The Girl on the Velvet Swing

by Simon Baatz

  The second act of the play moves to Wales, where Gilfain has bought a castle. A ghost haunts the castle, eventually forcing Gilfain to confess that he stole the title to the perfume factory: Dolores is the rightful owner. Everything ends happily: Frank Abercoed marries Dolores; Angela Gilfain marries an army officer; and Cyrus Gilfain marries Lady Holyrood, an aristocratic widow.15

  Florodora, despite its improbable plot, was popular beyond all expectations, playing to acclaim in both London and New York. Its catchy tunes, attractive girls, and extravagant costumes all conspired to make the play, a comic opera, an immediate success in New York, and it eventually ran for more than five hundred performances on Broadway.16

  The Florodora sextet—some of the most beautiful women in New York—was the centerpiece of the show, the fulcrum on which Florodora pivoted. These dancers were the stars of the Broadway stage, celebrities whose talents and beauty had earned them fame. Evelyn Nesbit, never more than a mere chorus girl, a bit player on the stage, would watch from the wings, admiring their poise and grace, aspiring to become a member of the famous ensemble. All six women—Frances Belmont, Susan Drake, Daisy Green, Edna Goodrich, Katherine Sears, and Clarita Vidal—knew Stanford White well, and it was one of them, Goodrich, who would first introduce Evelyn Nesbit to the architect.17

  The musical comedy Florodora played at the Casino Theatre from 1900 to 1901. The members of the Florodora sextet—reputedly six of the most beautiful women in New York—are shown here in a scene from the second act. This illustration originally appeared in a 1900 souvenir album. (Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

  Evelyn had given little thought to her first encounter with Stanford White. It had been amusing to spend the afternoon in his apartment, playing on the velvet swing; but it was just one novel experience among the many that she had had since her arrival in New York. Stanford White, moreover, had not impressed her; his friend Reginald Ronalds had been better-looking, younger certainly, and more amusing. White, then forty-seven, had seemed somehow remote, more distant, less a companion than a vaguely avuncular presence.

  It came as a surprise, therefore, that she should receive a second invitation from White a few days later. White had also asked Elsie Ferguson, an actress then appearing in The Strollers at the Knickerbocker Theatre, along with her companion, Thomas Clarke, a dealer in porcelain and antique furniture. The second occasion was not dissimilar from the first: White and his three guests had luncheon in the dining room on the second floor, later ascending to the fourth-floor studio to play on the velvet swing.18

  White, on this occasion, was less reserved, more carefree, more relaxed, and altogether better company. He was not handsome in a conventional sense, Evelyn thought; but there was a warmth in his manner that seemed to invite intimacy even with those acquaintances who had known him for only a short time. He was tall and imposing, six feet two inches, long-limbed, with gray-green eyes and a shock of spiky red hair. He seemed at first sight slightly awkward in his movements, almost as if he were self-conscious about his appearance. He had been good-looking as a young man, twenty years before, but he was now middle-aged, slightly overweight, and he was no longer as dashing as he believed himself to be.19

  There was something almost childlike about his exuberant enthusiasm, a quality that could be simultaneously endearing and exasperating. He was generous, charitable toward those less fortunate than he, but too often he acted spontaneously, always on some whim, rarely paying heed to the consequences, rarely thinking too far into the future.20

  Evelyn gave as little thought to her second encounter with White as she had given to her first. White had impressed her as a man who seemed more considerate and thoughtful than the majority of men she had met since her arrival in New York, but there was little else in their encounters that captured her interest. Evelyn had long been aware that she attracted attention on account of her beauty, but it had never occurred to her that Stanford White had any intentions toward her.

  It was so unexpected, therefore, that less than a week after the second meeting, her mother should receive a letter from Stanford White inviting her to visit him in his office on Fifth Avenue. Who was this man, Florence asked her daughter, who had asked to see her? Would it be proper, she wondered, for her to accept an invitation from someone to whom she had not yet been introduced? Evelyn had told her mother about her two encounters with Stanford White; she had described her adventures on the velvet swing; and she had portrayed White as sympathetic and kind, slightly eccentric perhaps, but surprisingly extroverted for someone so eminent. Evelyn had spent two afternoons in his company, yet, she confessed to her mother, she still knew almost nothing about him. He was an architect, she knew—and he was involved in some way with the theater—but otherwise she could provide her mother with very little specific information.

  Florence Nesbit accepted White’s invitation to visit him at his office, and she returned singing his praises. He was the perfect gentleman, she told her daughter. His interest in Evelyn was, according to White, simply a consequence of his benevolent regard for those girls struggling to gain a foothold on the Broadway stage. He had significant investments in several New York theaters; he knew many actors and actresses; and his connection with the stage provided him with an agreeable diversion from his sometimes stressful architectural practice. He regarded himself, he had told Florence, as a patron of the arts, and there was no better way for him to promote the cultural life of New York than by supporting the theater.

  Life had treated Florence Nesbit cruelly in the eight years since the death of her husband, yet she had remained untouched by the cynicism that typically accompanies misfortune. She was an innocent abroad, an ingénue who could never perceive the hidden motives that often undergird the actions of others. She accepted Stanford White’s kind words at face value, not suspecting that he might, in claiming the role of guardian over her daughter, be prompted by self-interest. She, Florence, had been tossed from one misfortune to the next, humiliated by her poverty, crushed by her failure to live as a respectable woman, and obliged to hire her daughter out as an artist’s model; and suddenly the skies had cleared with the arrival into her life of this considerate, thoughtful, generous man. Who was she to turn away such a philanthropist as Stanford White? Who was she to deny him the opportunity to take her daughter under his watchful guardianship? And the more she learned about Stanford White, the more fortunate she considered herself that such a distinguished man should take an interest in her daughter.21

  By 1901 White’s career as an architect had traced a triumphal arc of accomplishment that extended over three decades. His father, Richard Grant White, had never succeeded in his attempts at a literary career—the family had lived always in genteel poverty—and he had never been able to afford to send his two sons to college. Stanford White, the elder of the two boys, had been fortunate, therefore, to begin an apprenticeship in 1872 at the age of nineteen as a protégé of Henry Hobson Richardson, the leading exponent of the Romanesque style in the United States and one of the principal partners in the New York firm Gambrill & Richardson.

  Stanny, as he was known to his friends, soon realized his luck in gaining such a mentor as Richardson, who, for his part, came to appreciate that he could trust Stanford White to faithfully execute even the most complex tasks associated with the firm’s many commissions. White drafted the perspective drawings for the tower of Trinity Church in Boston in 1874 and hired the artists to design the murals for the church’s interior; he assumed responsibility for the decorative detail on Oakes Ames Memorial Hall in Easton, Massachusetts; he contributed to the interior decoration of the senate chamber of the New York State Capitol at Albany; and he worked closely with Richardson on several lucrative commissions for private houses in Newport, Rhode Island.22

  In 1877 White, having served his apprenticeship and now employed as a draftsman at Gambrill & Richardson, joined with a few close friends in establishing the Tile Club, an informal group
of artists and writers who met weekly for social conversation in one another’s homes. The Tile Club lasted only a decade, disappearing in 1887, yet it was an important institution, drawing together members of the city’s cultural avant-garde. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the most celebrated sculptors of his generation, was a member, as were Louis Comfort Tiffany, Winslow Homer, and William Merritt Chase. Stanford White faithfully attended the weekly meetings, designing the studio on Tenth Street that subsequently served as the club’s meeting place after 1882.23

  Stanford White served an apprenticeship with Henry Hobson Richardson before entering a partnership with Charles McKim and William Rutherford Mead in September 1879. White designed countless landmark structures in New York, most notably the Washington Square Arch, Madison Square Garden, the Herald Building, and the Judson Memorial Baptist Church. (Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-10592)

  In August 1878 White journeyed through France on an architectural tour with Saint-Gaudens and a second acquaintance, Charles McKim. They traveled from Paris as far south as Marseille, making sketches of some of the buildings that they encountered on their way. McKim returned to the United States later that year, but White remained in Europe, staying with Saint-Gaudens in Paris, traveling through France, Belgium, and Italy, and returning to the United States in September 1879.

  Charles McKim, following his return to New York, had joined with William Rutherford Mead, a draftsman working for the architect Russell Sturgis, in establishing a new firm. Stanford White had worked alongside McKim at Gambrill & Richardson in the early 1870s, and White also knew Mead; and so, on White’s return to New York, the three men established the firm of McKim, Mead & White, hiring draftsmen and renting office space on lower Broadway.24

  The creation of McKim, Mead & White in 1879 coincided with the start of a prolonged economic boom in the United States. An entrepreneurial class, capitalists who had made vast fortunes in railroads, iron and steel, shipbuilding, banking, and retail, had come into being in the decades after the Civil War, and members of this class were eager to display their wealth through the construction of extravagantly luxurious private residences. McKim, Mead & White was a direct beneficiary of their largesse, and soon the firm had received commissions from wealthy New Yorkers for country houses in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and along the North Fork of Long Island. The work of McKim, Mead & White began to appear also in New York City: Charles Tiffany hired the firm to build an imposing mansion on Seventy-second Street at Madison Avenue; Henry Villard, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, commissioned McKim, Mead & White to build an opulent apartment complex between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets for members of his immediate family; and other projects included the design of town houses for Lloyd Phoenix and Gibson Fahnestock.25

  The firm of McKim, Mead & White opened in 1879 in offices at 57 Broadway and soon became one of the leading architectural firms in the United States. In 1894 the firm moved to offices at 120 Fifth Avenue. This photograph, taken around 1905, shows, from left to right, William Rutherford Mead, Charles McKim, and Stanford White. (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University)

  By 1887 the partnership of McKim, Mead & White had established itself as the most lucrative architectural practice in the United States. No firm recorded larger profits in the late 1880s. In the five-year period from 1887 to 1892, McKim, Mead & White received nearly two hundred commissions with an aggregate value of $13 million. The nouveaux riches—those New York families that had suddenly accumulated great fortunes—adopted the style and manners of the Renaissance princes to signify their rapid rise up the social ladder; and it was no coincidence that McKim, Mead & White abandoned its earlier preference for the American colonial and Queen Anne styles in favor of an architectural mimicry of the Italian Renaissance.26

  It seemed appropriate, therefore, that in 1887 the managers of the National Horse Show Association should grant the commission for a new exhibition hall to McKim, Mead & White. New York had never possessed a suitable venue for the annual horse shows; the original Madison Square Garden, located on Madison Avenue at Twenty-sixth Street, had served this purpose for several years, but the building, a former railroad depot, was now dilapidated and shabby, an embarrassment to the city.

  Stanford White’s completion three years later of the new Madison Square Garden confirmed his reputation as one of the nation’s leading architects. White had purposely designed the building to convey the illusion of buoyancy and lightness. There was nothing elegant in its basic shape—it was simply a straight-walled rectangular box that filled up its allotted area—but the decorative detail on the exterior transformed it into one of the most beautiful buildings in New York.

  White had taken Filippo Brunelleschi’s fifteenth-century masterpiece the Ospedale degli Innocenti as the inspiration for his design of Madison Square Garden. A colonnade—a series of slender columns spaced at regular intervals—ran along the front of the building, forming an arcade, an enclosed space that served to protect passengers alighting from their carriages in inclement weather. The decorative detail on the upper façade, above the colonnade, resembled the ornamentation on the church of the Certosa di Pavia, a Carthusian monastery in Lombardy. White had placed six semicircular arched windows on the façade, and above each of these windows he had inserted a bull’s-eye window, a smaller circular opening that allowed additional light to enter the building. The exterior decoration—a combination of pale-yellow pressed brick and cream-white terra-cotta masonry—together with the large windows that looked out over Madison Avenue, created an impression that the building was lighter and more airy, somehow less substantial, than it actually was. Madison Square Garden was the largest and most capacious structure in the city—nothing in New York’s history up to that point could rival it—yet even at night, when the gas lamps illuminated it only faintly, it had a cheerful, exhilarating appearance.27

  Stanford White designed the new Madison Square Garden in the Renaissance Revival style. The structure, on the northeast corner of Madison Square, included a large amphitheater, concert hall, restaurant, and theater. The flat roof, at the base of the tower, was used for musical comedy during the summer months. The New York Life Insurance Company took ownership in 1913, and the building was demolished in 1925. (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University)

  An enormous amphitheater, with seating for seventeen thousand spectators, provided the interior space for horse shows, boxing matches, religious revivals, political meetings, and the like. Madison Square Garden also contained a restaurant on the first floor, a ballroom and concert hall above the restaurant, and an indoor theater lavishly decorated with silk draperies.

  The building had a flat roof, a large outdoor space that contained another stage and seating for almost two hundred spectators. New York possessed several outdoor theaters suitable for performances on summer nights, and the arrangement on the roof of Madison Square Garden was typically informal: the audience sat either on elevated benches running along the sides of the roof or at small tables positioned in front of the stage. There was space between the tables for waiters to move from table to table between acts, taking orders and serving drinks.28

  The shareholders who had invested in the project—a group that included members of the Astor family and the bankers George Bowdoin, J. Pierpont Morgan, Adrian Iselin, and James Stillman—had not imagined that Madison Square Garden would include a tower. The new building had been originally intended as an amphitheater for horse shows, and there was no functional requirement to superimpose a tower above the main structure; it would be a wasteful and expensive addition. But Stanford White had always meant his creation to serve as an architectural landmark, a building that, on account of its beauty and style, would distinguish itself from its neighbors, and nothing, he argued, would serve that purpose better than the addition of a tower. The directors and principal shareholders eventually acquiesced in the plan, and White’s tower, modeled after the campanile of the C
athedral of Santa Maria in Seville, reached three hundred feet, making Madison Square Garden one of the tallest buildings in the city.29

  The inauguration of Madison Square Garden on June 16, 1890, marked the zenith of Stanford White’s celebrity. The new edifice, one of the most attractive structures yet to appear in the city, was a signal of the emergent importance of New York City; and the opening ceremony was as much a tribute to the architect as a celebration of the building.

  Levi Morton, the vice president of the United States, sent a telegram to say that he had been detained at the capital and was unable to attend. But William Tecumseh Sherman, the famed Civil War general, had accepted an invitation and was present with his wife and two daughters. The leadership of the Democratic Party—New York’s political elite—was well represented among the audience, and Abram Hewitt, the former mayor, also put in an appearance. Theodore Roosevelt, a member of the Civil Service Commission, had traveled from Washington earlier that day to attend the inauguration of the new building.

  Some of New York’s most important capitalists had come to celebrate the opening of Madison Square Garden. Chauncey Depew, the president of the New York Central Railroad; August Belmont, the American representative of the Rothschild banking family; and Hermann Oelrichs, a director of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, along with a host of lesser industrialists, financiers, and bankers, were all in attendance. The social elite of the city, the wealthiest and most prestigious families in New York, an indiscriminate mixture of old wealth and new, sat in private boxes elevated above the main floor of the amphitheater. Below them, a vast crowd of New Yorkers, more than twelve thousand, watched as the Vienna Orchestra played a series of waltzes and polkas. Alfred Thompson, the librettist, had written two ballet scores for the occasion, and the spectators loudly applauded each piece before finally departing the new Madison Square Garden.