[4][5][6] White grew up at Box Hill, a farmhouse converted to an Italianate mansion by his architect father, situated on his parents' 60-acre Long Island estate.

[10] From 1915 until 1917, he worked at McKim, Mead & White (as did his Harvard classmate and fellow architect Frederic Rhinelander King).

[13] He also designed the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Newark, 52 Wall Street, the Regimental Barracks on Governors Island, and the Girard Trust Company offices in Philadelphia.

[10][14] White served as the president of the National Academy of Design for five years and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art shortly before his death.

[1][15] According to The New York Times, White was "a renaissance man" who "wrote light verse, painted, played the piano and published a translation of Dante's Inferno.