Empty Mansions

sent his wife and daughters west to the Rocky Mountains to Butte, Montana, where he had made his fortune in copper mining. He stayed behind inhis New York apartment, sometimes spending the night in the unfinished Clark mansion, changing the plans to make it grander.
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    “When this modern palace is completed,” the New York
World
reported, “it will rival in beauty and richness the mythical palace of Aladdin.” W.A. had selected the site in 1895, paying $220,000 for the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Seventh Street, prominently situated in the middle of New York’s Millionaires’ Row, up the avenue from Vanderbilt and Astor, down from Carnegie. By the time it was finished in 1911, observers called it the “biggest, bulliest and brassiest of all American castles,” “the most remarkable dwelling in the world,” and “without doubt the most costly and, perhaps, the most beautiful private residence in America.”
    The 121-room mansion was also Huguette’s childhood home from age five to eighteen. This was a fairy-tale castle come to life, with secret entrances, mysterious sources of music, and treasures collected from all the world. When Andrée and Huguette would arrive home in their chauffeured automobile, accompanied by a private security guard, they passed through the open carriage gates—bronze gates twenty feet high, fit for a palace.
    The bottom half of the six-story Beaux Arts mansion was not so unusual in its day, and might not have stood out if it were W.A.’s bank building. But on the top half, every inch was decorated with Parisian Beaux Arts ostentation, a profusion of lions, cherubs, and goddesses. Oh, but the architects weren’t done. Soaring above the mansion was anornate domed tower reaching nine stories, so pleased with itself that it continued to an open cupola. The overall effect was as if a lavish wedding cake had been designed in the daytime by a distinguished chef, and then overnight a French Dr. Seuss sneaked in to add a few extra layers.
    Andrée and Huguette were outdoor girls. In the winter, dressed in matching red coats and red broad-brimmed hats,they went coasting down hills on sleds in Central Park. In the summer, they romped in matching sailor shirts and bloomers gathered above the knee. From any corner of the park, they had a specific home base for navigation: the tower of the Clark mansion. And when they stood in the tower itself, one hundred feet above the sidewalk, Andrée and Huguette could see all of Manhattan spread out below them.
    Reporters who toured the home counted twenty-six bedrooms, thirty-one bathrooms, and five art galleries. Below the basement’s Turkish baths, swimming pool, and storage room for furs, a railroad spur brought in coal for the furnace, which burned seven tons on a typical day, not only for heat but also to power dynamos for the two elevators, the cold-storage plant, the air-filtration plant, and the 4,200 lightbulbs.
    As the girls pulled into the U-shaped driveway, they rode first into an open-air main courtyard and then under an archway into a vestibule decorated with a fountain of Tennessee marble. The fountain displayed a satyr’s head projecting from a great clamshell, while two marble mermaids played in the spray. Their carriage then passed into a rotunda, where the young ladies of the house could disembark.
    Mass production of the automobile had not yet begun when the plans were drawn up in 1898 by alittle-known firm. By 1900, the foundation was being laid, but W.A. kept changing the plans, buying up five neighboring houses to make room for a more extravagant plan by a more famous architect, Henri Deglane, the designer of the Grand Palais in Paris.
    W.A. supervised every detail of the house, every furnishing.To hurry along the work, and to keep from being gouged on the prices, in 1905 he bought the Henry-Bonnard bronze foundry, which used copper from his mine in Arizona to make the radiator gratings and door locks. When the price of white granite was raised by a quarry in North Jay, Maine, W.A. bought the quarry next door to undercut the price. He also boughtthe stone-dressing plant, the marble factory, the woodwork factory, and the decorative-plaster plant.
    The plans were modified to include an automobile room after Ransom Olds began selling his Curved Dash Oldsmobile in 1901. After the home was occupied in 1911, photographs show carriages of both types—horse-drawn and horseless—lined up by the gate,