Queer Places:
Eagle Rock, 45 Ober Street, Prides Crossing, MA 01965
The Frick Collection, 1 E 70th St, New York, NY 10021, United States
Homewood Cemetery, 1599 S Dallas Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, United States

Adelaide Howard Childs Frick (December 16, 1859 – October 4, 1931) was a prominent figure of the Gilded Age, best known as the wife of industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was the daughter of a prominent local family heavily engaged in the shoe and boot manufacturing and importing business. She married Henry Clay Frick in 1881, and the couple had four children: Childs, Martha Howard, Helen Clay, and Henry Clay Jr., though only Childs and Helen Clay survived to adulthood.

Adelaide presided over several grand residences built during her husband's meteoric rise in the coke and steel industries, including their summer estate, Eagle Rock, in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, and their primary New York City mansion on Fifth Avenue (now home to The Frick Collection). She was heavily involved in managing her household, engaging in elite social circles, and maintaining a deep personal interest in horses and equestrian pursuits. Following her husband's death in 1919, Adelaide continued to live in the New York mansion alongside her daughter Helen until her own death in 1931, after which the residence transitioned into a public art museum as stipulated.

The connection between Adelaide Howard Childs Frick and the celebrated interior designer and tastemaker Elsie de Wolfe centers around the artistic and architectural decoration of the Frick family properties. Elsie de Wolfe—widely recognized in modern historical contexts for her groundbreaking professional success and her lifelong domestic partnership with theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury—was commissioned by the Fricks to design and decorate the upstairs family rooms at Eagle Rock and various private spaces within their homes. Notably, de Wolfe traveled with the Fricks to Paris to help curate and acquire extensive antique holdings, including items from the Wallace Collection. Through these lucrative interior design commissions and high-society collaborations, de Wolfe worked closely with Adelaide and her husband, helping shape the opulent aesthetic of the family's elite Gilded Age environments.

References:

• Archival Collections: The Adelaide H.C. Frick Papers (1874–1951) housed at The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives, which contain correspondence, notebooks, travel records, and financial documents documenting her life, household management, and family.
• Biographical and Decorative Arts Literature: The Frick Collection: Decorative Arts Handbook and institutional records detailing the interior design commissions executed by Elsie de Wolfe for the Frick family residences (including Eagle Rock and the New York mansion).
• Primary Publications on Elsie de Wolfe: Elsie de Wolfe’s foundational design treatise The House in Good Taste (1913) alongside biographical accounts of her career and high-society commissions, such as Jane S. Smith's Elsie de Wolfe: A Life in the High Style (1982).

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