Alfred Corning Clark

Alfred Corning Clark (November 14, 1844 – April 8, 1896) was an American heir and philanthropist.

Biography

He was born on November 14, 1844 to Edward Clark, a founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. He married and had as his children: Edward Severin Clark, Robert Sterling Clark, Frederick Ambrose Clark and Stephen Carlton Clark, Sr.

Between 1888 and 1891, Clark built the first gymnasium in Cooperstown, New York. Although very successful, the facility had become obsolete by the 1920s and was demolished and rebuilt by Edward Severin Clark. The new Alfred Corning Clark Gymnasium was reopened in 1930, sporting such improvements as a swimming pool and bowling alleys. That site is today now part of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The successor to the original ACC Gym is the Clark Sports Center a greatly expanded facility, completed in the mid-1980s, located on the former grounds of Iroquois Farm (the F. Ambrose Clark estate) under the direction of Stephen Carlton Clark, Jr., the great-grandson of the gym’s founder.

He was married to Elizabeth Scriven, who in 1902, after she was widowed, became the second wife of Henry Codman Potter, the Episcopal bishop of New York.

According to a review in the New York Times Book Review of Nicholas Fox Weber's THE CLARKS OF COOPERSTOWN Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007):

"Weber suggests that Alfred [Corning Clark] led a dual life: a quiet family man in America and a gay aesthete in Europe, especially in France, which he declared “the Mecca of brotherly feeling.” He was a generous patron to male artists; for 19 years his closest companion was a Norwegian tenor named Lorentz Severin Skougaard. When his father’s death forced him to return to Manhattan, Alfred installed Skougaard down the block from the town house where he lived with his wife and children. James’s shadow lingers longest in this chapter; surely this was the sort of thing he meant by those uneasy intimations that beneath Europe’s splendor and refinement lurked something unspeakable. Weber’s bluntness, by contrast, highlights how much of that beauty was created by gay men seeking warm communities of free expression."**

Clark's donation of $50,000 to the piano prodigy Jozef Hofmann in 1887 spared the eleven-year-old from having to complete a fifty-recital American tour that had been criticized by Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. With this financial security, Hofmann and his family returned to Europe where the boy could receive a broader education before resuming his concert career. In addition to becoming one of history's most outstanding piano virtuosi, Hofmann's study in science and mathematics enabled him to become an inventor in later life, earning over 70 patents.

He died on April 8, 1896.

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