The architect of desire1996

Suzannah Lessard grew up on Box Hill, the Long Island estate built by her great-grandfather, Stanford White, the premier architect and social impresario of the Gilded Age. In 1906, on the rooftop theatre of the original Madison Square Garden, White was shot dead by the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw, whose wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, White had seduced when she was sixteen.

The highly publicized scandal, and the "trial of the century" that ensued, came to be mythologized in our culture and made ever more glamorous and romantic as the century rolled on. But on Box Hill, where four generations of the Stanford White family lived side by side, a tension-filled silence surrounded the eminent, charismatic figure in the family past.

Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's...