Payne Whitney House

The Payne Whitney House was conceived as the ultimate Gilded Age wedding gift. When financier Payne Whitney married Helen Hay in nineteen hundred and two, his wealthy uncle, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, purchased this prime Fifth Avenue lot and commissioned a mansion to be built from the ground up for the newlyweds. The project was entrusted to the era's most celebrated architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White, with the visionary Stanford White personally overseeing the design. The resulting high Italian Renaissance palazzo was intended to be a monument to the couple's status, featuring a curved granite facade that remains one of the last intact examples of the grand townhouses that once defined this stretch of the avenue.