Empty Mansions (20 page)

These showgirls on the console of the pipe organ at the Clark mansion were hired by the home’s buyer to lead public tours before the demolition.
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illustration credit5.3
)

Huguette and her half-siblings had trouble, however, finding a buyer for the mansion. Exactly as W.A. had told the property assessor, the Clark mansion was fit for only one owner. It was too expensive to operate, almost too expensive to tear down. Built for $7 million to $10 million, it sold for less than $3 million. The money from the sale was divided among the children.

In the summer of 1927, the tower of the Clark mansion came down, making way for the next wave in architecture, an apartment building with elegant interiors. Other mansions on Fifth Avenue were disappearing as well. The palace of Vincent Astor, the château of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt—
many mansions yielded to modernity. The Gilded Age was past.

At auction, the Clark heirs sold a silver candelabra, hundreds of yards of red velvet wall hangings, porcelain soup plates with gold trim and the Clark crest—nearly half a million dollars in furnishings, or in today’s values more than $6 million. A collector took the bronze carriage gates
to his farm. W.A.’s daughter May moved the walls of two entire rooms to her mansion on Long Island. The mirror-paneled walls and doors went to the city’s children’s hospital. When no buyer was found for the grand marble staircase, it was loaded onto a scow and dumped at sea.

The Clark mansion’s marble staircase, made of creamy, ivory-tinted Maryland marble, lasted only sixteen years.
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illustration credit5.4
)

Before the pinch bars and hammers began the demolition, the new owner of the Clark mansion allowed curiosity seekers inside to gawk at its bones, stripped of its art collection and furnishings. Among more than sixteen thousand tourists paying fifty cents for a peek was Charlie Chaplin. To promote the tours, showgirls posed for photographs: eight showgirls standing in front of the dining room fireplace, then the same eight clowning on the pipe organ.

Ah, the pipe organ.
No one thought to auction off Anna and W.A.’s $120,000 marvel. The real estate developer asked the man handling the demolition if he could take it home, thinking the organ might look good in his home or his church. He was prepared to pay a few thousand dollars, but the wrecker told him, “You can have the organ, if you’ll give me a cigar.” The developer soon realized his folly. The pipe organ was too inextricably built into the walls of the house to be removed intact. It was dumped to fill a swamp in Queens. He had wasted a perfectly good cigar.

NEW YORK’S DISAPPEARING MILLIONAIRES’ ROW
 

Prominent residences on Fifth Avenue in 1914, shown as a walking tour from south to north. Dates indicate the life span of each building.

S
OURCES:
Great Houses of New York, 1880–1930
, Michael C. Kathrens;
Gilded Mansions
, Wayne Craven. Dates of completion are approximate.

DOWNSIZING
 

F
OR THEIR NEW HOME
, Anna and Huguette found an apartment five blocks south at 907 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Seventy-Second Street. This was a super-luxury building, in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, but not showy, turning a refined limestone face to the street.

Anna’s tastes were not altogether different from her husband’s, but she added a touch of the religious, with a dark, mysterious air. When the massive wooden door to Apartment 12W was opened, the visitor passed into a paneled Jacobean gallery, thirty-seven feet long with herringbone floors. From the eleven-foot ceilings hung an ornate brass lantern with a maiden encircled by branches and leaves of gold. On the long wall to the right was an old red tapestry, about twelve feet square, depicting Crusaders bargaining with a caliph for prisoners. On the left hung stained-glass windows, facing the building’s open courtyard. These colorful panels of red and blue, apparently dating from seventeenth-century Zurich, depicted angels, knights, and coats of arms.

Though they were downsizing, the Clarks still had a marvelous view. On their twelfth floor—the top floor—a string of nine oversize windows ran the entire length of the building alongside the avenue, allowing them a view of the rapidly changing city skyline. The best view, however, was left to the servants, who had quarters on the roof, as was common in the day.

Looking down into the park in the foreground, Anna and Huguette could see Japanese cherry trees, the oval sailboat pond called Conservatory Water, and children sledding on Pilgrim Hill, with its statue commemorating the
Mayflower
’s landing at Plymouth Rock. Huguette painted this view straight across the park, a lovely scene showing the French gables of the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. Her painting is missing the iconic twin towers of the San Remo, which wouldn’t rise until after 1929.

To the right, far beyond the north end of Central Park, they could see
the Hudson River Bridge to New Jersey beginning to be built in 1927, before it was named for George Washington. To the left, looking south down Fifth Avenue, they were able to watch the Empire State Building begin its ascent in 1930.

Anna wanted nothing but the best, and this apartment had a respectable heritage as the most expensive in the city. Their
neighbors included W. C. Durant, a founder of General Motors. The previous tenant of their twelfth-floor apartment, Herbert Lee Pratt, was a name familiar to the Clarks, as Pratt and his father had been partners in Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller. Pratt had paid $30,000 a year to rent the entire twelfth floor, with its twenty-eight rooms, advertised when the building opened in 1916 as “the finest apartment in the world.” The Clarks took only half that space, five thousand square feet. Their rent was $12,000 a year, or about $150,000 in today’s dollars.

Most people, when downsizing from 121 rooms to only 17, would have to figure out which furnishings to sell off. Anna, however, didn’t own the contents of the Clark mansion. Those belonged to the estate, which was to be divided among the five children.
So she went shopping. Her tastes looked back to old Europe, nothing modern. She chose a French bed with a sumptuous green silk damask bedspread, a Queen Anne walnut wing chair covered in needlepoint, a small Jacobean inlaid and carved oak cabinet, a French library table of the Henri II period, a Chippendale mahogany bookcase; the bill of sale from Charles of London runs on for eight pages. In the last two months of 1925, Anna spent $92,210 at Charles, quite a bit more than the $75,000 President Coolidge earned in salary for the year. In today’s dollars, her new furnishings cost about $1.2 million.