National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
The firm also ventured into the use of the Chateauesque (an expression of French
Renaissance Revival) - popularized by Hunt and others - in the Clarence Mackay house, Harbor
Hill, at Roslyn, Long Island, 1899-1902. 1334 The exterior detailing of this house is very restrained
when compared to some of Hunt's forays into the same medium. However, the "evolution of
the firm's eclecticism toward a greater fidelity to the original sources reached its apogee with
Mackay's Harbor Hill (1899-1905), where Katherine Mackay specifically directed White to use
the seventeenth-century Maisons-Laffite by François Mansart as the basis for his design." 1335
The T. Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., house in Manchester, Massachusetts (1904) is a large
Neoclassical structure built of red brick and stone. The firm rarely used brick as a building
material in the construction of their country houses, although it had been used in the Wales
House adjacent to the Vanderbilt property. The façade exhibits more direct classical influences,
while the rear elevation is more closely associated with the Federal Revival. The Coolidge house
displays a Greek-detailed portico at the front elevation, Jeffersonian hyphens between the main
block and two dependencies, and Federal detailing on the rear elevation, the latter of which is
reminiscent of the early nineteenth-century country house Gore Place (1805-06) in Waltham,
Massachusetts. 1336 The interior plan has similarities to Hyde Park in its pure representation of
Beaux-Arts principles in its hierarchical and axial arrangement of rooms. 1337
Another country house, built eight years later, was also constructed in brick, but is
smaller in size than the Coolidge house. The residence of P.H.B. Frelinghuysen was constructed
in Morristown in 1912, and is Colonial Revival in character. 1338 Its main block is symmetrical,
with a porch wing to the south and the service wing to the north. One might consider the
interior plan to be Beaux-Arts, but since the house is rather small when compared to the other
houses reviewed here, its size and program requirements, with only three non-service rooms on
the first story, no doubt dictated the tight arrangement of rooms.
While research for this report employed many sources to review the body of McKim,
Mead & White's work, no doubt some structures within the focus of this study were
overlooked. In addition, some of the country houses or seaside cottages presented here may
have been designed by the newer and younger employees in the firm, with one of the partners
looking over their shoulders. However, of the known work, this aspect of the contextual review
purposely ends with the 1912 Frelinghuysen house due to the departing or withdrawal of the
three original partners.
McKim, Mead & White was the most successful architectural firm in the United States
while the principals were alive. Their office was responsible for more commissions than any
other firm, forty on Long Island, 1339 at least five in the small communities in the Berkshires, 1340
1334
White, 16.
1335
MacKay, 278.
1336
William J. Murtagh and Ronald M. Greenberg, eds., The National Register of Historic Places
(Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1976), 340. This
house was designed by Jacque Guillaume Legrand.
1337
McKim, Mead, & White, plates 222-24; Roth, 266.
1338
McKim, Mead & White, plate 348.
1339 MacKay, 273.
1340 Owens.
237