Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [851]
New money thrust its way into the world of men’s clubs with equal dispatch. In this case it was the Union Club—the city’s most prestigious—that gave offense. Patrician members had opened its exclusive doors just enough to allow a few newly monied to squeeze inside, but the rate of access was far too slow for those clamoring to be admitted. This time it was J. P. Morgan who assembled the group of refusés. Again, a new edifice was built, a regally scaled Italianate structure. Again, the newcomer was grandly titled the Metropolitan. And again, its backers situated the building, which opened in 1894, far uptown from the center of established clubdom—at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street.
CHÂTEAUX COUNTRY
Hunt’s château for the Vanderbilts proved an epochal success. Previous elites had rejected efforts, by A. T. Stewart and Leonard Jerome, to break the brownstone mold. But the eighties’ elite loved the Vanderbilt mansion’s scale, materials, and ornate sensuousness. They hailed it as a liberation from what their own Edith Wharton would call New York’s “mean monotonous streets,” lined with buildings “of a desperate uniformity of style” and a “universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried.”
Not all the elite was swept off its feet, to be sure. In 1882 J. P. Morgan was making a decent half million a year and could well have afforded something ostentatious. But Morgan despised fashion and vulgar display (except in yachts) and opted for a brownstone at Madison and 36th, in the no longer cutting-edge Murray Hill. And when the staunchly Baptist John D. Rockefeller arrived in town, he too settled in a brownstone, albeit one within blocks of the Vanderbilt château.
Nevertheless, Hunt would be kept busy until the day he died fashioning urban mansions for the rich, and their homes away from home as well. During the late 1880s and 1890s—as the elite fled Saratoga for Newport—Hunt constructed colossal summer places for them, like the Marble House for William Kissam Vanderbilt, and the Breakers for his brother Cornelius II. Indeed so great was the flow of commissions from avid haute bourgeois househunters that it begat a whole new generation of New York architects, of whom perhaps the most influential were Stanford White and Charles McKim.
McKim studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1867-70, came back to work in H. H. Richardson’s New York office, then drifted out of Richardson’s Romanesque orbit into that of Hunt’s Renaissance. When the Vanderbilt 52nd Street château went up, it seized his imagination; he got into the habit, he later recalled, of walking up Fifth Avenue late at night to admire it and “always slept better for enjoying the sight.” But even during the 1870s McKim had begun designing town houses in what was coming to be called the Queen Anne style, based loosely on English Renaissance sources. He also came to love the architecture of England’s American colonies—McKim was among the first to appreciate eighteenth-century vernacular buildings—and he held in high regard the civic decorum and classical orderliness of New York’s Federal structures.
Stanford White traveled a similar trajectory. Born in New York in 1853, he grew up in the city’s artistic and reform community. His father, Richard Gant White, was a cosmopolitan essayist who penned articles on music, art, literature, the stage, and English life and manners for the Galaxy, Nation, and Century magazines. The elder White was also a friend of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Olmsted. It was through Olmsted that young White got an apprenticeship in Richardson’s firm in 1872, replacing McKim, who had opened his own firm in collaboration with William Mead. Seven years later, White joined the other two, and the trio of McKim, Mead, and White would dominate New York’s architectural scene for the next generation.
The firm, a brilliant combination of talents, was described as a vessel of