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Some Gilded Age mansions are remembered for their beauty. The William A. Clark House is remembered, when it is remembered at all, for its sheer, staggering excess: a 121-room French chateau on Fifth Avenue that took fourteen years and roughly seven million dollars to build, and then vanished almost as quickly as it had risen.
William Andrews Clark was a copper and railroad baron from Montana, one of the richest men in America, and a United States Senator whose career was dogged by bribery accusations. When he set out to build a New York mansion worthy of his fortune, he did not merely hire builders and buy materials. He bought the means of production. He purchased a granite quarry in New Hampshire and built a railroad to haul the stone. He bought a bronze foundry that employed two hundred men to make the fittings. He imported marble from Italy, oak from Sherwood Forest in England, and entire rooms stripped out of old French chateaux.
The finished house, completed in 1911 at 962 Fifth Avenue, was almost beyond belief. It contained 121 rooms and 31 bathrooms. It had four separate art galleries, a swimming pool, a concealed garage, and a private underground rail line whose only job was to bring in coal to heat the place. Below ground were Turkish baths; on the top floor were the laundries. A four-sided tower rose nine stories and was said to be visible from almost anywhere in Central Park.
Inside, the superlatives kept coming. There was a marble rotunda thirty-six feet high, lined with violet marble columns, opening onto a conservatory of brass and glass. The main picture gallery ran ninety-five feet and rose two stories. An organ loft held the largest chamber organ in America. A Gothic library stretched ninety feet beneath a beamed ceiling. One room, the eighteenth-century Salon Dore, had been removed intact from a Paris mansion and reinstalled as Clark's receiving room.
And yet, for all this, the house was a punchline almost from the day it opened. Architectural critics savaged it. One called it an appropriate residence for the showman P. T. Barnum. Another dubbed it the House of a Thousand Cartouches and mocked its dolorous and ponderous granite. The nickname that stuck, and that New Yorkers used with relish, was simply 'Clark's Folly.'
The cruelty of that nickname became clear soon enough. Clark died in 1925. His widow and his daughter, Huguette, moved out almost immediately into a rented apartment. In 1927 the mansion was sold for three million dollars, less than half what it had cost to build, and torn down. It had stood barely sixteen years. In its place rose the luxury apartment building still at 960 Fifth Avenue.
The story did not quite end there. Clark's reclusive daughter Huguette would go on to leave several of her own mansions sitting empty and immaculate for decades while she lived quietly in a hospital room, a saga later told in the bestselling book 'Empty Mansions.' But the pattern of fabulous houses built and then abandoned began with her father's doomed Fifth Avenue palace.
What makes the William A. Clark House so haunting is precisely how forgotten it is. This was, by some measures, the most expensive private home built in America up to its time. It had its own coal railway and the largest chamber organ in the country. And within a generation it had been so completely erased that most New Yorkers today have never heard of it.
A few fragments survived. The Salon Dore was rescued and eventually given to a museum in Washington, where it can still be seen intact. But the tower, the rotunda, the ninety-foot library, the four galleries, all of it was demolished and carted away, the granite that Clark had quarried and shipped at such expense reduced to fill.
Clark's Folly is the ultimate cautionary tale of the Gilded Age: a monument to limitless ambition that the world decided, almost immediately, it did not want. It cost a fortune, it dazzled and appalled in equal measure, and it lasted no longer than a single childhood. Then it was gone, leaving behind little more than a nickname and a handful of photographs.
