Henry Cook and Payne Whitney Residences (1907) – New York

You’d be forgiven for thinking these two homes overlooking Central Park are actually one. Stanford White (or his assistants, more like it) designed the residences simultaneously, cladding the exteriors in elegant white Vermont granite and matching them with the same stacked Classical orders.¹

They aren’t my favorite projects by McKim, Mead & White: the firm’s work had become quite derivative by 1907, and the designs here feel overprocessed, as if sketched and refined by too many different hands. It doesn’t help that White was murdered before the homes were completed.

What makes this pair of structures important, though, is that they are among the handful of old mansions that survive in New York. Built too late for the Gilded Age, they were nonetheless conceived in its shadow — remnants of an era that will never return.

Elevations²

References

1. White, Samuel G. The Houses of McKim, Mead & White. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. (1998). ↩︎
2. A Monograph of the Work of McKim Mead & White, 1879-1915. New York: The Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1915. ↩︎