Payne Whitney House

972 5th Avenue | Upper East Side | built 1906

Open on the map7 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1902

    February 6

    Payne Whitney's wedding brings a Fifth Avenue mansion from his uncle

    Payne Whitney and Helen Hay marry on February 6, 1902, in Washington, DC, where the gift of a Fifth Avenue mansion is announced with the donor's name kept secret. The Times soon reveals that Whitney's uncle, the Civil War colonel Oliver H. Payne, has bought a 70-by-100-foot plot between 78th and 79th Streets, which it values at $525,000. Stanford White, a guest at the wedding, is hired to design the house.

    Source: Ephemeral New York

  2. 1905

    Stanford White and the Whitneys buy European furnishings for the Venetian Room

    Stanford White designed the Venetian Room, just off the rotunda, to evoke a hall of mirrors framed in gilded rococo. The French firm Allard et fils built it through its New York office, and White and the Whitney family bought its furnishings in Europe during the summer of 1905. By the 1930s Helen Hay Whitney was calling it the Venetian Room.

    Source: villa-albertine.org

  3. 1909

    Stanford White's mansion is finished three years after his murder

    Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White designs a five-story, High Italian Renaissance mansion at 972 Fifth Avenue, with a rotunda inspired by the portico of Rome's Villa Giulia. White is murdered in June 1906, and the house is completed in 1909. It has 40 rooms and 11 bathrooms, some with marble baths.

    Source: Wikipedia

  4. 1946

    February 7

    Parke-Bernet auctions off the mansion's artworks and furnishings for $101,386

    After Helen Hay Whitney died in 1944, the ground floor was shut and its windows were boarded over. Parke-Bernet Galleries sold many of the artworks, furnishings and architectural details at auction on February 7 and 8, 1946. The first day took in $31,119 and the second $70,267, a total of $101,386, yet many original furnishings stayed and a caretaker was hired to look after them.

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 1952

    France buys the mansion for its cultural services in New York

    After Payne Whitney's death in 1927 and Helen Hay Whitney's in 1944, her son Jock Whitney sells the house in 1949, and by 1950 it is divided into suites and doctors' offices. In 1952 the property passes to the Republic of France, and the Cultural Services division of the French embassy uses it. The Albertine bookstore and reading room opens in the house in 2014.

    Source: Wikipedia

  6. 1970

    September 15

    The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates the Payne Whitney House a landmark

    The Landmarks Preservation Commission held its public hearing on the Payne Whitney House on June 23, 1970, and Manhattan Community Board 8 told it that the board favored designation. The commission designated the mansion a landmark on September 15, 1970. Its report called the house the town residence of Payne Whitney, standing on the last remaining blockfront of imposing town houses on Fifth Avenue.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  7. 1996

    An art historian identifies the rotunda's Young Archer as a Michelangelo

    The marble Young Archer in the rotunda was bought by Stanford White after it failed to sell at a 1902 London auction, and it stayed relatively unnoticed until 1990. In 1996 Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, after visiting a French Cultural Services exhibition, identified it as a genuine Michelangelo. The statue went on loan to the Met in 2009, and a replica now stands in the rotunda.

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

Nearby

All 93 buildings with stories in Upper East Side