Madison Avenue and East 37th Street,
Google Streetview, 2014.
In 1867, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes was born in a brownstone Italianate row house on Madison Avenue in New York City, the first child for a successful banker and his wife. Born in the era of Reconstruction and into a reform-minded patrician family, Stokes gained notoriety as an architect, civic reformer, historian, collector, and major benefactor for New York City cultural institutions, but all in his own way, somehow always managing to remain in the background.
Bay Villa, the Stokes Family home. Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art Digital Collections.
Stokes was an eighteenth-century city boy, swaddled from birth in the kind of privilege only the eldest sons of the Gilded Age could expect. Tall and inquisitive, he peered down over a changing New York, summered at his family’s estate on Staten Island (left, then part of a separate city) and in Manhattan, and quietly witnessed the city transform.
He graduated from Harvard in 1891, briefly studied architecture at Columbia University, and decamped for Paris in 1894, where he literally immersed himself in housing studies, both incognito—with a messy beard and dirtied clothes, lurking about in the seamier arrondisements and taking notes—and avec l’élégance, studying the principles of symmetrical design and classical ornamentation amongst the last of the bell’ effete, at the École des Beaux-Arts. What he learned in Paris resonated throughout his life. Before the boroughs were consolidated in 1898, Stokes had traveled halfway around the globe, yet New York was his world.
Portrait of Mr. & Mrs. Phelps Stokes, John Singer Sargent, 1897. (MMA Collections)
Well, New York and Edith. Stokes married Edith Minturn in 1895, though he later surmised that they first met as children, staring at each other across pews in a cold Episcopal church on Staten Island. Edith, a renowned beauty, stood as the model for Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, but she was no trophy wife. Theirs was a marriage of partnership, and both championed separate, yet complementary, causes during their lives together.
While Edith raised their adopted daughter and rallied for social equality, I. N. adored her, designed housing and minor projects with his firm, Howells and Stokes, and, inspired by the fervor surrounding the three hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s sight of Mannahatta, dug in to an expensive hobby: collecting old maps and prints of his beloved city.
What followed was a nineteen-year obsession: Stokes later recalled that he spent most of his money buying things as he laboriously compiled the parts of what was supposed to be a four-volume anthology, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909. His firm dissolved, albeit amicably, he designed less, but his focus remained steadily on “the book.”
This exhibition examines this masterwork, attempts to reveal the editorial and creative processes through primary sources, and reflects on Stokes’ legacy.
This is the story of a Manhattan scion, Manhattan’s icon, I. N. Phelps Stokes.
Manhattan's Icon 