James, he would design Box Hill, a 20-acre summer retreat that served as a showplace for his grand aesthetic, and remains in the family today.įollowing a lavish wedding, the Whites took a six-month honeymoon in Europe and the Near East, purchasing copious antiques and architectural fragments for their own and clients’ collections. In 1884 he had wed 22-year-old Elizabeth “Bessie” Springs Smith, a descendant of the founder of Smithtown on Long Island’s north shore. White had concealed his sexual predation behind the veneer of being a “respectably” married man. ![]() Standing over the body, according to contemporaneous press reports, Thaw said: “I killed him because he ruined my wife.” During the show’s final number, “I Could Love a Million Girls,” Thaw approached White with a pistol and fired three shots at point-blank range, hitting White twice in the face and once in the left shoulder, killing the 52-year-old architect instantly. The night of the murder, White had been supping at nearby Martin’s restaurant, where he was spotted by fellow diners Thaw and Nesbit, who were also enjoying a meal before the premiere of Mam’zelle Champagne atop the Garden. Photo by Gertrude Käsebier/Library of Congress ![]() STAGE SIREN Evelyn Nesbit was abused by White even as he advanced her acting career (Demolished in 1925, it was the second of three Manhattan arenas to bear that name, and precursor to the current venue.) The killer was Harry Kendall Thaw, a Pittsburgh millionaire with a history of mental illness, who had never forgiven White for raping his new bride, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, five years earlier, when she was just 16. On the evening of June 26, 1906, the architect was gunned down in the open-air rooftop theater of the Beaux Arts Madison Square Garden. Between 18, his firm designed more than 900 of these - hotels, private clubs, libraries, museums, universities, churches, and even casinos. “White loved to create theatrical buildings with lavish ornament and interiors where important events could cause commotion,” Wilson tells Avenue. Morgan (now the Morgan Library), and the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park. ![]() Commissions for White’s robber baron clientele included a Madison Avenue mansion for J. “In his oeuvre, his appearance, and in his tabloid-worthy personal life, Stanny White projected color, and lots of it,” says architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, author of McKim, Mead & White Architects, a landmark volume on the firm. In any ranking of New York society scandals, the White affair is quite possibly the all-time number one. He was also a sexual predator who was murdered in public by the husband of one of his victims, during a musical theater performance at one of White’s own buildings, an earlier iteration of Madison Square Garden. His clients and friends were among the era’s elite, and many edifices raised under the banner of his firm, McKim, Mead & White, are still recognized as masterpieces of American architecture. During New York’s Gilded Age 120 years ago, Stanford White was the most famous architect in the city.
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