Word: fricking
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...make that house look like a miner's shack!" cried Henry Clay Frick who thereupon spent $5,000,000 on the house to which the public was admitted last week. Even strolling in Fifth Avenue's Easter Parade with timorous, kindly Mrs. Frick, Frick's mind was constantly working up ways of outshining Carnegie. Frick could not make after-dinner speeches, pat newsboys on the head, or write essays on the virtue of goodness, but he knew how to buy & sell and he had instinctive taste. He set out to form the greatest private art collection...
Henry Clay Frick died in 1919. His house was untouched until Mrs. Frick followed him in 1931. Since then their capable, ginger-haired daughter Helen has made the Frick art collection her career, almost her religion. With her own funds she assembled and housed a topnotch art library next door to her father's house (TIME, Jan. 21). As the most active member of the trustees of the $15,000,000 fund that was left to administer the collection, she has weeded out and improved her father's public legacy in the past four years until...
Those four years were spent on more than swapping pictures. The $5,000,000 that Frick gave Architects Carrere & Hastings went to build no museum but a palace for a conceited man. Trustees decided early that the house should, as much as possible, be kept as it was built "as a historic example of a rich man's home of the early 20th Century." But in order that people could circulate through it at all great changes had to be made...
Working on the problem from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. daily, without even taking off her hat, Miss Frick first decided that warehouses were not safe enough for Frick pictures. Before any remodeling was done at all, a fireproof, burglarproof vault was dug in the basement of the house in which every treasure was moved. Then the vault was bricked up. Doors and corridors had to be rearranged. In order to install a modern air-conditioning system the panelling in several rooms had to be taken apart piecemeal and replaced. Eighteen ten-ton blocks of marble were quarried...
Before a citizen can see the Frick pictures, he must call, write or telephone to a special ticket office, tell not only the day but the hour that he wishes to tour the collection. Once admitted, he must follow a special strip of green carpet from room to room, never loitering, never turning back, never sitting down. At the end of an hour he will have had brief glimpses of $50,000,000 worth of pictures and will be ejected through the same oak door through which he entered...