Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [852]
White, the self-styled Benvenuto Cellini of the profession, was indeed a renaissance man. Apart from his architectural work, he painted, designed furniture and jewelry, collected antiques. He was also a man-about-town—he loved making a grand entrance at the opera in cape and red mustache—and was a vigorous, not to say ubiquitous clubman. His various memberships allowed him to mingle with moguls and pull in commissions from Knickerbockers and nouveaux riches alike. The firm’s list of clients included Astors, Fishes, Goelets, Morgans, Pulitzers, Stuyvesants, Vanderbilts, and Villards.
McKim, Mead, and White didn’t monopolize the field; they shared it with a formidable array of practitioners—including William Ware, Richard Upjohn, James Renwick, LeBrun, and others who formed, in 1881, the Architectural League of New York, seeking to elevate their skills to Ecole des Beaux Arts standards. Devoted to European models, many used books of photographs they had snapped on their grand tours to convince clients of the accuracy of their imitations. No stylistic consensus emerged; rather the new generation ransacked all European history.
The Vanderbilt-Hunt collaboration inspired, and the eighties’ upturn made feasible, a building boom in town houses. Even the mid-1880s recession spurred construction, as investors frightened by chaos in the stock market shifted their capital into real estate. Soon upper Fifth was chock-a-block with millionaires—Harry Payne Whitney, Charles Harkness, Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, Benjamin Altman, Robert Goelet, Solomon Guggenheim, Russell Sage—and even the Astors, followers now rather than leaders, abandoned lower Fifth. The queen had Hunt build her a white French Renaissance palace at 65th Street, where she lived out the closing years of her reign. William Waldorf Astor sidled northward to a cream-colored Touraine château at the corner of 56th, three blocks south of the great complex of luxury skyscraper hotels clustered around 59th that included the Plaza, the Savoy, and his own seventeen-story New Netherland Hotel.
Fifth Avenue north from 65th Street, 1898. The château that Hunt designed for Caroline Astor stands on the near corner, anchoring a line of mansions that stretches uptown as far as the eye can see. (© Museum of the City of New York)
Some plutocrats pressed slightly eastward, to Madison Avenue, though not so far as the newly (1888) and misleadingly renamed “Park” Avenue, still fatally blemished by ventilation holes belching smoke and steam from the trains below. In 1882 McKim, Mead, and White started on a complex—between 50th and 51st, just behind the recently opened St. Patrick’s Cathedral—of six town houses grouped around a court. Their client, railroader Henry Villard, got a monumental Italian Renaissance structure, based on the Cancelleria in Rome, outwardly austere, richly embellished on the inside. Unfortunately for Villard, as the buildings were going up he was suffering career reverses. During the 1884 panic he moved into the unfinished house, hoping to save on hotel bills, but angry crowds besieged him there, as they hunted down Ward and Fish elsewhere in the city. After a few weeks Villard moved out, never to return, and in 1886 he sold the complex to Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid.
The Seventh Regiment’s new armory at 66th Street facilitated elite expansion into heretofore drowsy Lenox Hill. The French medieval-style fortress (with elegant interior for the unit’s social functions designed by White and Louis Comfort Tiffany) guarded against the concentration of working-class Germans and Irish stretching from Third