From time to time a public figure rises to prominence with hardly any redeeming features.
One such was Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the American steel magnate who took over the Andrew Carnegie Corporation, which he sold to J Pierpont Morgan to establish the US Steel Corporation in 1901.
Using family money from his grandfather’s whisky distillery and loans from the Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) he founded the Frick Coke Company in 1871, which he renamed H C Frick & Co when he bought out his partners nine years later.
The rising Pittsburgh steel industry relied on coke-manufacturing, and Frick formed a partnership with Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), and ultimately became chairman of the Carnegie Corporation.
The two men were complete opposites. Carnegie was a Scot who grew up in Pennsylvania, modest, phenomenally industrious and guided by strongly-held principles. His wealth derived from the steel industry, and in his lifetime he disposed of ninety per-cent of his fortune through philanthropy.
Henry Frick, on the other hand, cared for little but making money and spending it on fine art.
He joined a consortium of over sixty Pittsburgh businessmen who bought the largest earth dam in the world, built and later abandoned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in the hills upstream of the city of Johnstown, and established an exclusive resort, the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club. Though the group possessed sufficient expertise and resources to make the leaky, badly maintained reservoir safe, they neglected its upkeep, lowered the height of the dam and partially blocked the spillway to conserve fish stocks, until on May 31st 1889 it failed, sending a sixty-foot wall of water down the Little Conemaugh River to Johnstown where 2,209 people perished. The Club evaded paying compensation for the disaster, and an independent engineers’ report was suppressed until 2018.
Though he shared responsibility for the Johnstown Flood with many others, he was solely responsible for the consequence of a bitter trade-union dispute when, in 1892, workers at the Carnegie works at Homestead, seven miles south of Pittsburgh, walked out and were locked out over wages. Andrew Carnegie, who himself supported trade unions, had delegated responsibility for running the company to Frick.
To break the strike, Frick hired and armed three hundred private security agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The vicious conflict that followed led to sixteen deaths and many injuries, and the strikers maintained their opposition until confronted with four thousand state militia. Frick himself was wounded in an attempted assassination. Ultimately, support for the strike evaporated, and the powerful Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers narrowly escaped bankruptcy.
He asserted his presence in the centre of Pittsburgh by building the Frick Building, designed by Daniel H Burnham and completed in 1902, over three hundred feet high and deliberately sited to cast a permanent shadow over Andrew Carnegie’s headquarters next door. The lobby is decorated with John LaFarge’s stained-glass, ‘Fortune and Her Wheel’ (1902) and two bronze sentinel lions (1904) by the sculptor Alexander Proctor.
When he married in 1881 Frick bought an existing eleven-room house which he called Clayton within easy reach of his steelworks and the city. Here he and his wife Adelaide raised their four children, two of whom survived to adulthood. In 1904 he built a 104-room summer residence, Eagle Rock, on Boston’s North Shore, and rented the William H Vanderbilt House on New York’s Fifth Avenue, until the completion of his Henry Clay Frick House, further uptown along Fifth Avenue, in 1913.
He willed his house and its fabulous art collection to the City of New York. It opened to the public as The Frick Collection in 1936, following Adelaide Frick’s death five years earlier.
Clayton is now known as The Frick Pittsburgh. It opened to visitors in 1990, six years after the death of Frick’s daughter, Helen Clay Frick.
Eagle Rock was demolished in 1969.
The biography by Les Standiford, Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, the bitter relationship that transformed America (Three Rivers Press 2005), pulls no punches. A more recent study is Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait (Abbeville 2020).