The Frick Collection is celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. To commemorate opening its doors in 1935 the Collection is showing a few elevation sketches of the building’s transformation from the home of Henry Clay Frick into the museum we see today. The only other addition is a new orientation film, which “tells the story of Mr. Frick, his home, and his art collection.” Here we learn of this “man of the highest quality” and his remarkable journey from humble origins and a sickly childhood, a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a millionaire at thirty, and one of the great industrialists of the gilded age. We hear of his success as a coke magnate (the raw material used to make steel), his partnership with Joseph Carnegie, his leadership of U.S. Steel and his building of this grand and historic Fifth Avenue mansion. We hear how his love of art led him on a “chase for the old masters,” and of how he “went shopping” at the Metropolitan for the highlights of J. P. Morgan’s collection after Morgan died. We hear how it “wasn’t enough to have a great collection of old master paintings so he began to buy great pieces of furniture and decorative art.” We learn how the press avidly covered his art collecting and purchases with as much panache as they covered his feats of industry. We learn that he stipulated the creation of this museum upon his wife’s death so “the entire public should forever have access.” We learn that much of the museum is how Frick left it, when he lived there, and, in addition to viewing his art we “can also inhale the Gilded Age, the sense of the aesthetic, the beautiful” contained in these rooms.

What we don’t hear is how Frick was once “the most hated man in America.” We don’t hear how he stood out among the ignoble plutocrats of his day for his violent assaults on organized labor. We don’t hear the story of the 1892 Homestead Strike wherein Frick, despite soaring profits, offered the skilled workers of the Amalgamated Association of Steel and Iron Workers a 22 percent wage decrease, then summarily locked them out of his factory by building high walls replete with guard towers, barbed wire, and high pressure cannons capable of shooting scalding liquid at every entrance. We don’t hear how when the workers struck and shut down the factory, Frick hired the notorious Pinkerton Detective agency to invade Homestead by river, shooting into the strikers and the supporting townspeople in order to clear the way for scab labor. We don’t hear of how the National Guard was summoned to break up the strike and eventually the union, which Frick steadfastly refused to negotiate with throughout.

We don’t hear that Portfolio.com named Frick one of the “worst CEOs of all time.” We don’t hear how his construction of a dam to create a private lake for a fishing and hunting club, failed, due to poor maintenance and heavy rainfall, and caused the Johnstown flood of 1889 which killed over 2000 people and coincidentally knocked out his competitor’s factory (Cambria Iron and Steel) for a year and a half. Or of the legal battles Frick and his compatriots fought to insure they would not be held responsible and the conspiracy they hatched to keep the club’s existence a secret.