Henry Clay Frick's mansion on Fifth Avenue tells the story of an art collector with impeccable taste and a ruthless past.

Built in 1914 from Indiana limestone, the Beaux-Arts mansion was designed with deliberate generosity: Frick stipulated in his will that it should become a public gallery after his death. He didn't have long to enjoy it. He died in 1919, and the house opened as the Frick Collection in 1935.

Frick had made his fortune in coal and steel, working alongside Andrew Carnegie as the union-busting enforcer to Carnegie's philanthropic public face. That ruthlessness nearly cost him his life. In 1892, an anarchist named Beekman shot him in the neck and stabbed him four times, calling the act "the first terrorist act in America." Frick survived, and the assassination attempt paradoxically shifted public sympathy in his favour.

VoiceMap's audio tours use Frick's story to reveal the contradictions of the Gilded Age: how wealth can purchase both brutality and beauty, and how a man once reviled by workers came to be remembered as a generous steward of art.