The Frick Collection, the museum established by Henry Clay Frick (1848–1919), has just undergone a $330 million renovation, with new galleries, rewoven wall coverings and carpets, a new auditorium, and a delightful new café. Originally the infamous steel magnate’s imposing, block-wide city residence, designed by Carrere & Hastings, it was completed 111 years ago. This was the apogee of the period known as the Gilded Age.
Back then, 1 East 70th Street was but one among a few hundred grandiose houses bordering Central Park along Fifth Avenue between 59th and 110th Streets. Within 60 years, almost all were replaced by apartment houses. The few spared demolition became schools, foundation offices, and other institutions. In a new time of obscene inequality, one sign of how much society has digressed is that so many of these palatial structures recently have been sold and reconverted into private houses for just one family each.
Featuring incomparable European art treasures, the Frick Collection opened to the public in 1935. The high ratings of TV productions like “Downton Abbey,” “Bridgerton,” and “The Gilded Age” attest to the enormous appeal of escapist nostalgia about the elite.
When I ran into my old acquaintance Martha Stewart on my recent outing to the Frick, l could only agree when she said, “The Frick is fabulous. It offers the true ambiance of how Gilded Age ‘robber barons’ lived!”
Nowadays, many consider Central Park West or Riverside Drive and even Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope to be glorious spots, just as hot and even more desirable than the Upper East Side as a place to live. A century and more ago, this was unthinkable. Then, only Fifth and Park Avenues ranked as Manhattan’s undisputed millionaires’ row. Extending along the park, from 70th to 71st Street, stretching deep into the block, the site selected by Frick for his new house already contained a building: the memorial library of James Lenox (the man for whom Lenox Avenue was named), which was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. It was available because this privately owned public library had joined forces with two other privately financed public libraries. Taken over by the city, they moved to 42nd Street in 1911.
Magnanimously, at his own expense, Frick offered to move the much-admired empty building into Central Park to become the Parks Department’s administration office, but, after a hew and cry of objections to what was condemned as an attempt to appropriate sacrosanct parkland, this landmark was lost
Michael Henry Adams photos
Between 1914–1931 a family of three were the most people who ever lived at No. 1 East 70th Street, but formal meals in the dining room might include 20 guests. Hung with 18th-century English portraits, the serene room was decorated by White Allom & Co., the same decorators used at Buckingham Palace. Frick recommended them to Edward and Eva Stotesbury for Whitemarsh Hall, their house outside of Philadelphia. Although demolished in the 1980s, it was designed by Black architect Julian Francis Abele. (Photo courtesy of the Frick Collection Archives) 
If the cost to build his house, exclusive of land and contents, was as high as $1.5 million, the Fragonard Room by itself, featuring a series of paintings commissioned for King Louis XV’s mistress Madame Du Barry, was even more expensive. Acquired by English art dealer Joseph Duveen from the estate of J. P. Morgan, they were sold to Frick for what he paid. Duveen then doubled his investment by selling Frick suitable furnishings and porcelains. 
Henry Clay Frick’s house was meant to become a museum after he died, like the fourth Marquess of Hertford’s and Sir Richard Wallace’s (the nobleman’s illegitimate son) Wallace Collection in London. Every effort was made to assure that each curtain and tassel, every doorknob and fireplace, be exquisite. 
Named “The Westmorland,” after Henry Clay Frick’s luxurious private rail car, the Frick’s café overlooks the formal garden by Russell Paige. The Cosmopolitan Cocktails served at the café are most agreeable. 
Frick thought so highly of the dedication of Percy M. Martin — one of his 30-plus otherwise white servants — that he bequeathed him $8,000 in his will. Martin’s job of hauling, moving, and toting was the hardest in the household. He worked for the Fricks for almost 30 years. (Photo courtesy of the Frick Collection Archives) 
Whether a blacksmith at his forge by Goya or this woman doing mending by the light of a primitive oil lamp by Jean-François Millet, several works in the Frick Collection contrast with its pomp and splendor. 
Part of the program of alterations designed by John Russell Pope for transforming Henry Clay Frick’s house into a museum, the garden court replaced a driveway that traveled beneath a porte cochère between 70th and 71st Streets. 
“Selina, Lady Skipwith,” by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is just one of the bravura portraits in Frick’s oak-paneled library. Bookshelves are waist-high to allow more wall space for paintings. 
The loggia housing late-18th-century French sculpture, Antoine Hudon‘s study of “Diana Goddess of the Hunt,” was originally an open porch. 
Whether a lamp from Edward Farmer made from a Chinese vase or tassel-trimmed velvet armchairs, the quality and craftsmanship of each element at the Frick is incomparable. Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington is a rare American work in the collection.
(A superb source for learning more about the steel-man connoisseur is “The Henry Clay Frick Houses,” an illustrated book by Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Frick’s great-granddaughter.)
Born in rural West Overton, Pennsylvania, and a scion of immigrants (Swiss and German Mennonites), he was never poor. Rather, he went from middle-class moderation to obtaining riches almost beyond imagining. Unsuccessful at farming, Frick’s father married the daughter of the richest man in the region, flour merchant and rye whiskey distiller Abraham Overholt. His dad had yearned to be an artist and Frick, evidently, was enough like his father that while still a young man, his friend Andrew Mellon recalled, he had painted, too. He only did so secretly, though, lest others “think him a ‘sissy.’”
Resolute, unflinching, and methodical, Frick redirected his esthetic desires to collecting art. He also set his sights on supplying the coke — bituminous coal with gases and other impurities baked out of it — to fuel America’s burgeoning steel industry.
Showing just how beneficial generational wealth is, he borrowed cash from family and friends to start, rapidly repaying them to assure he retained control. By age 30, having amassed a coke monopoly, he’d made his first million. Approximately 149 more would follow. At his death, with generous bequests to universities and hospitals, 80% of Frick’s fortune was devoted to philanthropy — and there was still enough left over, protected by “spendthrift” trust funds, that his many descendants continue to lead lives of ease.
Forming a partnership with Pittsburgh steelmen Andrew Carnegie and Henry Phipps, as a business man, Frick was regarded as someone as ruthless as he was cunning. In the aftermath of the Jonestown Flood, for instance, he skillfully hid his elite sporting club’s full responsibility for the catastrophe. Three years later, in 1892, when the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers voted to strike at Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Company, he showed little leniency.
A battalion of 300 Pinkerton detectives was engaged to combat the strikers. In the pitched gun battle that ensued, eight workers were killed and dozens more were wounded. Fueling generations of racial hostility, Black men were hired as strike-breaking scabs.
Mere weeks later, karma stuck. Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman entered Frick’s office, determined on revenge. He shot Frick through the ear, with the bullet lodging in his back. Another hit his neck. Others came running to subdue Bergman and Frick was badly stabbed with a letter opener. Even after his attacker attempted to ignite explosives, Frick insisted he not be harmed, only restrained, to be delivered to police. Bleeding, but conscious, he then dictated a cable for his partner and for his mother: “Was twice shot … There is no necessity for you to come home …”
This brush with death came on the heels of the tragedy of his elder daughter’s death a year earlier.
In 1889, Frick had wed Adelaide Howard Childs. They acquired a large house in Pittsburgh’s best section, and expanded it and made it more stylish. Called Clayton, periodically lived in throughout the Fricks’ lives, it too is a museum today. At least two members of the ample Clayton household staff were African American.
Jane Grandison, who worked as a nursemaid for all four of the Frick children, was privy to the family’s greatest joys and their deepest sorrows, too. As a toddler, her charge, Martha Frick, swallowed a pin, and died from an infection the week before her sixth birthday.
In addition to caring for Frick’s son Childs and his favorite child, Helen Clay Frick, in 1892, Grandison nursed their mother as well. Frick’s wife was in a weakened condition after the arduous labor and delivery of her fourth child, Henry Clay Frick Jr. Grandison ministered to the new baby boy his entire life. Unfortunately, he only lived for a few weeks. After his attack a short time later, Frick felt she was the only person he could trust to prepare his meals.
Another valued Black servant working at Clayton was Spencer Ford, the Frick family’s cook. An indicator of his status was that he did not live in, but with his wife nearby. This might have also been partly due to the refusal of white employees to live with African Americans. Certainly, the $40 Ford earned monthly from 1894–1909 exceeded the wages of any of the white women he worked with. It was even greater than the housekeeper’s pay, but it was also lower than the earnings of white workmen at Clayton, like James Elmore, the Frick’s coachman.
After Frick remodeled the William Henry Vanderbilt house at 640 Fifth Avenue and moved his family to New York in 1905, the French chef there was paid a handsome $150 each month. Spencer, alas, was paid no more.
In 1904, Percy M. Martin, born in Reidsville, North Carolina, worked at Clayton for less than a year. Alternately identified in census records as “houseman,” “choreman,” and “odd-man,” in 1905, he accompanied the Fricks on their New York move. Whatever his title, Martin’s duties were the most difficult in the household, requiring hard physical exertion (at Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s Newport vacation house, “The Breakers,” only the women responsible for the hot, backbreaking work of laundresses were Black).
Martin was responsible for moving wood and freight, transporting trunks, and storing or moving furniture. He outlived Frick and his wife, unlike most of the white members of their staff, who often stayed for a year or less.
Again, most unusually, one learns from Caitlin Henningsen, whose book “Untold Stories: Domestic Service at the Frick Mansion, 1914–1931” is forthcoming next year, that Martin lived out. He married Mary Hamm in 1911, and they lived with their daughter Thelma in a walk-up apartment at 233 East 75th Street, between Second and Third Avenues (in contrast to neighboring buildings, other tenants living here were Black as well). The cost of Martin’s rent was included as part of his monthly wages.
Henningsen tells us that Martin’s loyal service was rewarded with steady advancement, noting: “Martin rose within the Frick household from a subordinate to a supervisory position, managing the annual opening and closing of Eagle Rock, the family’s summer home on the Massachusetts shore.” What’s more, she wrote: “Martin was among a small number of Henry Clay Frick’s
New York staff who received significant gifts from his estate ($8,000 in securities) after the businessman’s death, in 1919.”
Employed by Helen Clay Frick, beyond her parents’ death in 1919 and 1931, Martin only retired in 1933, to die himself six months later.
After the Frick Collection opened as a museum in 1935, Martin’s widow and daughter would tour the premises. Both retained contact with Miss Frick for decades. “So many wonderful memories raced across my mind on this visit. My father was brought back so vividly to me. Everything was as it was … so lovely, quiet and impressive,” Percy Martin’s daughter wrote after a Frick visit in 1969.
Stories taken from real life are invariably more exciting and strange than anything someone could make up. For me, “The Gilded Age” as presented in programs such as “Downton Abbey” is far too marred by anachronistic errors and deliberate distortions to watch. Because they relate history more widely than any book ever could today, series purporting to accurately portray the past have a far greater responsibility not to mislead viewers than they think they do.
How does it diminish dramatic impact to have boutonnières pinned to a lapel, as is often the case today, instead of put through a buttonhole, as it used to be done? How does it enlighten an audience to show Black Brooklynites with houses and clothes as sumptuous as those of the richest whites, when they never were?
As profoundly affected as their parents were by the death of their siblings, Childs Frick and his sister Helen Clay Frick lost their close ties and became estranged. Appreciating money as an expression of love and a means of exerting power, even they, seemingly blessed with affluence to spare, became corrupted by good fortune. Given houses and millions when he married, when their father died and his sister was left a larger amount, Childs Frick became resentful. Prevented from getting married by the fear of fortune hunters, Helen Frick tried to fix things with her brother. When their mother died, she gave him her half of the $5,000,000.00 legacy that was left to her. He took the money, but nothing changed.
On going to the Frick, where three people were once waited on by 30, in surroundings as exquisite as the galleries of the Louvre, contemplating such ironies might seem to be “white folks’ problems.” But they are not. They are more a testament to all that glitters not being golden and the inability to ever buy happiness. In addition to being exposed to what American culture teaches us is beautiful, this is another invaluable lesson to be gained at the Frick.
For more info, visit frick.org/visit.