Dream builder - architect Stanford White - excerpt from 'Architect of Desire'

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1996 by Suzannah Lessard

A part of the heroic standard of the new merchant class in the Gilded Age was a great deal of extremely silly social life; innumerable costume extravaganzas and improbable theme parties. It was a world in which crushing volumes of wealth were normal. Even with his wife Bessie's money behind him, Stanford was only modestly endowed in this arena, but he was still its impresario. He was a maniac for parties, always available to advise, to decorate, to manage the festivities, as part of his calling to teach the new rich how to be rich in style.

There is gaiety in this picture, but there was heaviness and pretension in these festivities as well. A photograph of the period shows Stanford and Bessie as portly and aging (though he was in his mid-thirties and she was in her late twenties), decked out in the attire of a knight and a Byzantine princess to a point of near-immobility, literally: Stanford was in chain mail. (Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, for whom Stanford built a New York house modeled on the Doges' Palace in Venice, instructed Stanford to design a ballroom in which a person who was not well bred would feel uncomfortable.) And yet mixed in with this kind of stuffiness was behavior that was so bad that one feels embarrassed merely to repeat it. James Bennett, for whose New York Herald Stanford designed a superb building, also in a Venetian style, generated many tales of bad manners. One is that he urinated in the fireplace at his engagement party. His most memorable moment, however, was in a Greek monastery where, on being shown a lighted lamp and told that it had not been extinguished for a thousand years, he snuffed it out and said, "Well, now it has"

Imperial Excess

Stanford, both in his personality and in the causes he served, became merged with the onsweeping imperial mood of the Gilded Age. On Fifth Avenue, at 60th Street, is the Metropolitan Club, Stanford's magnificent monument to the egos of parvenu businessmen. This club was started by J.P. Morgan in a pique, because some of his newly made millionaire cronies were refused admission by the exclusive Union Club. Morgan told Stanford he wanted a "gentleman's club" and "damn the expense." Stanford obliged, though he nearly killed himself trying to get the job done on time; in the last weeks Morgan had made a bet he couldn't do it. He worked around the clock. Tripped up by strikes, he hired scabs on the day before the club opened to bring in mantels made by nonunion workers and other scabs to install them, with charwomen standing by to clean up the mess. Stanford was there himself, overseeing it all. And he was there in the morning too. On February 27,1894, having had no sleep, Stanford was standing in the reception line next to Morgan to greet the members.

The result of Stanford's obsessive work is a miracle. Despite the pretensions implicit in its scale and style, the Metropolitan Club is joyous and light. The courtyard is elliptical. The facade is white marble. The two-story entrance hall is faced in gray-veined marble, and a double staircase that ascends one vast wall is graced with scrolling leafy ironwork banisters to lacy effect. The stairs themselves are still carpeted in burgundy, as they were by Stanford. In some of its details, the club verges dangerously toward a silliness of excess. For example, in a painted relief on the ceiling of the ballroom, bare and amply bosomed angels look down from an elaborate garden. But instead of creating a feeling of glut, the relief has the air of architecture dressed up for make-believe. Large windows with deep insets yield a more serious architectonic pleasure. They look across Fifth Avenue to a statue of General Sherman by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. There is General Sherman riding high on his horse, sword outthrust, led by victory, the trees of Central Park providing a soft texture behind.