The Payne Whitney House is a historic building at 972 Fifth Avenue, south of 79th Street, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was designed in the High Italian Renaissance style by architect Stanford White of the firm McKim, Mead & White. Completed in 1909 as a private residence for businessman William Payne Whitney and his family, the building has housed the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States since 1952.
The house has a five-story-tall gray-granite facade that is curved slightly outward. Each story is horizontally separated by an entablature. The interiors of the Payne Whitney mansion were designed in 16th- and 17th-century Renaissance styles. The first floor includes a rotunda that was decorated with an artwork attributed to Michelangelo, as well as the Venetian Room, a reception room that William Payne Whitney's wife Helen Hay Whitney particularly valued. Since 2014, the second and third stories have housed a French-language bookstore, Albertine Books.
The Whitney house was commissioned in 1902 by William's uncle Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne as a wedding gift. Construction took so long that, in the meantime, the couple's two children John (Jock) and Joan were born and Stanford White was killed. After the house's completion, William and Helen lived there until their respective deaths in 1927 and 1944. Jock Whitney sold the house in 1948 to a developer who converted it into apartments. The French government bought the building four years later. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated 972 Fifth Avenue as an official landmark in 1970. Various renovations have been conducted at the house over the years, including in the 1990s and 2010s.
Site The Payne Whitney House is at 972 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is on the east side of Fifth Avenue, directly across from Central Park, midblock between 78th and 79th Street. The land lot covers with a frontage of on Fifth Avenue and a depth of . Nearby sites include the Harry F. Sinclair House to the north, the Stuyvesant Fish House to the east, and the James B. Duke House and 960 Fifth Avenue to the south. There is a yard on the south side of the house, separating it from the James B. Duke House. The Payne Whitney House was also built with a rear entrance on 79th Street, measuring wide.
The city block between Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, and 78th and 79th Streets was part of the Lenox family farm until 1877, when Marcellus Hartley bought the block for $420,000. The railroad magnate Henry H. Cook acquired the site for $500,000 in 1880. and owned it for the remainder of the 19th century. Cook built a house on the southwest corner of the block in 1883. Cook intended the block to house first-class residences, not high-rises, and only sold lots for the construction of private dwellings. By the early 1910s, the value of the land had increased to $6 million. Through the early 2000s, the block of Fifth Avenue remained largely intact, compared to other parts of Fifth Avenue's "Millionaire's Row".
Architecture The Payne Whitney House was designed in the high Italian Renaissance style by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White. It was commissioned by Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne for his nephew William Payne Whitney and William's bride Helen Hay Whitney. The house was developed concurrently with the neighboring Henry Cook House at 973 Fifth Avenue; the two houses were among the last residences White designed before his death in 1906. According to Henry Hope Reed Jr., the inspiration for the Payne Whitney House's design is unclear, though the Pesaro Palace in Venice may have been one inspiration.
Facade The Payne Whitney House's five-story facade is made of granite from Bethel, Vermont. The facade is curved slightly outward toward Fifth Avenue. It is designed to appear continuous with the facade of 973 Fifth Avenue directly to the north, which Stanford White also designed. The facade is divided horizontally into three sections: the base, the middle stories, and the attic. Each story is separated by an entablature. The facade details were evocative of those of the Joseph Pulitzer House on 73rd Street and, by extension, those of Palazzo Pesaro, Venice. The ground floor contains blocks of rusticated stone, with a large marble entryway at the center flanked by a window on either side. The central entrance has a set of double doors with decorated grilles. Flanking the doorway are molded floral designs, as well as vertical pilasters with lions' heads at their bases and acanthus-and-maple-leaf panels above. Adolph Alexander Weinman designed these panels. There is a frieze directly above the doors, containing carvings of a wreath and medallions; directly above the frieze are egg-and-dart, dentilled, and acanthus leaf-and-dart moldings. The frieze is topped by a projecting cornice supported by carved console brackets on each end. Above the ground-floor windows on either side of the doorway, the joints of the rusticated facade are angled inward, creating voussoirs. Above the center of each window is a paneled keystone. The ground floor is topped by dentils and a band course with wave motifs.
The second floor contains round-arched windows flanked by paired Ionic pilasters. The spandrels at the arches' top corners contain carvings of cherubs, while the windows themselves are topped by bracketed keystones. The entablature above the windows consists of a frieze, dentils, and a cornice. The third-floor windows are square-headed and are flanked by paired Corinthian pilasters; each window has carved lions' heads and swags above it. The entablature above the third story also has dentils and a cornice. The fourth story has square-headed windows and paired composite pilasters, as well as low relief marble panels above each window, which depict classical scenes. A smaller entablature runs above the fourth story. The fifth floor has square-headed windows between pairs of carved vertical panels. Above each panel are ornamented brackets with foliate details. The tile roof is slightly pitched and is carried by a cornice made of stone.
There is a secondary facade facing south toward the James B. Duke House. The rusticated first story and the entablatures wrap around from the Fifth Avenue facade, but the window designs are simpler than on Fifth Avenue. The center of the southern facade has a slightly projecting pavilion. The rest of the south facade is flat. Adjacent to the south facade is the Florence Gould Garden. The side garden had been designed simultaneously with the rest of the house.
Interior The house was built with masonry load-bearing walls and a steel superstructure. The house had 40 rooms in addition to two elevators, a basement, and a sub-basement. The building also contained 11 bathrooms, some of which had marble baths. The interiors of the mansion were designed in 16th- and 17th-century styles. The French firm of Allard et Fils imported the furnishings in the house. John La Farge designed four stained-glass windows themed to the seasons, while muralist James Wall Finn painted the decorations in entrance rotunda. The interior has been used as a setting for films such as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940). It is still used as a filming location; for instance, the house has appeared in episodes of the TV shows Law & Order and The Blacklist.
First floor
Just inside the entrance is a rotunda. Measuring , it can fit 75 people. The rotunda's design resembles that of a peristyle and was inspired by the Villa Giulia's portico. The floors of the rotunda are clad in marble and are arranged in a grid with molded copper borders. Originally, the skins of various animals were used as floor coverings for the rotunda. Sixteen marble columns surround the rotunda and are arranged in pairs. The ceiling contains a motif of green leaves and yellow-tinted trellises; it is inlaid by eight medallions of playing children. These were painted by James Wall Finn. A white marble staircase leads to the second floor; it was originally decorated with a bronze railing, a wall frieze, and a carved-wood ceiling.
The center of the rotunda has a replica of Young Archer (c. 1490), a marble statue attributed to Michelangelo. After the sculpture had failed to sell at a 1902 auction in London, White had purchased the sculpture and installed it on a pedestal at the Payne Whitney mansion. It went relatively unnoticed until 1990, when graduate student James Draper speculated that the work was by Bertoldo di Giovanni, a mentor of Michelangelo's. In 1996, Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, a longtime art historian for the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in the neighboring James B. Duke House, identified the sculpture as a genuine Michelangelo work after attending one of the French Cultural Service's exhibitions. In 2009, the statue was placed on loan several blocks north at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Venetian Room, measuring square, is just east of the rotunda, on the south wall of the house. It is accessed by wrought-iron doors from the rotunda. Serving as a reception room for the Whitney family, the Venetian Room was used to receive guests before they proceeded upstairs. The room's furnishings include painted furniture and a French-style clock. The walls contain mirrored panels framed by gold leaf. In place of a cornice, the coved ceiling was originally decorated with a latticework pattern containing plants and enameled flowers. Other decorations include high Renaissance doorways and mantels, as well as a candelabra in the Bavarian rococo style. , the public has limited access to the room. North of the Venetian Room is a corridor leading from the rotunda to restrooms and private offices.
Other stories The staircase from the first-floor rotunda leads directly to the main reception room on the second floor, which is used as a reception area for events. The main reception room measures and can fit 75 people. Architecture magazine described the second-floor reception room as having "some excellent antique columns, a staircase with beautifully designed bronze rail, and a truly wonderful frieze and carved wood ceiling". The room also contains decorations such as gilded doors with mirrors. Immediately in front of it is another reception room facing Fifth Avenue, which measures and can fit 75 people.
When built, the house had other decorated rooms scattered throughout the interior. One of these was a salon with velvet hangings and pictures on the walls. The dining room had a coffered ceiling and hanging lamps above a tapestry. The breakfast room was decorated with a bright color scheme and also had a mantel and paneling in the Louis XVI style. Payne Whitney's private library had brocade walls, a carved-wood ceiling, and a Baroque-style doorway, as well as upholstered tacks on the walls. Helen Hay had a studio with a segmentally-arched ceiling, sparsely-decorated walls, and ornate furniture. One of John La Farge's four stained-glass windows, entitled Autumn, is on a staircase landing between the second and third floors.
On the second and third floors are the Albertine Books bookstore and reading room, designed by French designer Jacques Garcia. Albertine Books is considered part of the French consulate, so sales of books in the store follow French law. The reading room and bookstore are on separate levels, connected by their own staircase. The second-story section of the bookstore is within the Whitney family's former private library. Its ceiling has a mural depicting constellations, with a blue background and decorative gold details that converge at the center. The mural was inspired by one in Germany's Villa Stuck. The Albertine space also has custom furniture and carved busts of French and French-American historical figures.
History