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Some houses are remembered for their beauty. The William A. Clark mansion is remembered for its numbers, and what numbers they were. One hundred and twenty-one rooms. Thirty-one bathrooms. Four separate art galleries. A swimming pool. A concealed garage. And, most improbably of all, a private underground rail line whose sole purpose was to deliver coal to heat the place.
The man behind it was Senator William Andrews Clark, a copper baron from Montana and one of the richest men in America. He was so determined to control every detail of his Fifth Avenue palace that he refused to rely on ordinary suppliers. He bought his own granite quarry in New Hampshire and built a railroad to move the stone. He bought a bronze foundry that employed two hundred men. He imported marble from Italy, oak from Sherwood Forest, and whole rooms from old French chateaux.
The result, completed in 1911 at 962 Fifth Avenue, was a nine-story extravaganza that defied easy description. There was a marble rotunda thirty-six feet high. There was a picture gallery ninety-five feet long and two stories tall. There was a Gothic library stretching ninety feet. There was an organ loft holding the largest chamber organ in America, with four keyboards and dozens of stops. Below ground were Turkish baths; up top were the laundries. The four-sided tower was said to be visible from almost anywhere in Central Park.
It cost about seven million dollars, the equivalent of well over two hundred million today. And the critics hated nearly every inch of it. One writer in a leading architectural journal sneered that the house would be an appropriate residence for the circus showman P. T. Barnum. He called the tower meaningless and fatuous. The editor of another magazine dubbed the mansion 'the House of a Thousand Cartouches' and despised what he called its dolorous and ponderous granite.
The nickname that stuck was the cruelest and the simplest: 'Clark's Folly.' At a moment when the French chateau style had already begun to feel dated, Clark's vast, fussy pile struck many New Yorkers as the ultimate monument to money without taste. The very features Clark was proudest of, the carving, the tower, the imported rooms, were the ones the critics mocked most.
And then came the punchline that made the nickname prophetic. Clark died in 1925. His widow and his daughter Huguette moved out almost at once. In 1927 the mansion was sold for three million dollars, less than half its construction cost, and demolished. It had stood for barely sixteen years. A house that had taken fourteen years to build did not even survive two decades.
In its place rose the apartment building still standing at 960 Fifth Avenue, an address that remains one of the most exclusive in the city, though almost no one who lives there could tell you what stood on the spot before. The 31 bathrooms, the four galleries, the marble rotunda, the great organ, all of it gone in a matter of months.
It is worth dwelling on the waste. Clark had quarried his own granite and shipped it at enormous expense, and within a generation that granite was being hauled away as fill. He had imported entire eighteenth-century rooms from Paris, and most of them were simply destroyed. One survivor, the gilded Salon Dore, was rescued and given to a museum, where it can still be seen, a single preserved room standing in for an entire vanished palace.
There is a temptation to read Clark's Folly purely as a joke, the tale of a rich man with more money than taste. But it is also a genuinely sad story about how quickly the Gilded Age devoured its own creations. Whatever you thought of the house, it was an astonishing feat of craftsmanship and ambition, and the city tore it down almost before the paint was dry.
The numbers that made Clark's Folly famous, the 121 rooms and the 31 baths, turned out to be its epitaph. They were proof of an ambition so total that it could only ever disappoint, and a house so expensive that, in the end, it was worth more dead than alive.
