PA & NY 2023: Pittsburgh - Henry Clay Frick

Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie were two of the richest and most influential industrialists in Pittsburgh during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The two men were business partners and frenemies who made their fortunes in the steel and coke industries.  The legacy of both these titans lives on in the Pittsburgh area in terms of mansions, museums and other institutions founded by or named after them.  The Frick Fine Arts Building on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh opened in 1965 as a gift from Frick’s daughter Helen in memory of her father.  Just south of Point Breeze is Frick Park, a 644-acre park with extension hiking trails, a playground and sports amenities. Henry Frick’s main legacy in the city lies in Frick Pittsburgh, a 5.5 acre estate made up of a complex of museums and historical buildings. Yet Andrew Carnegie’s influence in Pittsburgh is felt much more today since he became a philanthropist in his latter days, donating about 90% of his net worth to fund public libraries, universities and organizations promoting world peace. During our stay in Pittsburgh, we visited establishments bearing the names Frick and Carnegie, as well as ones related to banker and philanthropist Andrew Mellon and Henry J.Heinz, founder of Heinz Company.

Frick Pittsburgh is a set of museums and historical buildings that include a small Art Museum, Car and Carriage Museum, and the Frick family 19th-century mansion named Clayton, as well as a lush garden, greenhouse, children’s playhouse, Visitor’s Centre/gift shop and a café.  Frick Pittsburgh was established in 1990 by the estate of Helen Clay Frick, Henry’s daughter, with the intent of preserving the family’s home and art collection.  It is free to visit the estate, tour the grounds and look at the art, but a paid tour is required to see the interior of the house.  We started our visit by walking quickly around the grounds, admiring the plants in front of and inside the greenhouse, which was was used by the Frick family between 1897-1970s to grow flowers, tropical plans, seeds for outdoor flower and vegetable beds as well as mushrooms.  We could not go inside the playhouse (now administrative offices) but read a plaque describing it as a structure built in 1897 with a drawing room on the first floor and a photographic dark room frequented by Frick’s son Childs. Dance lessons and gym classes were held on the second floor.

We have visited the Frick Collection in Manhattan which is where the bulk of Henry Frick’s art collection is displayed, including distinguished Old Master paintings and European sculpture and decorative arts.  The Art Gallery on the Frick Pittsburgh estate is much smaller.  It was built in 1970 in an Italian-Renaissance style to house Helen Clay Frick’s collection of paintings, sculptures, porcelains and decorative arts which she inherited from her father.  Upon entering the gallery, the first room encountered is a rotunda with 30-foot ceilings held up by a series of columns.  On display in this space are four French and Flemish tapestries dating back to early 1500s.

Surrounding the rotunda are entrances to other galleries that exhibit early Italian Renaissance and 18th Century French paintings, Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, antique furniture including a regal parlor organ, decorative arts and a large collection of Chinese porcelains.  The paintings on display are by notable artists including Peter Paul Rubens, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and more.

Two temporary exhibitions were on display during our visit.  The first was titled “From Stage to Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print”.  Here we saw a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio printed in 1623 as well as other copies of his works.  A virtual reality headset puts you in the middle of a full-scaled recreation of the Blackfriars Playhouse as it was back in the 1600s.  The exhibit “Reckoning: Grief and Light” by artist-in-residence Vanessa German is comprised of three “altarpieces” which are tributes to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain who were each killed through acts of police brutality.  Each figure is topped by gilded flowers and vines imbedded with symbolic iconography including Christian saints and martyrs, birds representing liberty, and candles.  Two of the figures have mirrors placed where the face would be, perhaps as a means of reflection for the viewer, that “this could be you”.  Hand-crafted cobalt blue glass bottles cascade downward as if to represent a “weeping river”.  Accompanying the visual work is the soundtrack “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice”, a contemporary symphonic work about the enslavement of Africans and African Americans”. Between 1926-1928, Walter Gay, known for his paintings of notable homes, was commissioned to paint several rooms in Henry Frick’s New York mansion including the Fragonard Room where Fragonard’s famous “Progress of Love” panels are displayed, as well as the Fricks’ living room.  We had seen the Fragonard Room in Manhattan, so it was especially interesting to see a painted representation of it.

The Car and Carriage Museum displays the Frick family’s collection of vintage automobiles and carriages.  My favourite vehicle was the blue and red 1939 Bantam Roadster with the soft canvas retractable roof which could travel up to 60miles on a gallon of gas.  Famous Bantam owners included Al Jolson, Buster Keaton and Ernest Hemingway.  I also liked the 1909 Keystone Six-Sixty Roadster, the 1917 Model E Touring Car and the 1940 American Bantam Model 65 Convertible Coupe.  There was a special exhibition about Pittsburgh and the Great Migration highlighting Black mobility and the automobile, but there was a fee to go inside and we did not have enough time since we were rushing off to tour Clayton mansion.

Clayton was the home of the Frick family from 1882-1905.  Originally an 11-room Italianate-styled house built in 1882 for $25,000, the home was expanded to a 23-room chateau-styled mansion in 1891 by acclaimed architect Frederick Osterling. Prior to entering the house, our guide showed us photos of Henry and his wife Adelaide as well as Helen and Childs, their two children who survived to adulthood.  We would hear more about the children who did not survive during the tour.  We also got to hold a piece of “coke” which is a solid product that is the result of heating coal and is used in the production of steel.

Photos of the interior of Clayton were not allowed during the tour but images were available from souvenir books and postcards.  Our tour started in the enclosed front porch where a Welte “orchestrion” (a 4500-pound mechanical self-playing organ) was situated. Costing $6100 which was a fortune at the time and driven by electricity, the orchestrion included 294 pipes that produced the sounds of an organ, woodwinds, brass and various percussion instruments.  A chest next to the orchestrion contained cartridges of sheet music that could be inserted to play different tunes.  Our guide played an example of a song, and the sound was deafeningly loud.

About 93% of the furnishings and artifacts in the house are original.  Interesting personal items such as the Duquesne cigar box in Henry’s games room, the childrens’ toys and clothes in their bedrooms, toiletries in Adelaide’s dressing room and the fully set dining room table give a real sense of how the family lived.  The walls and tables around the home are covered with photographs or paintings of the family.

In particular, there are many tributes to the Fricks’ middle daughter Martha, who tragically died just before her sixth birthday after suffering from an infection.  Years later, Adelaide had a miscarriage and lost another son, but there were not the same overt memorials for him.  We heard stories about how Frick and Carnegie were ruthless in their business practices, taking advantage of their labourers, overworking them and then even cutting their wages and raising their hours to maximize profits.  This led to the brutal Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, which lasted four months until Frick brought in the Pinkerton Police and State militia to violently end the strike, breaking the dominance of the powerful steel union.  Through it all, Carnegie was in Europe.  Frick took all the blame, even leading to an assassination attempt when an anarchist shot Frick four times and stabbed him with a steel file.  Miraculously, Frick survived but he never forgave Carnegie.  According to the book “Meet You in Hell”, Carnegie tried to reconcile with Frick before his death and that was his reply.