page_title: Henry Clay Frick House
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Clay Frick House / History
caption_attribution_description: English: 1 Lenox Library building, Fifth Avenue, New York City, circa 1905. photographic print.
context_page_description: The Henry Clay Frick House was the residence of the industrialist and art patron Henry Clay Frick in New York City. The mansion is located between 70th and 71st Street and Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was constructed in 1912–1914 by Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings. It was transformed into a museum in the mid-1930s and houses the Frick Collection and the Frick Art Reference Library. The house and library were designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008 for their significance in the arts and architecture as a major repository of a Gilded Age art collection.
context_section_description: After Frick's business partnership with Andrew Carnegie started breaking apart, he began spending less time in Pittsburgh, and soon established additional residences in New York and Massachusetts. In 1905, Frick leased the Vanderbilt house at 640 Fifth Avenue. He and his family stayed there for the next nine years. At that time almost every building on Fifth Avenue above 59th Street was a private mansion, with a few private clubs and a hotel. The Andrew Carnegie Mansion was also located on Fifth Avenue at 91st Street. Whether Frick decided to establish himself on the same avenue because of Carnegie is not definitely established. He started looking for a permanent place to set up residence and became interested in the plot on Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st Street, that was the site of the Lenox Library. The building housed the private collection of philanthropist James Lenox and was designed by the New York architect Richard Morris Hunt in the neo-Greek style.
  The library was suffering financially, which enabled Frick to acquire the plot in the summer of 1906 for $2.47 million. Four months later, he added an additional parcel of land running some fifty feet east through the block. Due to restrictions placed on the use of the library site, Frick could not take title of the land until 1912, when the Lenox collections were incorporated and moved into the New York Public Library's new Main Branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The library building was subsequently torn down that year.
  Initially Frick sought designs from Daniel Burnham, who was the architect of the Frick Building in downtown Pittsburgh. Burnham submitted a design for an 18th-century Italian palazzo. Ultimately he commissioned architect Thomas Hastings of the renowned firm Carrère and Hastings to design and build his residence. Hastings designed a three-story mansion in the Beaux-Arts architecture. Construction took place between 1912 and 1914. The material used for the exterior and parts of the interior of the mansion is Indiana limestone.
  Frick, along with his wife Adelaide Howard Childs (1859–1931) and daughter Helen Clay Frick (1888–1984), moved in in November 1914. The interior was not completed until 1916 and the large art collection moved in. His son Childs Frick (1883–1965) had married Frances Shoemaker Dixon in late 1913, and consequently never resided in the house.
  At the time of Henry Clay Frick's death in 1919, he willed his house and all of its contents, including art, furniture, and decorative objects, as a museum to the public. His family continued to live in the house until his wife died. Some of the earliest photographic documentation of the interior was taken in 1927 by Frick Art Reference Library photographer Ira W. Martin. Four years later after these photographs were taken on the death of Adelaide Frick, the trustees of collection began the transformation of the house into a museum. The collection opened to the public in 1935.
  Around one-third of the pictures of the collection have been acquired since the passing of Mr. and Mrs. Frick. The building itself has been enlarged three times in 1931–35, 1977, and in 2011, which has altered the original appearance of the house. John Russell Pope converted the former exterior courtyard into the enclosed Garden Court, and demolished the porte-cochère to make way for a public entryway, now known as the Entrance Hall. The office of Henry Frick on the ground floor was also demolished to make way for the Oval Room. The East Gallery and the Music Room are also later additions that were not part of the original house.
caption: The plot was originally the location of the Lenox Library from 1877–1912
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