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Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Clay Frick and his daughter Helen were lifelong, compulsive keepers.
School notebooks, letters, diaries, photographs and film reels, newspaper clippings, architectural drawings, souvenirs and memorabilia; business records from coal, coke, railway and steel companies; checks and receipts for household goods from food to fine art - all this and much more is housed at the Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze. It is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind record of life in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And in the spring, it could be leaving Pittsburgh permanently for a new home at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York. Trustees of the Helen Clay Frick Foundation, which owns the archives, voted 10- 1 last month to move the Frick family archives to Manhattan.
But a minority of Frick family members - three of Henry Frick's 14 great-great-grandchildren - believe an art library in New York isn't the right place for a collection that is mostly about life and industry in and around Pittsburgh. They say they will fight the transfer of the materials in court.
Earlier this month, the Pennsylvania Legislature adopted resolutions supporting efforts to retain the Frick archives in Pittsburgh.
"It would be a huge, huge loss to Pittsburgh," said Martha Frick Symington Sanger of Stevenson, Md., who spent 10 years researching the Frick archives for a 1998 biography of her great-great- grandfather.
"These papers contain a wealth of information on the history of Western Pennsylvania, its emergence as the nation's industrial capital and the lives of one the state's most influential men and his family,"
Sanger said. "There isn't more than 5 or 10 percent that has anything to do with New York or the Frick Collection. Frick, who was born 150 years ago today in a small springhouse on his grandfather's Westmoreland County farm, began the Frick Collection after moving to New York in 1905 and established it as an art museum in his will. Situated in the palatial former Frick family home across from Central Park, it is adjacent to the Frick Art Reference Library, founded by Helen Frick in 1920, a year after her father's death.
The Frick family archives belong in New York because the Frick Collection is "the...