Empty Mansions

interests, with Harriman in the shadows andClark out front as president. It took a while for the news to reach their men, however, and even as thetwo tycoons were shaking hands on the armistice and toasting each other, their men in the mountains were still battling over every inch of ground.
    The Clark Road began operation in May 1905, with brass bands and gifts of flowers for the passengers slowing down the first run so much that it arrived in Salt Lake four hours late.
    W.A. threw a rolling party, inviting Salt Lake notables, including two apostles of the Mormon Church, for a return trip to Los Angeles. The
Los Angeles Times
headline read, “Saints and Elders Greet Us—Handclasps for Our Salt Lake Friends.” The visitors wore red badges with this inscription: “We just arrived on the brand new track. You’ve a hot old town but we’re going back.” W.A. was honored at a banquet, with one of the visitors toasting him: “The two cities are wedded, and Senator Clark has provided the ring.”
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    In the Nevada desert, the Clark Road needed a maintenance point for switching railcars and storing water and fuel. W.A.’s men found a working ranch in the right spot, an abandoned Mormon missionary camp.
    W.A. had more land than he needed after the railroad opened, and saw an opportunity for profit. In 1905, he subdivided 110 acres to create a small town of 1,200 lots. People came from Los Angeles on a special Clark train for the auction, held on May 15 in desert heat above 100 degrees. Bidders paid as little as $100 for residential lots and as much as $1,750 for the corner commercial lots on the main street, called Fremont. At the end of the second day, W.A.’s auction company had sold half of his properties, pocketing more than $250,000.
    The missionary camp became Los Vegas Rancho (deliberately spelled differently from Las Vegas, New Mexico). Then it was Stewart Ranch. Clark called the new town Clark’s Las Vegas Townsite, but everyone else left off the Clark name, calling it Las Vegas, which eventually became the glittering gambling capital of the world. W.A. traveled to Las Vegas in February 1905, riding in the luxury of his new private Pullman car with its two apartments, a dining room for twelve, and an observation room finished in English oak and brass. He told the citizens theywould soon have a decent town with schools, churches, water, and roads. In 1909, a new Clark County was carved out with Las Vegas as its seat, one of the few lasting memorials to the Clark name.

    Owner of the railroad that established the town of Las Vegas in 1905, W. A. Clark greets the town’s citizens from his private railcar that year. His company auctioned off the lots that became downtown Las Vegas, now in Clark County.
( illustration credit3.3 )
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    From the time that his mother and siblings relocated to Los Angeles, W.A. visited at least once a year, generally staying in his mother’s Victorian home on South Olive Street, a few blocks from the current location of the Biltmore hotel and Pershing Square. He continued his visits after his mother died in 1904 and then threw himself into a philanthropic project there named for her, a group residence for young working women called the Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home.
    W.A.’s sister Ella had proposed that they create a memorial to their mother, in anticipation of the one hundredth anniversary of her birth coming up in 1914. W.A. said he preferred something practical, rather than a park or a statue. They agreed on building an affordable place where young, single women pursuing a career could live in a safe and wholesome environment. Now into his seventies, W.A. selected the siteon Crown Hill, west of downtown Los Angeles, hiring an architect and taking a hands-on interest in the design and materials, much as he had with his own mansions.The Clarks donated the massive 150-room French château to the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which operated it from 1913 as a dormitory for stenographers, office assistants, saleswomen, dressmakers, nurses, artists. The rules were strict—no men allowed upstairs, no slacks or curlers at dinner.
    After dinner at Ella’s home when W.A. would visit, the Clark family would tell stories while enjoying their dear departed mother’s favorite dessert,
île flottante
, or floating island, a meringue floating on custard.
    Ella’s son, Paul Clark Newell, Sr., recalled years later those family dinners, and a