★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
The Frick Collection
Workers are still discovering hidden servant bells throughout these walls... secrets from when twenty-seven servants lived on the third floor of this Indiana limestone mansion! You're standing at 1 East 70th Street, where steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick spent nearly FIVE MILLION dollars in 1913 to build what became New York's largest private art gallery. That massive West Gallery behind you was so huge, Frick could display masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer like a royal palace! After Frick's bitter breakup with Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh, he moved here to create his dream home on the old Lenox Library grounds. When you step inside, you'll walk through rooms that transformed from a family mansion where Frick's daughter Helen played, into America's most intimate treasure vault when it opened to kids like you on December 16th, 1935!
Did You Know?
- Henry Clay Frick’s original mansion, now home to The Frick Collection, is one of the last surviving Gilded Age mansions in New York City, and it was always intended to become a public museum—Frick even stipulated in his will that his home and art collection should be used to encourage public appreciation of the fine arts, a vision realized when the museum opened in 1935.
- The museum’s recent $330 million renovation, completed in 2025, opened the previously private family living quarters—including Henry Clay Frick’s and his daughter Helen Clay Frick’s bedrooms—to the public for the first time, and now displays a world-class collection of early Renaissance gold-ground paintings that Frick himself never owned or saw, thanks to Helen’s later acquisitions.
- The Frick Collection is famous for its intimate, house-museum atmosphere, with masterpieces by artists like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya, and Turner displayed in opulent, period-furnished rooms, and features a hidden gem: a serene interior Garden Court, designed by architect John Russell Pope, which offers visitors a tranquil escape in the heart of Manhattan.