National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
Jefferson's University of Virginia, which both architects held in high regard), 1395 both classical in
design and both exhibiting Beaux-Arts attributes.
McKim, Mead & White's New York City Beaux-Arts designs were numerous: the large
public, private, and corporate buildings included the Bowery Savings Bank (1893-95), the
Brooklyn Museum (1893-1915), and the Cable Building (1892-94), all preceding the Vanderbilt
Mansion. 1396 Columbia University's Low Library (1895-98) and the University Club (1897-
1900) were constructed simultaneously with the Vanderbilt Mansion. 1397 These three were the
finest of McKim's work during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Later structures
ranged from townhouses like the adjoining Payne Whitney (1902-06) and Henry Cook (1902-
05) houses 1398 to the Joseph Pulitzer mansion (1900-03), 1399 and also included the Pierpont
Morgan Library (1902-07), the Tiffany Building (1903-06), and the General Post Office (1910-
12). 1400
The firm's later ventures using the same building vocabulary exemplify the capability of
the succeeding generation to surpass the "master," perhaps only in part due to Hunt's death in
1895. In the end, McKim, Mead & White authored "some of the finest and most provocative
classical designs in American architecture." 1401 As Floyd notes, in reference to the architect
Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, who had followed McKim's footsteps to the Ecole and into
H.H. Richardson's office well after McKim left:
For at this time the organic concepts of Richardson, the shingle style, and the American
landscape tradition flourished in the presence of a rising interest in classicism and applied
ornament, best represented in the work of McKim and White in New York. 1402
But the firm maintained far from a monopoly in expressing Beaux-Arts principles.
Illustrious contemporaries such as Cass Gilbert, Carrère & Hastings, George Browne Post,
Bruce Post, Henry Ives Cobb, James B. Baker, Napoleon Le Brun and Sons, R.H. Robertson,
Hoppin & Koen, Ernest Flagg, Daniel H. Burnham, Charles P.H. Gilbert, Warren &
Wetmore and countless others were competing for and winning innumerable urban
projects employing the same architectural guidelines. This method of expression evolved
into the preferred method for urban work, having grown out of the planning work
connected with the Columbian Exposition. The Exposition bred the concept of urban
planning, which was slowly refined by each contribution an architect made to the cityscape.
Beaux-Arts provided the framework for defining the urban spaces prior to the infiltration of
skyscrapers. 1403 This framework included functional clarity, spatial progression, conceptual
order, and symbolic expression, all of which reduced the chaos of the increasingly crowded
city. 1404
1395
Roth, 195.
1396
Gillon and Reed, 14, 80, 43, 18.
1397
Gillon and Reed, 78-9, 51.
1398
White, 224-31; Gillon and Reed, 64.
1399
White, 218-23; Gillon and Reed, 62.
1400
Gillon and Reed, 34, 32-3, 30.
1401
Reed and Bryant, xv.
1402
Floyd, 44.
1403
Roth, 251.
1404
Roth, 358.
246