Dennis Miller Bunker: And What of Eleanor?

"Wisdom of Law" by Henry O. Walker

How terribly sad for Eleanor Hardy Bunker to have lost her husband of only three months to influenza. Dennis Miller Bunker had written her frequently when they were apart. Some of the letters speaking of their relationship were quite imaginative and beautiful. He wrote her:

"I wish often for the magic lamp of Alladin and the magic carpet that one had only to speak to be obeyed. I wish those days would come when we might sit on our carpet and be transported over the seas and mountains and cities wherever we wished to go - where we could ride on the backs of enormous genies with great black and blue wings and fly so fast and far the stars would seem like one stream of white fire - where we would go there would be no cold nor wind but always summer and green - and a white palace with a thousand steps and a thousand domes and a thousand white horses in the stables..."

They had been very happy together, and this classic beauty had posed for a commission that Dennis Miller Bunker had just received from Standford White. One can only imagine her grief when their dreams were completely shattered.

Three years later in 1893, she married Charles Platt, a close friend of her husband whose wife had also died in childbirth several years before. Platt was an artist, landscape designer, and architect. Among his works were the gardens at the Larz and Isabel Anderson estate and the Brandegee estate, both in Brookline, and the Freer Gallery of Art building in Washington. They had five children. Among them were William (1897-1984) and Geoffrey (1905-1985), who followed in their father's footsteps and practiced architecture in New York City.

A friend of the Platts, the muralist Henry O. Walker, used Eleanor as the model for the mural "Wisdom of the Law" in the appellate court building in Madison Square in New York (1898-99). In 1968, her son Geoffrey, as the first chairman of the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission, was in the courthouse facing a challenge to the preservation law when he looked around (reported the New York Times) "to find a very familiar face staring at him from the courtroom wall. He said ‘There was mother, and I knew everything would be all right.’" 

Eleanor's second husband Charles died in 1933. She lived for twenty more years before dying in 1953 at the age of 84.

(Info from the Brookline Historical Society website: https://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org/archives/slideShowPeople.asp?ID=Hardy01 and the SNAC Cooperative website: https://snaccooperative.org/view/3428010 )