Suzannah Lessard

I have come to see family history as similar to architecture in certain ways. Like architecture, it is quiet. It encompasses, but does not necessarily demand attention. You might not even notice that it’s there. Like architecture, too, family history can suddenly loom into consciousness. For example, you can sit in the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street—designed by Carrère & Hastings, and perhaps the greatest building in New York—with your nose in a book, or busy with the catalogue and transactions with clerks, all the while oblivious of the splendid interior around you. You can forget it utterly, or perhaps not have noticed it at all that day, and then, casually looking up, be astonished, even momentarily disoriented by what you see. So it is with family history. One can go about one’s life with no thought of the past, and then, as if waking from a dream, be astonished to see that you are living within its enclosure.

There was a lot of drinking—these were very late nights—with rich food thrown in, and a boxing match perhaps, or a visit to a music hall to see the Florodora girls. Or there might be a bit of opera and several stops at regular men’s clubs, or sexual intervals in one or another of the private hideaways that Stanford kept in addition to his secret club’s hideaways. It’s an indication of the pace at which Stanford lived that his night life often included late-night stop-offs at the office. There are several descriptions by colleagues of Stanford dashing in, sometimes dressed in evening clothes, and brushing everything aside to jot down a design that had come into his head, commandeering any draftsman who happened to be around doing late-night work and forcing him to focus on Stanford’s project. When Stanford was done, the draftsman would be likely to find red mustache hairs and bits of chewed and splintered pencil all over the work—Stanford would twist his moustache furiously as he drew—and a sea of crumpled paper on the floor.

On the evening of June 25, 1906, during the intermission of “Mamzelle Champagne” in the Roof Garden restaurant and theatre, Stanford went backstage to get the phone number of one of the actresses—there are indications that he was already involved with two others. During the second half of the show, when Harry K. Thaw came up to him in a highly agitated state and wielding a gun, Stanford simply stared at him. It could be that he felt invulnerable. It could be that he recognized inevitability. Or it could be that in the stillness, the unendingness of that moment he chose not to move.