In 1900, Lloyd Stephens Bryce purchased poet William Cullen Bryant’s Upland Farm and commissioned the architect Ogden Codman to design a neo-Georgian mansion on an elevated site overlooking Hempstead Harbor for he and his wife Edith. The Georgian-Revival house was laid out on Palladian lines with a three-story central block attached by two single story arcades to a pair of two-story pavilions set forward from the main house. Codman added his trademark preference - arched windows. Next to the house, Codman laid out parterre gardens and the rich lawn bordered by woodland gradually sloped down to the water.
In 1919, Henry Clay Frick, co-founder of US Steel Corporation, purchased Bryce House. He unfortunately died shortly after, so his son Childs and wife Frances Frick got possession of the house. They hired British architect Sir Charles Carrick Allom to redesign the facade as well as the interior of their new home, which they named Clayton after Childs’s childhood home.
Childs Frick was an avid sportsman and lover of the outdoors. At Clayton, he and his family enjoyed swimming, tennis, polo, golf, and skiing on his estate, which included two tennis courts (one grass and one clay), a polo field, two ponds for skating and canoeing, a shooting range, a swimming pool, bridle paths, and a ski slope with its own snow making machine. The family’s love of animals and the outdoors included a large animal zoo with a bear pit, snakes, and an alligator, an aviary, a monkey house, and otters in a pond.
Frances and Childs Frick lived at Clayton with their children, Adelaide, Frances, Martha and Henry for almost 50 years. Four years after Childs Frick died, the estate was purchased by Nassau County to establish the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art in 1969.
In 1989, the Museum became a private not-for-profit institution, governed and funded by its own board of trustees. A major exterior restoration of the historic mansion was undertaken and the mansion was then renamed the Arnold and Joan Saltzman Fine Arts Building.
A sculpture park was begun in 1989 and became one of the largest publicly-accessible sculpture parks in the Northeast.
Sources:
“Clayton.” American Aristocracy, americanaristocracy.com/houses/clayton-1. Accessed 5 Jan. 2026
“History.” Nassau County Museum of Art, nassaumuseum.org/history/. Accessed 5 Jan. 2026
