Stanford White's New York. - book reviews

National Review, June 21, 1993 by David Klinghoffer

Stanford White's New York, by David Garrard Lowe (Doubleday, 339 pp,, $45)

JUST TO look at the photos in this biography is to recall a lost civilization--a glorious Atlantis in black and white. Stanford White, of the firm McKim, Mead & White, was the pre-eminent architect of the years preceding the turn of the century, and did more than any other man to transform New York City from Edith Wharton's dowdy brownstone cemetery to a Beaux Arts metropolis full of terracotta and marble palaces, including the old Madison Square Garden, the now vanished Herald building, and the extinct Fifth Avenue mansions of the Whitney, Pulitzer, and Vanderbilt families. Mr. Lowe, a distinguished architectural historian, has written a breezy yet learned, charming, and wonderfully evocative portrait. The pleasure of the book, though, is spiked by the reader's awareness that most of White's best work has been torn down: the model of the decline of the American city. The people of Stanford White's era walked around with their eyes wide open, while many of us do so half asleep. That is the only explanation I can think of for the bland indifference that has greeted the destruction of these astonishingly beautiful buildings. Though images of the time come down to us in black and white, it seems that White and his contemporaries were the ones, and not us, who lived in full color. They even died more colorfully back then. White himself ended his career in 1906 atop Madison Square Garden, shot to death by the jealous ex-husband of a young woman with whom he had carried on an affair.