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House joins stellar lineup on 'Castles'
Thursday, March 04, 1999 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In five seasons, A&E's "America's Castles" has visited lavish and opulent homes built by some of the country's wealthiest tycoons.
"America's Castles"
When: Sunday at 11 p.m. on A&E.
Featuring: Clayton in Point Breeze.
On Sunday at 11 p.m., "Castles" comes to Clayton, the Henry Clay Frick house museum in Point Breeze, one of three mansions featured in an episode called "Mining Magnates." The program also explores houses in Salt Lake City and Spokane, Wash.
Now in its final year, the program, produced by Knoxville-based Cinetel Productions, has featured 196 homes in 65 episodes, inviting Americans to sample the century-old lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Not a bad run for a show that first was sold as a two-hour special.
"Cinetel Productions originally approached A&E with a different idea,
taking a look at the families of the Gilded Age, similar to "Biography,' " said Cecil Stokes, producer and writer for "Mining Magnates." "But they said, why don't you show us their homes?"
The original two-hour special garnered such good ratings that a second two-hour program was ordered, then a 13-episode season.
The show's supervising producer, Scott Galloway, who spent his teen years in Fox Chapel, wanted to feature Clayton earlier, but it took a while to figure out what houses could be showcased with it, Stokes said.
The program also includes the Thomas Kearns house in Salt Lake City and the Amasa Campbell house in Spokane. The three segments are told through interviews with local historians, curators and docents.
For Clayton, University of Pittsburgh history professor Ted Muller talks about Frick's role in Pittsburgh industry. Post-Gazette Art and Architecture Critic Donald Miller is filmed in his favorite room, the dining room, "where Mr. Frick seemed most alive and at home."
Miller also recalls visiting Helen Clay Frick at Clayton in the mid-1970s. By prior agreement, he had to squirrel his notebook away and not write about the visit until after her death, which came in 1984 at age 96.
Also commenting on life at Clayton are "Miss Frick's" private nurse, Barbara Hunter, now a Clayton docent, and Sheena Wagstaff, former director of collections, exhibitions and programs at the Frick Art & Historical Center.
Henry and Adelaide Childs Frick purchased the Benjamin and Caroline Vandervort house, built sometime between 1866 and 1872, and spent twice the $25,000 purchase price on upgrading the interior before moving there in 1883. In the program's only misstep, University of Virginia architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, taking his cue from a book about Clayton, assumes the Vandervort house was called Homewood. The Vandervorts seem to have built their home within the bounds of Homewood, the estate of Judge William Wilkins that gave the later neighborhood its name.
The Clayton segment takes viewers on a tour of the first- and second-floor rooms open to the public, showing interiors created during the home's complete makeover in 1891 by Frederick J. Osterling, who transformed the modest 11-room Italianate villa into something grander, a 23-room mansion inspired by French chateaux. It was filmed in May during a run of perfect weather.
"It was my first trip to Pittsburgh," Stokes said. "It was 70s and blue skies every day. I thought it was the most wonderful place I ever visited."
Teddy Roosevelt, who feasted on an eight-course lunch at Clayton on a sweltering July 4, 1902, also visited Thomas Kearns, bringing him a rustic horn hat rack that still hangs on the library wall of Kearns' Salt Lake City home. Kearns, who made his fortune in silver mines, spent some of it on a limestone mansion completed in 1901. The eclectic design, which blends elements of Italian Renaissance palazzi and French chateaux, features a grand, winding, three-story staircase under a domed ceiling. Kearns' daughter donated the house to the state of Utah in 1937, so that it could become the governor's mansion. In recent years, the house was faithfully restored after a Christmas tree fire caused extensive damage to the staircase area, as a photograph taken just after the devastation makes clear.
The third home, completed in 1898 by silver and lead mining magnate Amasa Campbell, is one of Spokane's great Tudor houses. Pieces of armor above the door of the oak-paneled entry hall and a great Tudor-Gothic stone fireplace in the library help carry through the medieval theme. The East Washington State Historical Society now operates the Campbell House as a museum.
"America's Castles" isn't done with the Fricks; on March 28, the program will feature Frick's palatial Manhattan home in an episode on New York City mansions.
"Mining Magnates" will be repeated March 13 at 10 a.m. Last year, in a program called "Coal Barons," the show visited Linden Hall, the Sarah B. Cochran mansion in Dawson, Fayette County.
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