The Controversial Origins of New York City's Frick Collection
James Nevius is the author of three books about New York, the most recent of which is Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers.
[Photo courtesy of Flickr user t-mizo]
The Frick Collection is heralded as one of the world's best small museums, but it has recently stirred up controversy with a proposed six-story addition that would expand the museum by over 40,000 square feet. Not only would this expansion destroy parts of an earlier, 1970s renovation (including a private garden), it would also reconfigure the experience of visiting what is often referred to as a "jewel box" of a space. But any museum named after Henry Clay Frick is probably destined to invite controversy. Not only was Frick himself a polarizing figure—he was known as the "most hated man in America," and once targeted for assassination—but the construction of his mansion a century ago raised the hackles of New York's Fifth Avenue elite in much the same way that the Frick's current expansion plans have sent some New Yorkers into a tizzy.
Frick, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1849, began amassing the fortune that would get him to New York at age 21, when he founded the Frick Coke Company, which supplied the fuel used in Pennsylvania's steel mills. Ten years later, already a millionaire, he entered into a partnership with steel baron Andrew Carnegie, vaulting him into the ranks of America's richest men.
[The Vanderbilt Mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue. Photo via the Library of Congress.]
Around the same time, a visit to William H. Vanderbilt's art-filled mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue spurred Frick to begin collecting paintings himself (his first purchase was a Pennsylvania landscape), much of it under the guidance of art dealers Roland Knoedler and Joseph Duveen. The Vanderbilt mansion, with its elegant furnishings and art-lined galleries, made quite an impression on Frick; according to biographer (and great-granddaughter) Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Frick later remarked, "It is all I shall ever want."
Before he could pursue his mansion dreams, misfortune began to hound Frick. On May 31, 1889, the dam gave out at Lake Conemaugh, a private lake at a fishing and hunting club Frick had helped found. The dam collapse sent millions of gallons of water downriver toward Johnstown, PA, killing 2,209 people—at the time, the worst disaster in American history. Though Frick quickly set up a relief fund for the victims' families, he couldn't fully dodge the club's—or his own—role in the tragedy. Soon thereafter, his young daughter Martha died, and a year later, his son Henry, Jr.
A national scandal followed when Carnegie Steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, went on strike, in part due to Frick's ongoing attempts to break the union. On July 6, 1892, a battle broke out between steelworkers and the Pinkerton agents Frick had contracted to reopen the mill. In the skirmish, nine union members and three Pinkerton agents were killed. In retaliation, anarchist Alexander Berkman burst into Frick's office two weeks later and shot him twice at close range. Remarkably, Frick not only survived the attack but was back at his desk within the week. But Frick's reputation was sullied, and it was the beginning of a decade of strained relations between Frick and Carnegie that would ultimately send Frick from Pittsburgh to New York. (Not, however, before Frick built his company's Pittsburgh headquarters right next to Carnegie's—and taller—so that his building would overshadow his rival's.)
After a brief stay at Sherry's Hotel in New York, Frick rented the Vanderbilt mansion, the same house that had started him on his path as an art collector, in 1905. He packed up fifty paintings from Clayton, his Pittsburgh mansion, and moved them to New York, allegedly because the pollution from his own coke ovens and Carnegie's mills was damaging the art. This was the beginning of what would become the Frick Collection.
In New York, Frick began to collect paintings that (in Sanger's words) "reflected the high society into which he was moving," including portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough, a Turner landscape, and El Greco's Saint Jerome. Then, in 1906, Frick took a step to ensure his ever-growing art collection would be preserved for future generations: he purchased the lot at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 70th Street so that he could move out of the Vanderbilt house into a grand mansion of his own.
There was only one problem—a beloved Beaux-Arts masterpiece stood in Frick's way. This was the Lenox Library, a rare book and manuscript collection founded by philanthropist James Lenox and housed on the block of Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st streets in a building designed by the "dean" of American architecture, Richard Morris Hunt. The Times had deemed the library "a structure of chaste and simple design…gratifying to the eye," and its reputation as a Hunt masterpiece only grew with time. Ostensibly a public library, it was nearly impossible to visit: it was only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays and admission required written permission of the librarian....MORE
