Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Mass production of the automobile had not yet begun when the plans were drawn up in 1898 by a little-known firm. By 1900, the foundation was being laid, but W.A. kept changing the plans, buying up five neighboring houses to make room for a more extravagant plan by a more famous architect, Henri Deglane, the designer of the Grand Palais in Paris.

  W.A. supervised every detail of the house, every furnishing. To hurry along the work, and to keep from being gouged on the prices, in 1905 he bought the Henry-Bonnard bronze foundry, which used copper from his mine in Arizona to make the radiator gratings and door locks. When the price of white granite was raised by a quarry in North Jay, Maine, W.A. bought the quarry next door to undercut the price. He also bought the stone-dressing plant, the marble factory, the woodwork factory, and the decorative-plaster plant.

  The plans were modified to include an automobile room after Ransom Olds began selling his Curved Dash Oldsmobile in 1901. After the home was occupied in 1911, photographs show carriages of both types—horse-drawn and horseless—lined up by the gate, with the automobile’s driver careful to park in front of the horse.

  From the carriage rotunda, Andrée and Huguette could stop on the ground floor to see their father in his private office, situated at the street corner for maximum light. With Santo Domingo mahogany walls, the office was dominated by a Gilbert Stuart portrait above the mantel—the familiar face of George Washington now on the one-dollar bill.

  Huguette’s girlhood home, the most expensive house in New York, afforded 121 rooms for a family of four. Note both types of carriages awaiting passengers at the Clark mansion on Seventy-Seventh Street at Fifth Avenue. (illustration credit 1.1)

  IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

  Saints, and religion in general, were more important to the Roman Catholic Anna and her daughters than they were to W.A. He had been a Presbyterian as a youth, then as a prosperous banker he became a more fashionable Episcopalian. Though he helped to build most of the churches in Butte, he admitted, “I am not much of a churchman.”

  Huguette told me that as a child she asked her father, “Oh, Papa, why can’t you be Catholic?”

  His reply: “All religions are lovely, my dear.”

  —PAUL NEWELL

  If Andrée and Huguette sneaked through their father’s waiting room and down the mirror-lined hallway past his office library, they could peek into the house’s male domain, a Gothic-style great hall for smoking and billiards. The room was twenty feet by ninety feet, decorated with a thirteenth-century stained-glass window from a cathedral at Soissons in France.

  The billiard room had another oddity: six paintings depicting the heroism, trial, and cruel death of Joan of Arc, France’s maiden heroine. Her story was a particular favorite of Andrée’s. The French artist of these paintings, Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, had done a children’s history of the maiden Joan, and the girls met the artist in France. At first the artist intended these paintings for a chapel near Domrémy, Joan’s birthplace. But W.A. had to have them, so instead of being on view for the faithful who made pilgrimages to honor Joan, they were hanging in W.A.’s billiard room.

  The cost of building the Clark house, not counting the furnishings, had been predicted to be $3 million, which would have made it as expensive as Rockefeller’s and Carnegie’s homes combined. As so often happens with home construction projects, the cost climbed—to $5 million, then $7 million, and some newspapers said $10 million, a bill that works out to a bit more than $250 million in today’s currency. For perspective, the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building, a neo-Gothic cathedral of commerce completed in 1913 in Lower Manhattan, cost $13.5 million, and the Woolworth would reign for nearly two decades as the tallest skyscraper in the world. Still, the Clark mansion cost no more than two years’ profits flowing from a single Clark copper mine, the United Verde in Arizona. Always watching his pennies, W.A. was able to persuade the courts to lower his property tax bill by valuing the home at only $3.5 million, on the legal theory that it was so expensive to operate that it was of no use to anyone else.

  The girls could ride up to the main floor in the elevator, or climb the grand circular staircase. Made of ivory-tinted Maryland marble, the stairs wound their way through a ceiling of oak overlaid with gold leaf. At the top of the stairs, Andrée and Huguette passed two exquisite bronze statues on white marble pedestals, each showing classical Greek heroes in scenes of struggle: on the left a muscular Odysseus bending his bow to show his strength and prove his identity, and on the right a chained Prometheus enduring his endless torture, an eagle eating his liver.

  From the top of the stairs, the girls could look down the hallway, of white marble with mottled Breche violette columns, to the marble sculpture hall, with its thirty-six-foot-high octagonal dome made of terra-cotta, in the center of which hung an antique Spanish silver lamp. Here the girls enjoyed playing a game of hide-and-seek. If Andrée, the braver one, climbed to the third floor and passed through an alcove to the top of the dome, she could look down to see Huguette three floors below.

  IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

  On November 3, 2003, Huguette called, her voice strong and clear as usual. I thanked her for the packet of family photos she had sent and asked her about the photo of her father and his guests standing at a long dining table. She said it had been taken in the formal dining room at the Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue in 1913.

  Could she tell me who the guests were? She mentioned several, including J. P. Morgan, and …

  “Oh, what was that character’s name? Oh, yes, Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie.”

  The main dining room, twenty-five feet by forty-nine feet, was about the same size as a family apartment in New York City. Above its massive fireplace, carved figures of Neptune, god of the sea, and Diana, goddess of the hunt, presided over the stone mantel, attended by cherubs, guarded at their feet by carved lions six feet tall. The ceiling set mouths agape: gilded panels carved from a single English oak supposedly harvested from Sherwood Forest. Over the door was a panel for the new Clark crest. The Clarks had no hereditary coat of arms, so W.A. sketched one out himself with elements fit for a royal house: a lion, an anchor, and a Gothic C.

  Huguette recalled that her father forbade the girls to run around in the grand salon. W.A. had bought this room, alone the size of a typical house, and had it reassembled here overlooking Fifth Avenue and the woodlands of Central Park. Called the Salon Doré, or “golden room,” it gleamed with exquisitely carved and gilded wood panels made in 1770 for a vainglorious French nobleman. W.A. brought the extravagant wall panels intact from Paris, adding reproduction panels to make the square room fit into his larger rectangular space. He decorated the salon with a clock from the boudoir of Marie Antoinette. During the French Revolution, when the former queen was under house arrest at Paris’s Tuileries Palace, this gilded clock counted down the hours before her imprisonment and execution. A century later, this room was reserved for formal occasions. The Clark girls were allowed to play in the smaller room next to it, sitting on the Persian carpet of the petit salon.

  The girls found more wonders in the tower. Huguette recalled playing hide-and-seek with Andrée there, one hundred feet above the street, discomforting their mother terribly. The tower held its own secret, a suite held in reserve for dark days. This was the quarantine suite, a valued space in these years before antibiotics, with bedrooms and its own kitchen, a refuge in case of a pandemic.

  Coming down from the tower, the girls passed the servants’ quarters on the fifth and sixth floors. The nursery on the fifth floor was separated into night and day nurseries, each with its own kitchen. A gentleman from The New York Times who toured the new house explained, “As the Senator and Mrs. Clark have but two small children, the facilities of these spacious rooms will not be overtaxed.” On the fourth floor was the Oriental room, with the senator’s treasures from the East, and some of the twenty-five guest rooms. These higher floors were designed at first to hold apartments to accommodate W.A.’s grown chil
dren from his first marriage, but they already had their own homes, and the apartments were converted to other uses.

  Brought over from Paris, the golden room, or Salon Doré, was a bit too formal for Andrée and Huguette to play hide-and-seek in. (illustration credit1.2)

  There were many nooks for Andrée and Huguette to explore. The private area of the mansion, the part reserved for the immediate family, was located on the third floor. Here the most comfortable spot was the morning room, with a bearskin rug at one end and a tiger rug at the other. The mirror-paneled walls hid mysterious doors, which opened on a spring when the right spot was touched, revealing a fire hose, a storage closet with boxes of cigars, or an entire suite of rooms. Perhaps these doors were hidden out of whimsy, perhaps with an eye toward security.

  The family of four had seventeen servants in residence, including a houseman, a waitress, two butlers, three cooks, and ten maids. For dish-ware, W.A. and Anna ordered from Chicago a nine-hundred-piece set of china, costing $100,000, or about $3 million today. It was a simple pattern, aside from the gold trim and Clark crest.

  The room that Huguette described with the most fondness, years later, was the library, warmed by a fireplace from a sixteenth-century castle in Normandy, with armed knights standing guard as andirons. The mantel was carved with a scene of rural revelry, bringing to mind W.A.’s own origins, with a shepherdess, a bagpiper, and dancing men. The ceiling was of carved French mahogany from the 1500s, and the room contained three stained-glass windows freed from a thirteenth-century abbey in Belgium. Its thousands of volumes included Dickens and Conan Doyle, Poe and Thoreau, Ibsen and Twain.

  A morning room in the Clark mansion was decorated with a tiger rug at the near end and a bear rug at the far end. The public areas downstairs were cavernous galleries and salons, while the suites upstairs were more warmly decorated for family living, though still featuring European furnishings and the finest Persian rugs. (illustration credit1.3)

  Oh, but from France—their France—the library also held copies of letters of Marie Antoinette, a history of French illustration, and the fables: seventy-five volumes wrapped in red Levant morocco leather and gilt lettering, the works of Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian and his more famous predecessor Jean de La Fontaine. These were French versions of ancient stories still known the world over, such as “The Ant and the Grasshopper” and “The Miser Who Lost His Treasure,” along with lesser-known gems, “The Man with Two Mistresses” and “The Cricket.”

  Huguette recalled nearly a century later how Andrée patiently read to her here, enjoying the fables and fairy tales of the France they had left behind. Of all the rooms in the mansion, the library was the one Huguette missed most of all.

  • • •

  Huguette once showed her nurses a photograph of “my father’s house” in a book of the great houses of New York. With evident pride she reminisced about how much fun she and her sister had had there. The architectural criticism in that book didn’t pierce her memories.

  Critics have long been mixed in their opinion of the Clark castle: Some didn’t like it, and others thought it awful. It was called an abomination, a monstrosity, and “Clark’s Folly.” The Architectural Record said it would have been a fine home for showman P. T. Barnum. The horizontal grooves in the limestone suggested to some passersby that the building was wearing corduroy pants. Others were offended by the tower, so vulgar and bombastic.

  It may be time for a reassessment of the Clark mansion. In his “Streetscapes” column in The New York Times in 2011, architectural historian Christopher Gray took the critics to task: “These opinions have been parroted many times but, upon contemplation, this is a pretty neat house. If Carrere & Hastings [architects of the New York Public Library] had designed it for an establishment client, its profligacy would certainly have been forgiven, perhaps lionized.”

  It’s not clear, however, whether the true objection of critics was to the building or to the man it represented. Whatever one thought of the house, it was a perfect embodiment of W. A. Clark’s lifelong striving for opulence and recognition, his defiance of criticism, and his self-indulgence.

  AN AMERICAN CHARACTER

  WHEN THE SLIGHTLY BUILT MAN in the black frock coat and silk top hat stepped briskly down New York’s Fifth Avenue in the Easter Sunday parade of 1914, the gawkers saw his face and recognized him instantly. His bristly beard and mustache may have turned from auburn to gray, but at seventy-five years of age, he was the picture of sartorial eminence. The proud little man was accompanied by three discreet touches of male vanity: a gold watch chain hanging from his dapper white waistcoat, a polka-dotted silk cravat held tightly to his high collar by a pearl stickpin, and his thirty-six-year-old wife. The publicity-shy Anna walked in the parade by his side, wearing a flowered hat and an uncomfortable expression, perhaps attributable to the tiny steps enforced by her fashionable but thoroughly impractical hobble skirt from Paris.

  Uncomfortable in public, Huguette’s mother, Anna, does not appear to be enjoying the Easter Parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which offered a chance for the public to gawk at the tycoons living on Millionaires’ Row. On Easter in April 1914, eleven-year-old Andrée walks in the parade, studying her fingernails while her mother gives her hand a tug. Seven-year-old Huguette stayed home. (illustration credit2.1)

  There strode a man of unusual character, a symbol of two contradictory American archetypes.

  W. A. Clark, businessman, was legendary, respected on Wall Street as a modern-day Midas. The epitome of frontier gumption, he was a triumphant mixture of civilizing education, self-reliance, and western pluck, living proof that in America the avenues to corporate wealth were open even to one born in a log cabin.

  W. A. Clark, politician, was ridiculed on magazine covers as a payer of bribes, the epitome of backroom graft, and a crass mixture of ostentatious vanity, extravagance, and Washington plutocracy, living proof that in America the avenues to civic power were open only to those with the most greenbacks.

  An indefatigable worker, W.A. carried on at a pace that today seems impossible, especially in an era when travel was by steamship and railroad, and communication by letter and telegram. During the first decade of the 1900s, for example, he maintained homes in Paris and Montana; built and furnished the most expensive house in New York City; constructed out of his own pocket a major railroad between Los Angeles harbor and Salt Lake City; subdivided and marketed lots for the city of Las Vegas; oversaw the operation of copper mines in several western states; ran streetcar and electric power companies in the West and a bronze foundry and copper wire factory in the East; grew sugar beets in California; published several newspapers; owned a bank with a good national reputation; was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate, then was reelected and served six more years; fought off a paternity suit filed by a young woman he had met at the Democratic National Convention; traveled through Europe collecting art; maintained good relations with his adult children; married a young wife and sired two daughters. All while in his sixties.

  Though often chosen as a leader because of his intelligence, resolve, and deep pockets, he was not blessed with a magnetic disposition. W.A. was introverted and extremely private, a closemouthed man who acted as if he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him. If people didn’t like what he did, they were wrong. And yet he did give a damn about some things, including family, art, and social prominence. He was a seeker of public attention, not a great orator but a persistent one. He cheerfully took center stage to lead the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at public events and didn’t limit himself to the familiar first stanza.

  In the pocket of his cutaway coat, W.A. carried two grades of cigars, fine ones for himself and lesser ones to give away.

  “TO BETTER MY CONDITION”

  W. A. CLARK COULD HONESTLY SAY he rose from a log cabin to the most magnificent mansion on Fifth Avenue, a handy trajectory in America’s tradition of Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories. Yet W.A.’s beginnings w
ere not so impoverished as he let on.

  Will Clark, as W.A. was known as a boy, was indeed born in a four-room log cabin on January 8, 1839, but his grandfather owned a 172-acre farm in a remote corner of southwestern Pennsylvania called Dunbar Township. That’s southeast of Pittsburgh, about two miles outside the small city of Connellsville, then known for its iron furnaces. This area was becoming connected to a wider world. One of Will’s chores was to haul farm produce into town to sell to travelers who were leaving by flatboat on the Youghiogheny River, which led to the Monongahela, then the Ohio, and westward into the expanding nation.

  Those were hard times. The nation had fallen into a seven-year economic depression beginning with the panic of 1837. It was not easy to see that the world was on the cusp of the second industrial revolution, when America would begin to take its place as a great power. In 1838, the year before W.A.’s birth, Samuel Morse demonstrated the first long-distance telegraph. A year after his birth, the first customer bought one of Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reapers for harvesting grain. The number of stars on the American flag had doubled from the original thirteen, reaching twenty-six with the addition of Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan in 1837. The people of Dunbar Township were buying their first books written by Americans. Will’s father had obtained an account of the westward journey fifty years earlier by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (no relation).

  “The scenes of my joyous childhood,” W.A. reminisced some seventy-five years later, were “outlined then by a very limited horizon. Nevertheless, I can recall ambitious speculations engendered in my mind when on winter evenings my father read the thrilling adventures of Lewis and Clark’s explorations.… This had the effect of strengthening my preconceived but ill-defined idea of adventure. And I recall telling my mother one day at luncheon hour, when I had returned from hoeing corn, and the weeds were really bad, that when old enough I would seek my fortune in the great West.”