McKim, Mead & White built houses for America’s greatest financiers and magnates: the Astors, Joseph Pulitzer, the Vanderbilts, Henry Villard, and J. P. Morgan, among others . . . They designed and built churches Trinity Church in Boston, Judson Memorial Baptist Church in New York, and the Lovely Lane Methodist Church in Baltimore . . .
They built libraries the Boston Public Library and the social clubs for gentlemen, among them, the Freundschaft, the Algonquin of Boston, the Players club of New York, the Century Association, the University and Metropolitan clubs. . . .
They built railroad terminals the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City and the first Roman arch in America for Washington Square (it put the world on notice that New York was now a major city on a par with Rome, Paris, and Berlin). They designed and built Columbia University, with Low Memorial Library at the centerpiece of its four-block campus, and New York University, and they built, as well, the old Madison Square Garden whose landmark tower marked its presence on the city’s skyline . . .
Mosette Broderick’s Triumvirate is a book about America in its industrial transition; about money and power, about the education of an unsophisticated young country, and about the coming of artists as an accepted class in American society.<
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Background Information
The Gilded Age was the term used by Mark Twain to describe America after the Civil War, which was not a golden age but one characterized by showy gilding. Joseph Pulitzer, who immigrated from Hungary and built a newspaper empire, established through a bequest the journalism awards which still today bear his name.