Stanford White PDF
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DA CAPO PRESS SERIES IN ARCHITECTURE AND DECORATIVE ART General Editor: ADOLF K. PLACZEK A very Librarian, Columbia Univers ity Volume 39 STANFORD WHITE STANFORD WHITE ?3y CHARLES C. BALDWIN DA CAPO PRESS • NEW YORK • 1971 A Da Capo Press Reprint Edition ISBN- 13 :978-1-4684-6224-1 e-ISBN- 13 :978-1-4684-6222-7 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4684-6222-7 This Da Capo Press edition of Stanford White is an unabridged republication of the first edition published in New York in 1931. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-150512 SBN 306-70138-3 Copyright, 1931, by Charles C. Baldwin Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1931 Published by Da Capo Press, Inc. A Subsidiary of Plenum Publishing Corporation 227 West 17th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011 All Rights Reserved STANFORD WHITE STANFORD WHITE 13y CHARLES C. BALDWIN With Illustrations DODD, MEAD & COMPANY NEW YORK 1931 COPYRIGHT, 1931 By CHARLES C. BALDWIN ALL BIGHTS RESERVED NO PART OJ' THIS BOOK KAY BE REPRODUOED IN ANY J'OP WITHOUT PERKISSION IN WRITING rROK THE AUTHOR paINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AKERICA BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON. N. Y. To Judy-on her birthday August 1, 1931 FOREWORD Richard Harding Davis used to complain because-when speaking of Stanford White-he found it necessary to ex plain what White was not before telling what he was: the greatest designer, and probably the greatest architect, this country has ever produced. Had White died in bed, with his family and his friends about him, there would have been no word of dispraise. He stood at the head of his profession; he was not yet fifty-three; great things were expected of him. But he allowed himself to be murdered, on a roof garden, by a Pittsburgh ne'er-do-well. Now "murder," as every newsboy knows, is the greatest word that can be put into a headline. Even in small type it sells. And shouted from every street corner. ... The newspapers made the most of White's murder. Thaw, the murderer, stayed on the front pages from June 25 to July 13, 1906, returning on January 23, 1907, the first day of his first trial. He was pictured as in some sort a hero, the defender of his home. White was the villain of the piece. Davis, speaking as one who had been for fifteen years in the newspaper business, said: ttl have never known an attack to be made upon anyone as undeserved, as unfair, as false, as the attack upon White." In their search for motives, in their eagerness for circu lation, in their shameless greed, the newspapers despatched detectives and reporters to interview valets and chorus girls, bell boys and waiters. And what did they discover? That White got more out of life in more different and more intelligent ways than any vii viii FOREWORD other man of his generation in New York, that he admired women of wit and beauty, and that he had never, by so much as a word, harmed any of his fellows. Yet why complain? White was not the first to suffer from the inhumanity of the press. He was not to be the last. Nor, for that matter, was the press necessary. Long before the press came into power men reviled one another, warring-with the conspicuous exception of Charles V against the dead. The Jews still expiate the sins of Cai aphas. Cromwell, in his grave, became the butt of every shallow wit in England. And Shakespeare, to make a holi day for James I, dug up the bones of Macbeth, the noblest of the Scottish kings-Macbeth who broke the power of the barons, and established a reign of tolerance and peace Shakespeare pictures him as a murderer, ghost-haunted and cowering . . . Macbeth who murdered no one. Yet why complain? We are not living in a kindly world, a world that thinks, as Malvolio did, nobly of the soul. We are living in a world that uses, to its own advantage, as bait for circulation or opportunity for self-advancement, the failures and the tragedies of others. White probably did more for New York, to make it beautiful and livable, than any other man native to the city. Yet, apparently, the violence of his death was enough to damn him, to close the minds of all but thinking men to the beauty of his art and the fineness of his spirit. I cannot explain it. I only know that it is so--that in the months I have spent arranging the few pages that follow I have asked a hundred times concerning the murder and the trial, concerning what manner of man White was. Which is my excuse for introducing him before taking up in detail the record of his life and his achievements.
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