National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
contributions to Newport were The Elms (circa 1901) and Miramar (1914), both utilizing
Beaux-Arts principles. He also designed the James B. Duke mansion (1912) in New York City
(now New York University's Institute of Fine Arts) in the Neoclassical style, with very restrained
Beaux-Arts ornamentation, and the Wildenstein Gallery with Julian Abele (1932), which is
expressed in Federal Revival form with a freer use of Beaux-Arts ornament. 1352
C.P.H. Gilbert was also younger than Charles McKim, William Rutherford Mead, and
Stanford White. He studied architecture at Columbia and also the Ecole. It appears that he was
more prolific than Trumbauer, and therefore perhaps more of a threat to McKim, Mead &
White in competing for commissions. Commissions during Gilbert's early and middle periods
on Long Island show English, French, and American colonial influences, but his floor plans
reflect a perfect understanding of Beaux-Arts principles, with clear axial arrangements. In 1899-
1901, he enlarged and modernized Snook's French Second Empire station of 1871 at 42 nd Street
for the Vanderbilts' New York Central Railroad. 1353 His later designs for Long Island estate
houses named Meudon (1900), Pembroke (1916-18), and Winfield Hall (1916-20) exhibit his
shift to the Neoclassical preference, but these three do not display Beaux-Arts
ornamentation. 1354 Three of his New York City houses, however, are all designed in the
Chateauesque style, with a very free application of Beaux-Arts ornament. These include houses
for Isaac D. Fletcher (1899), Captain Joseph Raphael DeLamar (1905), and Felix Moritz
Warburg (1907-08).
Perhaps McKim, Mead & White's most important competitors were their former
draftsmen who struck out on their own, always under the gentle guidance of McKim:
More than five hundred men had worked in their office by 1919, among the best known of
whom are Cass Gilbert (architect of the Minnesota State Capitol and the Woolworth
Building, New York), A.D.F. Hamlin (Professor of Architecture at Columbia University),
Royal Cortissoz (art and architectural critic), John Merven Carrèrre and Thomas Hastings
(architects of the New York Public Library), Henry Bacon (architect of the Lincoln
Memorial, Washington, D.C.), John Galen Howard, and John Mead Howells (the nephew of
William Mead and architect of the Tribune Tower, Chicago) . . . Of the three partners,
McKim in particular was deeply committed to the education of architects, spending long
hours in the drafting room with his assistants. 1355
Cass Gilbert (no relation to C.P.H. Gilbert) had been one of the firm's first office
assistants in 1880. 1356 Shortly after he left the firm in 1883 to open his own office in his native St.
Paul, Minnesota, McKim, Mead & White named Gilbert's first office its branch (at his
suggestion), forwarding work to him and crediting him for the work related to the Villard
railroad interests. 1357 Later and on his own, Gilbert won the competition for the New York
Customs House in 1900, in which the firm of McKim, Mead & White was disqualified because
of McKim's refusal to adhere to the programmatical restrictions. 1358 Gilbert's Customs House is
1352
Edmund V. Gillon and Henry Hope Reed, Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York: A Photographic Guide
(New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 65, 58.
1353
Roth, 315.
1354
MacKay, 180-92.
1355
Roth, 6.
1356
Roth, 7.
1357
Roth, 92.
1358
Roth, 296.
240