europe. 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. Allerton, IsaacSeparatist, 34. Stanford White (November 9, 1853 - June 25, 1906) was an American architect. Suzanne Nicolas, was a sculptor. He was hired by Astors, Vanderbilts, and J.P. Morgan. . 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. We said it wasnt nothing, and she, in her turn, burst explosively into tears. Usually, Ms. Lessard said, the incest occurred when the male relative had been drinking heavily. . The experiences that I was acknowledging were, in contrast, outside any sense of law or institution, without elegance or aesthetic. We students would snicker about the pink marble he had used to refinish the space: it embarrassed us, I think; it was so unrestrainedly sensuous, so soft-seeming, with its alternately swirling and mottled grain, that it almost overwhelmed the architectonic characteristics of the hall. The afterlife of White's collection is vividly recorded in a scrapbook kept by his family and scanned for The Frick Collection/ Frick Art Reference Library Archives. All of our lives changed drastically within the year. Youd need a computer to create it today.. 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 . I was lucky enough to interview Genevieve White Carter, one of the talented descendants of the iconic architect Stanford White. But I think it was a displaced body memory, because, as I began to come to terms with my childhood, instead of seeing the silent explosion of the plane in the sky I would experience a sense of interior exploding, an inchoate overload of mixed feelings, including rageagain, a wish to kick viciouslyand all this in chaos, as if blowing out a nervous system too small-gauged to contain it. Richardson died in 1876, and just a few years later, Stanford was asked to renovate the house by Shermans new wife, who wanted its interiors to be more formal. Part of HuffPost Home & Living. Founder of NES CREATIVE and NES FILMS. The owner let me know he would help me in anyway in replicating the peacock wallpaper as it was intricate and rare. Then notes would roll through the house and up the stairs and out the windows, and we would all be awash in it. When she was fifteen he had got into her bed and lain on top of herand then, after a time, had gone away. He was always fussing, clipping, arranging: he was good at creating spotsa column in a sun-catch, a statue among pines on a hill. Its all about texture., When it came to the interiors, Stanford was a compulsive purchaser whose appetite for beauty respected no borders, Samuel writes. But White had hung up the receiver seconds before, meaning that the lightning bolt merely raced inches from his chest. This is my favorite part of what we do. 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. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Ms. Lessard wrote at length about Archie Chanler's stay in an asylum and Willie Chanler's habit of throwing his wood leg at waiters to get their attention. There were also steep debts to jewellers and florists. After I woke up, I recognized that the scene had about it an atmosphere of serene catastrophe which was profoundly familiar. . From the outside, it was plain and unspectacular. Nordiska Kompaniet dining chairs, 1950, offered by MY MODERN. We have both been pleasantly surprised at how well we enjoy working together. The family circled the wagons against whatever repercussions might provoke further feelings in my grandfather. He is known for the murder of architect Stanford White at Madison Square Garden in 1906. Not really. We had all, in a sense, become somnambulists. Samuel believes the elaborate decorations including marble column capitals, intricately carved wood and embossed-leather panels were all executed in the U.S. This was the period when the federal governments main source of income was tariffs, and it was expensive to bring things over from Europe, he says. All rights reserved. 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. I could snicker about the nuns in the pink marble with my friends as if I had no association with it, without a sense of duplicity. As The Gilded Age opens, horse-drawn carriages transport European decorative treasuresfurniture, tapestries, statuaryto the still-under-scaffolding white limestone mansion architect Stanford. No more stories to load; check out The Study. By Natalie Shirinian , Contributor Filmmaker, writer, creative. 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 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. . His signature is a breezy warmth, a land of grace, a feeling of goodnesskindness in a measurement, as my mother has put it. He was lean and fit, and his room on the top floor of Box Hill was manly and sane, with a sleigh bed, a Navajo rug, a jackknife on the bureau, and a gun leaning in the corner. (The bushes had also slid down a bank into the woods on one side, in a dissolute-looking way.) She laughed, but her feelingsgasping fear, followed by reliefwere still fresh. The Tiffany and Company Building is the landmarked former home of the Tiffany and Company store at 401 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York City, New York. The gilded and coffered ceiling inside the bank had a skylight at its center, with panes of deep-yellow glass. 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. 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. The suggestion itself was revolutionary; indeed, in the past the prospect would have generated such stress and resistance that the plan would have fallen apart. It was partly because of public perceptions of the scandal surrounding his murder, and partly because of what the public never knew. Nancy Bilyeau, a former staff editor at InStyle, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, has written a thriller set in the 18th century art and porcelain world titled 'The Blue.' By the time Laura Chanler saw Stanford in his little red car, there was a penumbra of depravity surrounding the celebrated architect. Important Projects The architectural firm McKim, Mead, & White designed relaxed summer homes, many in the Shingle Style, and grand public buildings in the more ornate Renaissance Revival and Beaux Arts styles. 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. Peter White said Ms. Lessard had sent copies of the book to every family member. The central feature of the faade was a pediment containing statuary, with a big clock in the middle and a frieze running underneath, the whole supported by four massive Corinthian columns. Dial Press, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978--385-31445-9. He would laugh at the fact thatSuzannah, Beatrice, Felicity, Madeleine, Isabella, and Gertrudewe had all turned out to be girls. 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. Random acts of kindness, senseless acts of beauty. . Genevieve is one half of Carter Design (her husband Cy Carter being the other talented half), Cy and Genevieve have been working both independently and together on interior design projects for the past decade all over the country. There was also a cluster of barns designed by Stanford, along with some barns and farmhouses from earlier times. What was it like working with Commune Design?Working at Commune was fantastic. She identified with aboriginal peoplesour local Indians, the Setaukets, for example, who had led a woebegone life of subsistence on clams. There was also a bed in the studio; some interludes there were more intimate than others. It was clear that sexual violation (mercifully, of a limited sort) had been a part of our life in the Red Cottage. Ms. Lessard describes the eight Chanler siblings who were orphaned when the oldest was 13. Stanfords best work emerges out of combinations of materials rather than structural form, and in the mysteries of proportions, particularly the proportions of interior rooms: the feeling of a doorway as one passes through, the effect of the size, placement, and setting of a window as one looks out. The house is right near the Long Island Sound, and there are wonderful beach pebbles that really capture the light, says Samuel. A five-minute visit from him left you limp with the reaction from the strain of trying to follow his thought as his fingers flew. The windows are framed in larger pebbles. '', A family friend, Leighton H. Coleman 3d, said: ''I think she has a right to interpret her own family history, and every generation interprets the ones before differently. The piano room had a wavy wooden floor that pitched down, and the plaster walls were wavy, too. I might, for example, remember an incident yet have no feeling about it, or I might simply seal it off in the cloisternot remember it at all. 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 . Thus there was hardly a spot on the Place in which Stanford was not implicitly present. She seeks to explore the meaning for his descendants of this man's violent end and his voracious appetite for . I saw how far the mire extended, how deep it was, how impossible escape was for me. A consensus appears to agree that the book is well written. '', To Ms. White, the inclusion of the affair in a book meant to be a memoir seems contrived, an attempt to use a forebear's notoriety. In some ways his activities dont even seem to be sexual in the usual sense. At the time that my grandmother saw Stanford out the parlor window of her parents house, he had already built many of the citys landmarks; he had also designed palaces for the Gilded Age rich and had expanded and refurbished Jeffersons campus at the University of Virginia. She passed out to find herself naked in bed next to a naked Stanford White. I saw them, in a sense, for the first time. Quite suddenly, I had a powerful impression of my grandfathers presence, and I was carried back to the front hall of Box Hill as it had been when I was a child. Also in attendance was celebrity Stanford White, the venue's architect, and former . Cy was raised in a ranching family where the family works together and this was our template for running a design business together. You have quite the background, tell us about your relationship to Stanford White?Stanford White was my Great Great Grandfather.
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