She was a friend of my grandfather, a neighbor, and a lady, and she had loved my great-grandmother. In 1875, Richardson built his first great shingle-style house, in Newport, for the banker William Watts Sherman. My experiences, again in contrast, were largely unarticulated and unstructured. 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. 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. You had to guess what and which he meant. His father, Richard Grant White, was a cranky bohemian who fancied himself an English gentleman yet was blackballed from the Century Club and was chronically broke and in debt, who had studied to be a doctor and also passed the bar but was, in practice, a music critic, a Shakespearean scholar, a linguist, a lecturer, a cultural gadfly, a sonneteer and an employee of the Custom House, wrote Suzannah Lessard, the great-granddaughter of Stanford White in her bestseller The Architect of Desire. She passed out to find herself naked in bed next to a naked Stanford White. On one occasion White was completing business calls at the community telephone in the store when a lightning storm raged and hit the telephone wires. Founder of NES CREATIVE and NES FILMS. Stanford White, one of many characters in HBO's new series The Gilded Age, was part of a deadly love triangle involving model Evelyn Nesbit and coal and railroad scion Harry Kendall Thaw. For a long time, when I tried to move past this point in my memory, what came to my mind was a picture, observed without emotion, of an airplane exploding in air, and body parts flying. There was a kind of involuntary combustion in the way our terse factual statements shot out, accompanied by explosions of tears. (The bushes had also slid down a bank into the woods on one side, in a dissolute-looking way.) On what he calls the Sheraton-style sideboard of no particular importance are a bronze fish from a fountain Stanford designed for Box Hill and a cast of a 16th-century Florentine bust. Repeated freezing and thawing Box Hill had no heating system until 1938 caused the paint on the anaglypta to develop a crackle finish. In this way, what happened at night was put out of consciousnessnot only his but ours. But Stanfords most famous building, and the one that most precisely reflected his extravagance and his ebullience, was Madison Square Garden, which stood at Twenty-sixth Street near where Fifth Avenue and Broadwayor high society and caf societycrossed. ''She layers them one over the other. 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. . . Random acts of kindness, senseless acts of beauty. ''We have a large family, not all of whom are inured to publicity,'' Ms. White said. . It was as if the crash had already happened. . The storekeeper, Ebenezer Smith, would run out with White's mail and a few of his favorite cigars, rather than force the important man to dismount. The gilded and coffered ceiling inside the bank had a skylight at its center, with panes of deep-yellow glass. At this point we each have over a decade of knowledge or paint colors, fabrics and materials that are great and can apply them. 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. 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. I calculated that my grandfather would have been thirty-one at the time. My father was a person of clefs and measures, sharps and flats, and of discipline and boundariesespecially the boundaries between children and adults. What she found, however, was a mechanical progression of sexual compulsion that gradually destroyed her liking for Stanford and, with it, her will to continue. I cannot be quite sure what happened next, but as I go through this part of the vision I feelin the presentan uncontrollable impulse to kick, and what I discern through my wincing and kicking feelings is that my father reached up and poked me between my legs. Roslyn Church in Roslyn was his last architectural effort before his death in 1906. 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. . 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. Stanford White's investments in art and antiques, destined for eager clients were by far more successful than his speculation in the stock market. 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. The car was driven by a chauffeur, but Stanford was in the front seat, leaning forward as if to make the car go faster. . The passage describes elaborate stag parties and, of course, the well-known sculpture of Diana, said to be modeled after Miss Nesbit. 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. My father was tall and lanky, with a big head, a mischievous, catlike expression, and receding curly dark hair. However, if they are, they should be dealt with inside the family forum, not in the public eye like so much dirty laundry.''. 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. I was ten at the time the movie was released, and it was the first I had heard of sexual complications having to do with the murderit may have been the first Id heard of the murder at all. 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". 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. ''There were some passages in 'Architect of Desire' that I found very nice,'' Peter White said. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. All rights reserved. Pamela, Johnnys daughter, who was now in her twenties, was interested, too, and she joined me. I needed to retreat from it into a kind of feigned innocence, to be a barefoot child outdoors. 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. In keeping with this aesthetic, my husband and I decided to move an old house to the Place rather than build a new one. Early Life. By Tiffani Sherman. Jul 14, 2013 - Explore atara's board "stanford white", followed by 3,227 people on Pinterest. 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. It was typical of my grandmother to guess the provenance of the fragments right off like thatto have facts about Stanford at her fingertips. When he isnt helping his brother or working at his longtime firm, PBDW Architects (formerly Platt Byard Dovell White), Samuel often writes about his famous forebear one of whose structures, the Players Club on Gramercy Park South, he can see from his own Manhattan apartment. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. His wife, Laura Chanler White, was a serious painter, trained at the Academie Julien in Paris. January 3, 2021 By 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. He was a grandson of the architect Stanford White . 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 In October, Thaw was tried for murder, and the defense sought sympathy for him by portraying Stanford as someone whose morals were so bad that he deserved to be shot. This was a dirt-floored cellar, walled with a foundation of boulders cemented together, and it was gloomy, with cobwebs and mildew and a moldy smell of old earth. Several years after the house was completed, my grandmother died, at the age of ninety-six. You have quite the background, tell us about your relationship to Stanford White?Stanford White was my Great Great Grandfather. Four spent time in art schools, but only Robert White made it a profession. Salas O'Brien announced today that Raleigh-based engineering firm Stanford White has joined the company, creating a combined firm of 35 offices with more than 825 team members, 190 registered professionals and clients including the most significant companies, institutions and government agencies in the United States. Johnny himself had for many years continued to suffer from an infernal combination of vigor and ineffectuality. The Garden opened in 1890, a joyously imperial edifice of yellow brick and white terra-cotta tile. ''I am not saying that I believe Suzannah's experiences are true or not,'' Ms. White said. He suffered from Brights disease, his liver was in terrible shape, and he had incipient tuberculosis. She was merry, but there was also something sad about hersomething passive, a kind of stubborn innocence, as though she were a very large girl. Stanford figures just lightly as a friend to the children and later the business partner of Archie and Wintie, the two oldest orphas. White would have been dead within the year if not murdered. Hyperthyroidism could explain the architect's hyperactivity, nervousness and even ''fat puffiness,'' as Ms. Lessard wrote. 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. 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.