Clark's Folly
I got off the Amtrak with just enough time to take the 2 to the 4 to my hotel in the Bronx, drop my things back, and head straight to Lincoln Center to queue for the NYFF P&I screening of The Brutalist, the latest attempt at auteurism by actor-turned-director Brady Corbet. I wouldn’t get the chance to learn if Corbet’s latest was an ambitious, fundamentally flawed work like his previous two efforts The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2019)—a pair of films more interesting for why they don’t work than almost anything they do, with the exception their remarkable Scott Walker scores. The appeal of seeing the VistaVision shot film projected on 70mm was a hotter item than I expected, and after spending an hour wrapped around the concrete exterior of the Walter Reade I didn’t make it in before they filled up the theater. That complicated this column, which I planned to write on whether that film was actually any good, or if it is the kind of film people just want to be good, that they’re so starved for that they will sing technical praises over any genuine material. I can’t do that now, as I haven’t seen the film. I’m sure that The Brutalist tries to say something about 20th-century America, and there are plenty of other objects in NYC that can be just as informative.
I made my way east across Central Park towards 5th Ave. and 77th St., a particular corner I’d meant to visit for almost a decade. Not for what’s there, but what’s not.
What is there is 960 Fifth Avenue, a luxury apartment building completed in 1928. 960 is a building that flaunts its wealth through its simple confidence, with huge stones cleanly staggering up its 15 stories, leading to its decorative detailing on its top-floor facade. It’s the quiet luxury that was replacing the rococo fixtures of the opulent Gilded Age. And, 960 was picked up for pennies on the dollar compared to the bombastic mansion it supplanted—Huguette Clark sold her late father’s house in 1925 for just $3 million compared to the $7 million it had cost ($54 and $127 million, respectively, in today’s money). Huguette would become the subject of fascination in the tabloids throughout her life, the kind of reclusive heiress that dotted the old declining social scenes wealth begotten in the 19th century, as their new money all of a sudden became as old as they were, and their extracted riches of copper and oil that built the 20th century would slowly give away capital unfettered from the physical world. Huguette might as well have been an Amberson or a Bouvier Beale, sitting in decaying houses as the vines crept through the windows and lead paint piled in chips on the hardwood that used to be decorated with the finest imported rugs.
Before there was 960 Fifth Avenue, there was “Clark’s Folly,” the massive, garish Beaux Arts behemoth that barely stood for 20 years in NYC’s Millionaire’s Colony, with its ridiculous tower standing as a monument to the wealth that William A. Clark stole from the mountains of Butte, Montana. Clark was one of the “Copper Kings,” the select couple of extraordinary bourgeoisie who ripped their wealth from the ground by the bloodied hands and broken backs of countless miners, many still buried in the miles of crush tunnels underneath the Richest Hill On Earth. Clark may not have been as personally responsible for all the disasters and crimes that got the money out of Butte—he may not have owned the Speculator Mine when its fires asphyxiated 168 miners deep beneath the ground, and he’s probably not the one that put out the hit on Frank Little either—but Clark in his grandiosity, his showiness, stands as a testament to the foolish drive behind the wealthiest men that modernized the United States.
What did Clark want? Well, he bought out the Montana Legislature to give him the privilege of serving as one of the state’s Senators to Congress—and they passed the 17th Amendment to make sure no one would ever do that again. He wanted the image of power, wielding it only to reinforce that image. Clark built Clark’s Folly on 5th Ave., with its gaudy art galleries and Turkish baths, really just to show that he could. He went out West only to return to the East with his fortune, showing that the American Dream really is just properly leveraging the exploitation of the people and the land to the point where you have so much real wealth that the only thing to be done is import lumber from the Sherwood Forest to panel your house that serves no function but to impress.
Clark is the man for the age, and went out of fashion even before he put in the ground. It’s no wonder New York tore down Clark’s Folly and put up luxury apartments in its place—it’s a more subtle wealth, the one at 960 5th Ave. that quietly flaunts in its elegance rather than trying to be a beacon for the eye. It’s a more unachievable wealth, the kind that East Coast old-money types build their social structures on: it’s not about what you can extract, or who you can exploit, or if your copper built the nation or how many terms you had in the Senate—if you weren’t born into it, you shouldn’t try to be here. This tension lies at the heart of the city, and America more broadly—the aspiration, and the success of the aspiration, coming to blows with the genuinely unmoving structure of class. Clark is as foolishly American as any dreamer, but one without the wits of the union syndicalists, the communist militants, the IWW organizers that were a thorn in the side of Butte’s long road to become a half-abandoned superfund site that made a lot of money for a handful of people, because they understood what Clark never could: there’s no joining them, only the war to try to beat them.