Empty Mansions

guests standing at a long dining table. She said it had been taken in the formal dining room at the Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue in 1913.
    Could she tell me who the guests were? She mentioned several, including J. P. Morgan, and …
    “Oh, what was that character’s name? Oh, yes, Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie.”
    The main dining room, twenty-five feet by forty-nine feet, was about the same size as a family apartment in New York City. Above its massive fireplace, carved figures of Neptune, god of the sea, and Diana, goddess of the hunt, presided over the stone mantel, attended by cherubs, guarded at their feet by carved lions six feet tall. The ceiling set mouths agape: gilded panels carved from a single English oak supposedly harvested from Sherwood Forest. Over the door was a panel for the new Clark crest. The Clarks had no hereditary coat of arms, so W.A. sketched one out himself with elements fit for a royal house: a lion, an anchor, and a Gothic
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    Huguette recalled that her father forbade the girls to run around in the grand salon. W.A. had bought this room, alone the size of a typical house, and had it reassembled here overlooking Fifth Avenue and the woodlands of Central Park. Called theSalon Doré, or “golden room,” it gleamed with exquisitely carved and gilded wood panels made in 1770 for avainglorious French nobleman. W.A. brought the extravagant wall panels intact from Paris, adding reproduction panels to make the square room fit into his larger rectangular space. He decorated the salon with a clock from the boudoir of Marie Antoinette. During the French Revolution, when the former queen was under house arrest at Paris’s Tuileries Palace, this gilded clock counted down the hours before her imprisonment and execution. A century later, this room was reserved for formal occasions. The Clark girls were allowed to play in the smaller room next to it, sitting on the Persian carpet of the petit salon.
    The girls found more wonders in the tower. Huguette recalled playing hide-and-seek with Andrée there, one hundred feet above the street, discomforting their mother terribly. The tower held its own secret, a suite held in reserve for dark days. This was the quarantine suite, a valued space in these years before antibiotics, with bedrooms and its own kitchen, a refuge in case of a pandemic.
    Coming down from the tower, the girls passed the servants’ quarters on the fifth and sixth floors. The nursery on the fifth floor was separated into night and day nurseries, each with its own kitchen. A gentleman from
The New York Times
who toured the new house explained, “As the Senator and Mrs. Clark have but two small children, the facilities ofthese spacious rooms will not be overtaxed.” On the fourth floor was the Oriental room, with the senator’s treasures from the East, and some of the twenty-five guest rooms. These higher floors were designed at first to hold apartments to accommodate W.A.’s grown children from his first marriage, but they already had their own homes, and the apartments were converted to other uses.

    Brought over from Paris, the golden room, or Salon Doré, was a bit too formal for Andrée and Huguette to play hide-and-seek in
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    There were many nooks for Andrée and Huguette to explore. The private area of the mansion, the part reserved for the immediate family, was located on the third floor. Here the most comfortable spot was the morning room, with a bearskin rug at one end and a tiger rug at the other. The mirror-paneled walls hid mysterious doors, which opened on a spring when the right spot was touched, revealing a fire hose, a storage closet with boxes of cigars, or an entire suite of rooms. Perhaps these doors were hidden out of whimsy, perhaps with an eye toward security.
    The family of four had seventeen servants in residence, including a houseman, a waitress, two butlers, three cooks, and ten maids. For dish-ware, W.A. and Anna ordered from Chicago a nine-hundred-pieceset of china, costing $100,000, or about $3 million today. It was a simple pattern, aside from the gold trim and Clark crest.
    The room that Huguette described with the most fondness, years later,was the library, warmed by a fireplace from a sixteenth-century castle in Normandy, with armed knights standing guard as andirons. The mantel was carved with a scene of rural revelry, bringing to mind W.A.’s own origins, with a shepherdess, a bagpiper, and dancing men. The ceiling was of