Revamped Clayton tour shows the Fricks at their most powerful — and private

The Frick Pittsburgh recently won laurels from the American Association for State and Local History for thoughtful updates to its guided tour of the Frick family’s former home, Clayton, which sits along a busy stretch of Penn Ave. in Point Breeze. The museum invited Pittsburgh City Paper and other local media to check out the refreshed Gilded, Not Golden tour — what we found was a thoughtful, entertaining, and more inclusive version of the walkthrough that pulled back the curtain on the Fricks’ home life while incorporating more of Clayton's staff and working-class Pittsburghers outside its walls.

Our staff sat down afterward to discuss the tour and its highlights. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Rachel Wilkinson, staff writer: They really wanted to update the tour to have “a broad focus on the experiences of everyday Pittsburghers.” It's a really good effort to show the contrasts, and obviously they won an award for it, and they took several years to update it. But is it possible to encapsulate the lives of everyday Pittsburgh at one of the most opulent mansions in the nation at the time? It's difficult.

Colin Williams, news editor: I think that they do a good job of acknowledging what people who were working under Frick would have been like, what their lives would have been like. But it's so crazy — there's as much stuff in just that massive dining room as there would have been in a multifamily home in Pittsburgh at that time.

Rachel: I never considered what Point Breeze meant until the tour. I knew it was a suburb, obviously; but not that it literally referred to the idea that the breeze would run through that neighborhood [and flush out air pollution].

Colin: I thought it was really interesting that they renamed it “Point Breeze” from Homewood, that the Homewood cemetery retains the old name of what's now Point Breeze, but today when you think of Homewood, you think of a predominantly Black, working class, dense urban neighborhood. That use of branding changing as a neighborhood changes has some modern parallels.

What about the many details of the house? What were some of the things you saw that left you intrigued?

Rachel: The lunch pail. (Clayton added a variety of artifacts to attest to the lives of working-class Pittsburghers.) Our tour guide [Julie Silverman] said, “I like when people come in and go, ‘oh, my grandfather had that [lunch pail] that he took to the mines.’ And you go, ‘oh, there's history right here.’” It does very much echo through the generations to today, those little touches.

This is not as pertinent, but I really nerded out to the ice stuff, because I love old ice hauling. When [our guide said] “there was someone whose job it was just to move around the ice,” because if you leave ice long enough in any kind of contained place, it will mold — the ice handler being one of the staff felt really opulent to me.

Colin: Kind of on the opposite end of the temperature spectrum from that, I thought that the sitz bath was really unusual. There were so many things about it that are designed to be used with help, like you can't get in and out on your own. There are all these different valves, and you have to remember exactly which spigot they operate depending on what exactly it is you're trying to do. Going from a room where there's a rusty lunch pail to a room where there’s a brass-knobbed sitz bath, it's a very clear exercise in contrasts.

There are so many amazing details in that house, everything from the crushed velvet wallpaper with mother of pearl to all the hand-carved woodwork everywhere. Whatever you can say about Clayton and Frick, almost everything in that house was in very good taste.

What about family members? This isn't actually exactly a family member, but one thing that I thought was a really revealing part of the tour was talking about their live-in maid, and the photos of her with [the Fricks’] dead child, [Henry Clay Frick, Jr.] were really striking. (The Fricks’ longtime maid Jane Grandison, who was a Black Hill District resident, gets more attention on the updated tour.)

Rachel: They've updated their website, and she has her own webpage … but there is, other than that, almost no historical record of her I could find. So it seems like they really dug deep to represent her when they updated the tour, and I can see why.

I first got to know Helen Frick through the Frick Fine Arts Building (at the University of Pittsburgh). My understanding is that to this day, it’s a fight with her estate to the level of, like, if they change the letterhead in the building, it has to be approved. I always heard Helen was a known weirdo, with a sort of an Ivanka Trump-esque relationship to her father, and the tour was very pro Helen, I think, because she was the one who poured a lot of effort into maintaining the legacy and maintaining the estate. [But] I still remember it was a point of contention allowing anyone but traditional Western European artists to show their work in the Fine Arts building into the 21st century because of Helen Frick's estate, which complicates her legacy for me to say the least.

Colin: It shows the way that she was her father's daughter, too, that there were so many really specific considerations made when it came to the appointing of the house and the way things were installed, the way that the rooms flowed into one another, even, like that little kids’ foyer with the sink in it.

Rachel: That she lived until 1984 is wild. To have seen the absolute height of the Gilded Age, and then see basically the dissolution of the factories in one lifetime — I mean, I see why she had trouble adapting.

Another single object I liked was the grandfather clock, because I recently learned about how weird the Allegheny Observatory is. It's where time zones were invented and standardized because of industrialization because they needed the trains and the factories to run on time.

Colin: The fact that this whole house is built on this foundation of steel and stuff like that, having that [clock] be so front and center was so telling. I also love that when the Fricks got it in there via their private train, it didn't quite match the woodwork! There’s sort of a poetic justice in that.

Also that Orchestrion, my god. I loved hearing it play. I heard the story of the Orchestrion through a live recording of The Dollop history podcast at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall, where they were talking about the Homestead strike and Henry Clay Frick's relationship with Carnegie at that time. Those two were literally, from what I understand, at least, corresponding about how great the Orchestrion was while they were sending in the Pinkertons [to break the 1892 strike]. Sending telegrams about this gigantic, million-dollar jukebox, basically, while you're preparing to lock your workers out of their livelihood and send in violent thugs to break up their labor movement, is really something. You couldn't draw a clearer contrast between opulence and the everyday working man’s struggle than that.

Rachel: Steel touched everyone for generations. To situate [the tour] in the middle of that time — in 1892 when the mansion was the most occupied — and tie it to the strike, which is probably the most significant historical event that's happened in Pittsburgh, I think it's very smart.

This keeps coming up as I go to places: is this for tourists, or is this for locals? And I do feel like [Clayton] was for tourists … and now it might be for locals who have a grandfather with a lunch pail but have never been on the tour, or who have grown up around the mansion but not necessarily gone inside. I feel like that angle is more incorporated now. It's beautifully preserved, and it transports you back to that time in a way that it's hard to get elsewhere in the city.