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The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
The story of Stanford White--his scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"--has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. The premier neoclassical architect of his day, White's legacy to the world were such masterpieces as New York's original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square Arch, and the Players, Metropolitan, and Colony clubs. He was also responsible for the palaces of such clients as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers, the robber barons of the Gilded Age whose power and dominance shaped the nation in its heady ascent at the turn of the century.
As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family.
Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, one that, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.
As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family.
Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, one that, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
May 6, 2008
This is a memoir written by Suzannah Lessard, the great grandaughter of the most famous gilded age architect, Stanford White. White is as famous for his talent as he is for his violent demise at the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden, a building that White designed, by being shot several times by Harry Thaw, the husband of Evelyn Nesbit. Evelyn Nesbit was a very beautiful young showgirl whom White had ravished by stealing her virginity while she was still a naive and vulnerable sixteen year old child. The story takes us through the White, Smith, Astor, Howe, and Chanlor families, names that represented, wealth, power, intellect, talent, and the highly educated. Rape, incest, male power and madness are the underlying theme throughout. I did not see the anger that needs to be present in these women, in order for this kind of depraved and violent behavior to be ended once and for all. I see an intellectual approach demonstrated by the author and the women of her present generation. in their attempt at processing and assimilating their own personal vioalations. The same kind of complacency and ability to look away so as not to see such monstrous behaviour as was demonstrated by their female relatives through past generations. Ms. Lessard is a powerful writer. She is an author of immeasurable talents. The final chapter made me angry as well as giving me an overwhelming sense of sadness. I am very hopeful that I will hear more of her great talent and just as importantly, that she is healed.
June 21, 2011
This is a really good book, both as a very personal memoir of White's great granddaughter and as a biography of Stanford White. Lessard, whose life overlapped not with White, but with his wife Bessie and many other family members from both sides, brings a unique perspective to the work, the life and the scandal of the architect's murder. I found myself seeking out White's buildings in Midtown Manhattan--there are many surviving buildings. No doubt White and his firm left an indelible mark on the city of New York, and yet his designs are sometimes flawed in a very particular way. Lessard describes his work as sometimes imperialistic rather than democratic, there is a feeling of plunder and an emphasis on domination of the individual.
Altogether a fascinating story of an era, a family and it's ongoing legacy, this book provided insight on many unexpected levels. I highly recommend it, and if you are left wanting more you can also pick up "American Eve" which centers around Evelyn Nesbit, the young woman at the center of White's murder.
Altogether a fascinating story of an era, a family and it's ongoing legacy, this book provided insight on many unexpected levels. I highly recommend it, and if you are left wanting more you can also pick up "American Eve" which centers around Evelyn Nesbit, the young woman at the center of White's murder.
July 11, 2010
A good follow up read to American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the birth of the "it" girl and the crime of the century by Paula Uruburu (which is very well written).
Found Lessard's book to be part memoir, family history, spiritual journey, but with a very fuzzy connection between all of the aforementioned. Lessard has a poetic way with words but leaves the reader lost as to what she did learn by taking on such a complicated and messy past of her family's life. I hope Lessard finds what she is looking for as she was close but not clear on what it was she is in search of. I needed her to process more of her family's checkered past for me - to clarify what was going on under the surface.
I also need to sit and let this book wash over me. Perhaps I will find what I am looking for that was missing in the pages.
Found Lessard's book to be part memoir, family history, spiritual journey, but with a very fuzzy connection between all of the aforementioned. Lessard has a poetic way with words but leaves the reader lost as to what she did learn by taking on such a complicated and messy past of her family's life. I hope Lessard finds what she is looking for as she was close but not clear on what it was she is in search of. I needed her to process more of her family's checkered past for me - to clarify what was going on under the surface.
I also need to sit and let this book wash over me. Perhaps I will find what I am looking for that was missing in the pages.
September 16, 2025
I thought this book very fine when I read nearly eight years ago, how I would feel now is hard to say. I was most interested in learning about Stanford White, then about his family/descendents and only very down the list about the author and her theories about abuse as inherited projected diown the generations. My order of interest may not be what most younger readers might feel appropriate but I mean no disrespect to the author. As is so long since reading this book I recommend you check out the following reviews as a guide to determining whether this is a book you want to read:
Review from the New York Times: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
Review from Kirkus: A dreamlike memoir of the violence and sexuality underlying a well-planned family landscape, its statuary nooks and architectural crannies filled with secrets. Lessard (a contributing editor to Mirabella and the Washington Monthly and Whiting Award winner) is the great- granddaughter of turn-of-the-century architect Stanford White, a man best remembered as the shooting victim in the notorious love triangle also involving Harry Thaw and his wife, Evelyn Nesbit. Lessard and her five sisters grew up near Smithtown, Long Island, on the White estate known as the Place, where the family retreated in the wake of the stunning public disclosures about Stanford White's debauchery that followed his death. The circumstances of White's death and his secret dissipations were never mentioned at the Place, where Lessard's often privileged childhood included horses, boats, and acres to roam, and a covey of loving and eccentric relatives. But sometimes the male relatives, including her father, were overly loving, and some gun-toting eccentrics were prone to violence. Lessard lived in an atmosphere that was safe, but not safe; when she moved to Manhattan on her own, she responded to White's designs—including the landmark Washington Square Arch—with both joy and fear, feelings she felt were anchored in her family experiences. A meeting with her sisters in which each revealed sexual experiences with their father plus disclosure of a cousin's rape by another cousin while the rest of the family danced in the barn on the Place led her to explore the family past. Most interesting are chapters on great-grandfather Stanford's architectural and hedonistic adventures, plus tales of her Chanler/Astor relations. Stories of her growing-up have a narcotic quality that keeps the reader at bay. Probably therapeutic for the author, riveting for the social voyeur, and mildly illuminating for the student of family pathology.
Review from Publishers Weekly: When a writer as gifted as Lessard makes her debut with a memoir as candid, perceptive and wrenchingly affecting as this history of her family, it is a signal event. While the complex character and magnificent accomplishments of Lessard's great-grandfather, celebrated Gilded Age architect and murder victim Stanford White, could indeed be the focus of a fascinating story, Whiting Award winner Lessard brings to her assiduously researched narrative a depth of understanding and a moral vision that imbue this work with a deeper significance. This is a mesmerizing narrative composed of many interlocking layers. Most simply, it is an account of the several ancestral lines from which Stanford White descended, and of how the genetic strain of genius and rampant sexual perversity affected his descendants. It's a lucidly detailed portrait of several upper-class social milieus from whose combined values White was formed: the Smiths of Smithtown, Long Island, unpretentious Yankee stock intimately tied to their land holdings over many generations; the Chanler siblings, eccentric and vastly wealthy orphans brought up on a splendid country estate in the Hudson River valley. It is an incandescent depiction of the classical monuments that White contributed to our culture, from the Washington Square Arch to a mansion at Newport. It is an evocation of Box Hill, the almost magically beautiful and serene family compound on Long Island, where Lessard was raised, and of the dark secrets that shadowed its idyllic vistas. It is a chronicle of the circumstances leading to demented millionaire Harry Thaw's revenging his wife Evelyn Nesbit's honor by murdering White in Madison Square Garden in 1906, with what we already know about the sensational event augmented by Lessard's portrait of the bizarre silence in which the family shrouded the crime. And it is a personal revelation of Lessard's own suffering, of the sexual abuse to which she and her siblings were subjected and of the reasons this perversion occurred and was tolerated. Lessard is a writer of mature talent, immense sensibility and poetic expression. Her understanding of the visceral and spiritual effects of architecture and music and landscape on the heart and the soul is both brilliantly instinctive and intelligently reasoned. As exposed by Lessard, what resulted from the family's genteel social code--which prohibited discussion of emotions and pain--is practically a textbook example of psychological dysfunction. That Lessard finally has been able--at great emotional cost--to tell her overlapping stories with simple eloquence is both a triumph for her and a resonating experience for her readers.
Review from the New York Times: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
Review from Kirkus: A dreamlike memoir of the violence and sexuality underlying a well-planned family landscape, its statuary nooks and architectural crannies filled with secrets. Lessard (a contributing editor to Mirabella and the Washington Monthly and Whiting Award winner) is the great- granddaughter of turn-of-the-century architect Stanford White, a man best remembered as the shooting victim in the notorious love triangle also involving Harry Thaw and his wife, Evelyn Nesbit. Lessard and her five sisters grew up near Smithtown, Long Island, on the White estate known as the Place, where the family retreated in the wake of the stunning public disclosures about Stanford White's debauchery that followed his death. The circumstances of White's death and his secret dissipations were never mentioned at the Place, where Lessard's often privileged childhood included horses, boats, and acres to roam, and a covey of loving and eccentric relatives. But sometimes the male relatives, including her father, were overly loving, and some gun-toting eccentrics were prone to violence. Lessard lived in an atmosphere that was safe, but not safe; when she moved to Manhattan on her own, she responded to White's designs—including the landmark Washington Square Arch—with both joy and fear, feelings she felt were anchored in her family experiences. A meeting with her sisters in which each revealed sexual experiences with their father plus disclosure of a cousin's rape by another cousin while the rest of the family danced in the barn on the Place led her to explore the family past. Most interesting are chapters on great-grandfather Stanford's architectural and hedonistic adventures, plus tales of her Chanler/Astor relations. Stories of her growing-up have a narcotic quality that keeps the reader at bay. Probably therapeutic for the author, riveting for the social voyeur, and mildly illuminating for the student of family pathology.
Review from Publishers Weekly: When a writer as gifted as Lessard makes her debut with a memoir as candid, perceptive and wrenchingly affecting as this history of her family, it is a signal event. While the complex character and magnificent accomplishments of Lessard's great-grandfather, celebrated Gilded Age architect and murder victim Stanford White, could indeed be the focus of a fascinating story, Whiting Award winner Lessard brings to her assiduously researched narrative a depth of understanding and a moral vision that imbue this work with a deeper significance. This is a mesmerizing narrative composed of many interlocking layers. Most simply, it is an account of the several ancestral lines from which Stanford White descended, and of how the genetic strain of genius and rampant sexual perversity affected his descendants. It's a lucidly detailed portrait of several upper-class social milieus from whose combined values White was formed: the Smiths of Smithtown, Long Island, unpretentious Yankee stock intimately tied to their land holdings over many generations; the Chanler siblings, eccentric and vastly wealthy orphans brought up on a splendid country estate in the Hudson River valley. It is an incandescent depiction of the classical monuments that White contributed to our culture, from the Washington Square Arch to a mansion at Newport. It is an evocation of Box Hill, the almost magically beautiful and serene family compound on Long Island, where Lessard was raised, and of the dark secrets that shadowed its idyllic vistas. It is a chronicle of the circumstances leading to demented millionaire Harry Thaw's revenging his wife Evelyn Nesbit's honor by murdering White in Madison Square Garden in 1906, with what we already know about the sensational event augmented by Lessard's portrait of the bizarre silence in which the family shrouded the crime. And it is a personal revelation of Lessard's own suffering, of the sexual abuse to which she and her siblings were subjected and of the reasons this perversion occurred and was tolerated. Lessard is a writer of mature talent, immense sensibility and poetic expression. Her understanding of the visceral and spiritual effects of architecture and music and landscape on the heart and the soul is both brilliantly instinctive and intelligently reasoned. As exposed by Lessard, what resulted from the family's genteel social code--which prohibited discussion of emotions and pain--is practically a textbook example of psychological dysfunction. That Lessard finally has been able--at great emotional cost--to tell her overlapping stories with simple eloquence is both a triumph for her and a resonating experience for her readers.
May 8, 2013
The short version is, i should have read the straight-up biography of Stanford White (Stanny, published in the 80s) instead of this book, but i had hoped I might get some interesting "inside insight" from White's great-granddaughter so i tried this one first. It's a fairly standard 90s memoir, of the form that was popular then--an author has a unique biographical circumstance that "qualifies" them to write a memoir, which in this case is being the great-granddaughter of Stanford White, and the text itself is largely family-history navel-gazing with flashes of info about said unique biographical fact. Then at the end, a twist! Surprise! Incest raping! And, curtain.
It wasn't a waste of my time, per se, but i dunno, it also didn't really work for me as an overall composition.
It wasn't a waste of my time, per se, but i dunno, it also didn't really work for me as an overall composition.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 4, 2020
I was swiping through my Kindle looking for my next read and accidentally opened this one up, only to be immediately engaged by the quality of the writing. There was a meandering quality throughout this book, and not much in the way of plot, but the vividness of the imagery left a strong impression on me. The chapters that actually covered Stanford White's murder were the best in my opinion, if only because Lessard thrives when she has a clear story to tell, but the entire book was an impressive exercise in scene-setting and storytelling via architecture, which you can't say about too many books really - so points for painting me a picture I won't soon forget seeing.
January 12, 2014
Fantastic read - moving and powerful.
June 25, 2015
This is just a fascinating book! The great-granddaughter of Stanford White intertwines the story of her childhood with her family history, and the architecture that is the framework of their lives.
August 6, 2022
This is an incredible achievement, to confront the brutal reality of her family’s history and shame, to understand and, from her intimate perspective, hold it to account. The stories and people are shocking and almost unbelievably bad. She goes deep to try to explain how they coped and made do. It must have torn her insides to write this over the 20 years it evolved but in the end (and the best bits come late like a good suspense thriller) she emphatically delivers a very thoughtful memoir.
A keeper. I want to go back to NYC and see all the Stanford works that remain. Highly recommended!
A keeper. I want to go back to NYC and see all the Stanford works that remain. Highly recommended!
June 22, 2024
Uh yeah so this was staggeringly upsetting!
December 30, 2016
Suzannah Lessard is a fine, poetic writer who knows how to translate her intuitive experiences to the page. I started reading this as I am a crime buff and wanted to read more about the Stanford White shooting. This book is so much more.
Lessard does a fine job of documenting the shooting and the events that built up to it, but the cream that rises to the top here is her expression and exploration of what constitutes home and our anchorage to our concepts and memories of home and family; how that passes down through the ages and manifests in repetitive patterns. She manages to tie all this in to somehow explain to herself and others how misogyny and power remain controls over women in family and society. How does one overcome the separation, grief, and suppression that results from rape, incest, pedophilia, and abuse when constant reminders are present? There is a path that at least opens to expression in the end.
The quality of writing and Lessard's voice kept me reading at a slow pace to soak it all in. I can relate to much of her experiences and expression, resulting in taking breaks from the book to process my own relationship with memories of home and both male dominance, abuse, and abandonment. In the end, I found my path a bit more open, too.
Lessard does a fine job of documenting the shooting and the events that built up to it, but the cream that rises to the top here is her expression and exploration of what constitutes home and our anchorage to our concepts and memories of home and family; how that passes down through the ages and manifests in repetitive patterns. She manages to tie all this in to somehow explain to herself and others how misogyny and power remain controls over women in family and society. How does one overcome the separation, grief, and suppression that results from rape, incest, pedophilia, and abuse when constant reminders are present? There is a path that at least opens to expression in the end.
The quality of writing and Lessard's voice kept me reading at a slow pace to soak it all in. I can relate to much of her experiences and expression, resulting in taking breaks from the book to process my own relationship with memories of home and both male dominance, abuse, and abandonment. In the end, I found my path a bit more open, too.
October 30, 2019
Beautifully written, I thoroughly enjoyed falling into the author’s rich internal world and how it intertwines with her visual world. How fortunate we are that the great-granddaughter of the great Architect Stanford White, came to this world with such a gift for prose. I look forward to reading everything she writes.
There is scandal and trauma beneath the story, which is peeled away in the way one processes personal trauma. But if the reader has an expectation of high drama in this book they will be disappointed. It’s much much more than that.
There is scandal and trauma beneath the story, which is peeled away in the way one processes personal trauma. But if the reader has an expectation of high drama in this book they will be disappointed. It’s much much more than that.
December 13, 2018
Memoir of the great-granddaughter of Stanford White, the great Beaux-Arts architect murdered in a theater he himself designed by the husband of one of his former mistresses. Lessard writes beautifully about architecture and place and family, but I think she rushes the ending.
September 6, 2007
So far, if you are an architect realizing your life is messed up, take comfort in this family and realize you have some close competition.
Read
September 11, 2008This is a fabulous book! Haunting and erudite.
June 17, 2009
Well-written with a compelling story, this book got lost in a lot of psycho-babble.
December 23, 2010
What a screwed up family! The girl on the red swing is only the tip of it.
April 17, 2011
Completely fascinating and exceedingly well-written.
May 16, 2011
Fascinating behind-the-scenes of the Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White story, and how White's actions affected his family for generations. Written with smart, beautiful prose.
May 24, 2011
This is a very well-written and fascinating book.
September 10, 2016
I was interested in Stanford White and wanted to read about him but the book is quite badly written and the author too self-indulgent for my taste.
June 30, 2018
Rather too fuzzy for my taste.
May 1, 2024
I battled through 200 pages of this before finally giving up. On the plus side, some of the writing is really beautiful and the architectural descriptions are unique and gorgeous. But I dreaded picking it up every night; I think it might have been due to the fact that the author spends a chapter on each member of her family without regard to whether there’s anything particularly interesting to say about them. This makes the book both structurally boring (a series of vignettes rather than any sort of plot) and overfilled with trivia that I’m not sure why anyone outside of this family would care about.
July 9, 2019
Maybe more like a 3.5 rating. Well written with a lot of family and history context around Stanford White. Some parts read more diary-like. But it was interesting to read the sections about how, by living in NYC and on Long Island, she inevitably ran into White's architecture. Her writing also shows a deeper understanding of design.
April 29, 2024
Suki Lessard writes with absolute emotional clarity about complex themes of family history, trauma, and creative generation. By the time this semi-memoir arrives at its concluding revelations your vague feelings of dread have accrued to the point where you know it can end in no other way.
August 12, 2017
I had been looking forward to this book for a while, but it didn't live up to the hype. Part history; part memoir. History gets 5 stars; memoir 2.
October 21, 2017
Found it boring. Sorry.
July 22, 2018
Great book to add to you biography collection.
Written by a descendant.
Written by a descendant.
December 18, 2018
At points moving and perceptive, the work is so personal as to be largely useless to this reader but for some documentary history and lessons perhaps transferable across lives.
April 27, 2020
Highly recommend well written
Story about a family impacted by pedophilia and genius story of the architect Stanford White and the impact on his children
Story about a family impacted by pedophilia and genius story of the architect Stanford White and the impact on his children
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews