Not for nothing were the, mostly young and novice, protesters of 'Occupy Wall Street' encamped downtown. The ascendancy of a new caste of modern-day robber barons is upon us. With profligate abandoned theirs is an existance of luxurious excess, made possible by the worsening poverty of masses bewildered by this shameful renaissance of deprivation and disparity.
Surely no phenomenon today better symbolizes this rampant inequality than the recent return, after decades of institutional use, of former museums, foundations and schools, back to their original function, as private dwellings. Mind you, these are not mere run-of-the-mill three-storey brownstones to which one refers, but houses of such colossal magnatude and grandeur as to most resemble the lost palaces of European aristocrats, public libraries, train stations or post offices.
For instance, with the adaptation of the Henry T. Sloane house, at 9 East 72nd Street, built in 1896 and designed by Carrere & Hastings, into the Lycée Français in 1964, who could possibly dream, in what nightmare, that at the start of the 21st century it would again become one family's home? Yet all over the Upper East Side, in Harlem and beyond, this same sort of reversal is occurring more and more.
And, without undue irony, here I am, nonetheless, documenting and exploring diverse structures, landscapes and objects created, mostly, for the obscenely rich of today and yesterday. They are people of whom I am most critical, even as I chronicle their out-sized foibles, their out-sized and singular creations.
What accounts for my fondness and advocacy of buildings and things which might reasonably be regarded as the very embodiment of the injustice I so despise? That answer, is a complex one. Possibly it comes from being made to feel that such things were in no way, save as a servant meant to care for them, destinedfor me? As with Russian Communist of the 1920's and after, who view imperial palaces, bedecked with precious art objects, not unlike African Americans now, making pilgrimages to plantations where our enslaved ancestors toiled, one feels such places to hold a kind of hard-bought reverence. Imagine the labor and hardship required to make the fortunes, grand houses of the rich celebrate; consider the collective blood, sweat and tears implicit in every part of each place.
Is it such considerations, or an addiction, to mere beauty, that makes furniture, decorations and architecture, as tainted as blood diamonds, so compelling, even to me? Is it still worse, that I admire and covet not only the backdrop, but also the form of a ritualistic life once led in such surroundings...imagining, it might return yet, in some future time when computers are capable of replicating the most sublime craftsmanship imaginable...when a retinue of capable and unquestioning robotic servants, are available to all?
A dashing portrait by William Merritt Chase makes him look harmless enough, even polished and gentle. Yet. as noted in my inarguable offering, in his day, a century ago, Montana's 'copper king', William Clark, was a man widely hated as the arch-typical robber baron. Certainly, he elicited from Mark Twain and many others little by way of admiration.
"He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time."
Because as a widower, Senator Clark had made his teenage 'ward', his mistress then his wife, last year we were all held spell-bound by the modern-day fairy tale about a sleeping princess. Clark's reclusive 104 year-old daughter was proprietor of three palatial, exactingly maintained houses, two of which she had never inhabited and one she had not visited for 25 years.
A small part of what offended New Yorkers about the only recently deceased Huguette Clark's father, the bumptious westerner turned art-collector, other than unscrupulous morals and corrupt business dealings, was his flamboyantly towering Fifth Avenue mansion. With the exception of Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt's, Collis Huntington's, Whitlaw Ried's, and latter Otto Khan's, far more modest examples, few other proper east-side robber baron dwellings brandished lomming towers. Taken individually, the various elements of Clark's residence were certainly handsome. But an overwhelming profusion of devices and ornaments, often treated with robust opulence, made the whole a tedious structure indeed. Like a pointillist painting in reverse, the further away from which one looked at Clark's greatest monument to money, unable to appreciate the vituoso carrving ot fine materials, the more obscure and coarse it appeared.
Undoubtedly, in sumptuousness, it was indebted to several contemporary buildings its designers sought to out-shine. The Sloane house mentioned earlier helped to inspire it. So did Richard Morris Hunt's double house for Mrs. William B. Astor, the acknowledged queen of New York and Newport society and her son, J. J. Astor. Located on Fifth Avenue at 62nd Street, it stood where Temple Emanuel is and was also completed in 1896.
As a youngster, my aesthetic standard was, the bigger, the bolder and more ornate, the better. More, is more! This also would seem to have been the principal motivating the inordinately rich copper king, who was born to humble Pennsylvania farmers. In an era when a lawyer doing well made $3,ooo-$5,ooo dollars annually, when the average African American New Yorker earned only $800 during the same span, William Clark had a yearly income of $12-million dollars. Is it any wonder, rising so rapidly from mundane care, Clark should choose magnificence?
When the size of his envisioned art gallery was deemed “entirely insufficient,” quietly, through his architect, Clark purchased adjoining houses to increase the size of his mansion. With a succession of 'improvements' and additions the estimated cost of the structure rose from $417,000 to $2.5-million. Errecting the gargantuan pile took a full 13 years, from 1895 until 1908. By then, it was no longer the height of architectural fashion. The Times remarked of the result of so protracted an outlay, the effort so many, “Viewed from the street the building strikes the observer as too big, too heavy, too massive, for its ground space and its residential surroundings.” Montgomery Schuyler was more succinct in his denunciation, "it is an aberration!" he wrote.
Externally, every millionaire's palace of the following generation was chastely designed as a tasteful rebuke in reaction against its unrestrained exuberance.
Yet, one wonders? Was the chorus of detractors disparaging Lord, Hewlett & Hull's design for Clark's mansion at 5th Avenue and 77th Street really deserved? Retaining M. Henri Deglane, a well-known instructor at the École des Beaux-Arts, to amplify his local architect's conception, Clark also engaged young Kenneth Murchison, a recent graduate of the world's most acclaimed architectural school. Murchison was acquainted socially with Senator Clark's two older daughters, May, Mrs. Everett Culver and Katherine Louise Clark, who in 1900 became Mrs. Lewis Rutheford Morris. A lowly draughtsman with Lord, Hewlett & Hull, able to secure for his firm such a dream commission, implementing the construction of a structure where, on the whole, money was no object, Murchison demanded 10 percent of the partner's fee. Inevitably, the dispute that arose as a consequence broke up the firm and still took years to resolve.
Clark's willingness to spend whatever it took to get the richest and showiest outcome was legendary. The Senator minded little about paying whatever tariff was required to obtain top quality. This is indicated by the record prices he routinely paid for paintings, tapestries and porcelain. However, he was totally adverse to being cheated. So, when his quarry, the Maine and New Hampshire Granite Company, increased their bid for stone work, Clark purchased their adjacent competitors, establishing his own stone cutting operation. According to Christopher Gray, exorbitant bids for bronze work , provoked a similar response,with Clark acquiring the Henry Bannard Bronze Company for whom he provided a supply of copper from his own mines.
With a carriage-way requiring more space than any other, besides Henry Clay Frick's, Clark's house exhibited several innovative forms of conspicuous consumption. Reserved, besides the reception room, for minor, low ceillinged spaces, like the owner's office, billiard room and service facilities, the ground floor of his residence was meant merely as a fortaste of splendors to come.
And in no way did the 'first floor' piano nobile disappoint on delivering grandeur in abundance. If the entry of Edwina Ashley's girlhood home in London was mockingly called, "the giant's lavatory", due to the prousion of rare marbles covering its walls, so too could have Senator Clark's marble halls. Graced by neo-classical statuary, lined with Maryland marble and eight Bresche violet columns, the rotunda rose 36 feet. It opened into a domed glass and bronze conservatory, 30 feet high and 22 feet wide. With windows corresponding to mirrored doors, a painted and gilded oval salon reprised the famous round room of the Hôtel de Soubise. The dining room ceiling was carved from quarter-sawn oaks felled in Sherwood Forest. Numidian marble its fireplace measured 15 feet across with life-size figures of Diana and Neptune en-framing the over mantle's cartouche.
Groaning with Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Young Man", Gainsbroughs, a coupleRubens and 22 Monticellis, displayed against crimson silk velvet, Clark's top-lit art gallery was 95 feet long and two stories high. At a time without stereo systems or compact disc, the millionaires favorite toy was a home pipe organ. Clark's instrument was the largest chamber organ in America, with 62 speaking stops, imitative of a symphony orchestra. Equipped with a mechanical player mechanism, the organ's sonorous sounds could be pipped throughout the house via a series of ducts. A similar network provided cooled and conditioned air. Among 120 rooms filled with fine French tapestries and furniture, were 24 marble waistcoated baths.
By now, surely one must realize that, no more than in any other aspect of his life, when it came to antiquities, Clark was no purist. Arguably his drawing room was the aesthetic highpoint of his décor. Fashionably supplied with Goût grec boiseries from the Parisian Hôtel de Clermont, Clark had no hesitation whatever, adapting the square Salon Doré, to fit his larger, rectangular room. The clever ministrations of highly accomplished craftsmen, with reproduced painted panels, windows and garlanded trophies, subtly embellished with green and yellow gilt, the salon was successfully 'strecheed.' As the ceiling didn't fit, the larger painted ceiling of an adjacent room in the 1760's house was obtained.
Yes, it strikes me this was a house of greater qualities than we have been led to believe before. On March 25, 1925, one of the 50 richest men in America, 86-year-old William A. Clark died. With a moderate admission charge for charity, two years later the mansion was opened to the public from February 20th through March 1st. The public viewing went well enough to indicate how popular the senator's idea to open his home, its matchless collections intact, as a satellite of the Met. Soon after this exhibitin, so like a wake, only 19 years after it was finished, the most opulent house ever built in New York, was razed to the ground.
Thanks to a superb cashe of photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, one can still get some understanding of what was lost at 77th Street. Along with the better part of Clark's artwork, the restored Hôtel de Clermont Goût grec Salon Doré, survives at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C. Even a room as exceptionally lovely as this though, hardly mitigates such a devastating loss. As for Senator Clark, one feels certainly, that as someone ever on the outlook for swindlers, he would have minded far more the inept way in which his daughter was cheated, than he would have the obliteration of his house, which so many thought, 'over-rich', that he considored 'the pink of perfection.'
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