[#97 Clark Street.]
#97 Clark Street (with vines.) Picture taken from west side of Monroe Place.
1958
[#97 Clark Street.]
#97 Clark Street (with vines.) Picture taken from west side of Monroe Place.
97 Clark Street, October 12, 1958.
This 40-foot wide mansion was known as the Ford Mansion, as it was once the home of Gordon L. Ford and later his son, Paul Leicester Ford. Gordon was the business manager for the New York Tribune and had a hand in banking and railroad interests. Paul was a journalist, writer, and noted bibliographer of Revolutionary War America. (Another son, Worthington, was chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.) Paul was killed in a murder suicide enacted by the third brother Malcolm in 1902.
In the 1960s as this, and other nearby buildings were being prepped for demolition as part of the urban renewal plans, preservationists saved the home's railing in hope to reuse it the restoration of another historic Heights house, the Peter Cornell home. That house was demolished as well and the railing is now in the Sculpture Garden at the Brooklyn Museum, among other architectural artifacts.
The early 1970s building that replaced the demolished Ford Mansion is the massive Cadman Towers, a 421-unit, almost Brutalist, co-op building (given the address 101 Clark Street).