Empty Mansions

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 includedDickens 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
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    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 ofancient 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” ina 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 showmanP. 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

 
    W HEN 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.
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    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,