image by Jim Henderson
Millionaire banker Frederick Dobbs Tappen died in his brownstone-fronted mansion at 49 East 68th Street on February 28, 1902. Just over a decade later, on January 4, 1913, the Record & Guide reported that the house had been sold, noting it, "adjoins the residence of Percy R. Pyne, at the northwest corner of Park av." (The Pyne mansion had been designed by McKim, Mead & White two years earlier.)
The buyers were John William Clark and his wife, Margaretta Brua Cameron. Born in 1867, Clark was president of the Clark Thread Company and the Spool Cotton Company, founded by his grandfather in Paisley Scotland. (Its O. N. T. brand, short for Our New Thread, was a staple in stores and homes throughout the nation.) Margaretta was the daughter of former Senator J. Donald Cameron. The couple had three sons, William, Jr., John Balfour, and James Cameron. The family's summer estate, Peachcroft, was in Bernardsville, New Jersey.
Peachcroft, from the collection of the Bernardsville Public Library
The Clarks hired the architectural firm of Trowbridge & Livingston to design a replacement home on the site of the Tappen mansion. On April 23, 1913, The New York Times reported, "Plans have been filed for a new five-story private residence for J. William Clark...The facade will be of brick and marble in the Colonial style of architecture." The neo-Federal style was, almost assuredly, meant to blend harmoniously with the Pyne mansion next door. The architects placed the cost of construction at $60,000 (about $1.9 million in 2024).
John William Clark, United States Passport Application, 1923
On October 4, 1913, the Record & Guide reported that excavation was underway for the Clark house. Its completion would be too late for the Clarks' eldest son, William, to occupy it. He was married to Marjory Bruce Blair at Blairsden, the country estate of the bride, a month before the article.
The family moved into 49 East 68th Street the following year. The main and service entrances were recessed within a double-arched loggia. The upper floors were faced in Flemish bond red brick. French windows at the second floor opened onto a full-width iron balcony. The metal-clad attic level was fronted by two elegant, Federal style dormers.
James Cameron was 22 at the time and John Balfour was 17. The boys prepared at St. Mark's School and James was currently a junior at Harvard. When America entered World War I in 1917, both young men entered the United States Army Air Service. While John would serve in France, earning the rank of lieutenant, James was stationed in Texas for the war's duration.
The Clark house enjoyed an unexpected second wall of light and ventilation. photo by Wurts Bros. from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York
The global conflict was unable to hinder James's romance. On December 6, 1917, the Air Service Journal reported on his engagement to Teresa Fabbri, the daughter of multimillionaire Ernesto Fabbri and the great-granddaughter of William Henry Vanderbilt. He obtained a ten-day pass and the pair was married at Bar Harbor, Maine, on December 11. Two days later, The New York Times reported, "Lieutenant James C. Clark and his bride, formerly Miss Teresa Fabbri...are on their way to San Antonio, Texas, where Lieutenant Clark is in the Signal Corps of the ground school for the Aviation Corps."
At the war's end, James was discharged on December 20, 1918 with the rank of first lieutenant. He and John went into the family's business. (John would eventually become its president, by then renamed Coats & Clark, Inc.) William, in the meantime, had pursued law and eventually became a Federal judge.
On January 16, 1924, The New York Times reported on John's engagement to Rhoda Cameron. The couple was married later that spring.
John and Margaretta were at the Bernardsville estate on July 15, 1928 when John suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 60. He left an estate of $12,957,775, according to The New York Times. The figure would translate to $236 million today.
In May 1937, Margaretta leased 49 East 68th Street. It was occupied by Walter Mack and his family when she died in March 1941 at the age of 71. Two years later, her estate sold the mansion to Leroy Alton Lincoln.
Lincoln was chairman of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Born in 1880, his earliest American ancestor had arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts in 1635. His wife, the former Hilda F. Deyoe, was his third, his two previous wives having died.
The Lincolns resided here for a decade, selling the house in November 1953 to the Soviet Government for $150,000 ($1.7 million today). The New York Times explained it would be used "as a residence for Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the Soviet Union's permanent delegate to the United Nations," adding, "The property has twenty rooms, an elevator, and three floors below ground."
In 1967, the mansion was purchased by Theodore Kheel for his American Federation on Automation and Employment. Now called Automation House, its lavish 1914 interiors were gutted. The renovations resulted in a "private museum" on the first and second floors, and office and exhibition space on the upper floors.
On March 2, 1970, New York Magazine announced, "Automation House...opens this week. It is a kind of electrical service station for artists to plug in to. Its first show will be The Magic theatre, an exhibition of electrical environments by eight artists."
Automation House was more than that. Theodore W. Kheel was described by the Staten Island Advance in November 1970 as "the famous lawyer-mediator." The venue for years was the scene of tense labor negotiations and was the headquarters of the Board of Mediation for Community Disputes, founded here in January 1969.
Automation House was outfitted with "telephones and electrowriters, as well as telex, Xerox and Magnavox facsimile machines," according to Catherine Spencer in her Beyond the Happening, Performance Art and the Politics of Communication. Here, she writes, "Groups of children were invited to inhabit them simultaneously and use the technology to send each other text and picture messages."
The house served as meeting space, as well. On January 27, 1970, for instance, British Prime Minister Wilson addressed a gathering of management and labor leaders here. And later that year, on July 1, Samuel R. Pierce was sworn in here as general counsel to the Treasury Department by Secretary David M. Kennedy. (Pierce was the first black to receive an appointment to a sub-Cabinet post in the Treasury Department, according to the Associated Press.)
A riotous situation occurred on July 13, 1976 when Rolling Stone Magazine, "long a fount of anti-establishment culture," as described by The New York Times, hosted a "big party for the new Jimmy Carter establishment." The organizers miscalculated the response and at 11:00 p.m. the Automation House executives ordered the doors barred. The New York Times reported,
Left out on the sidewalk were the likes of: Warren Beatty, the actor, and Representative Bella S. Abzug, who later sauntered off as a twosome; Jane Fonda, the actress; Katharine Graham, publisher; and Benjamin Bradlee, editor of The Washington Post; William vanden Heuvel, Carter campaign manager here; Theodore H. White, the chronicler of presidential campaigns, and for a while, Lauren Bacall.
A few of the celebrities who had made it inside before the doors were locked were Paul Newman, Shirley MacLaine, and Walter Cronkite. Apparently Bella Abzug was not overly-bruised by not gaining admittance and the following year, on December 19, 1977, she used Automation House to announce her candidacy for Congress.
Richard Feigen purchased 49 East 68th Street in 1991. He told James McElhinney in an interview for the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in 2009, "All the detail was gone from the inside...And it appealed to me because you had brick walls; you could hang early paintings and contemporary art and everything in there. And I've always enjoyed mixing these things up."
On September 23, 1991, New York Magazine reported, "Richard L. Feigen settles into his new location with paintings and drawings by the Italianate Dutch landscape painter Bartholomeus Breenbergh." It was the first of a long string of important exhibitions that would last through 1999 when composer Mitch Leigh and his artist wife Abby Leigh purchased the property for $1.1 million.
photo by Jim Henderson
The couple hired Wendy Evans Joseph to reconvert the building into a single family home. Mitch Leigh, who won a Tony Award for composing the music to Man of La Mancha, died in 2014. Two years later, Abbie Leigh, whose works hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney, sold the house for $20.4 million.
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