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With its detailed carved oak lintels, parquet floors and original plaster ceilings, the Clark Mansion in the Forest Hill section of Newark is one of the finest examples of a well preserved Victorian-era mansion.
For that reason, the Northern New Jersey Chapter of the Victorian Society gave its annual preservation award to The North Ward Center, which has called the 33-room mansion home since the early 1970s.
“It’s an incredible building,” said Richard Grossklaus, the preservation chair of the Society. “There just aren’t that many Victorian-era homes of this quality and size in this area.”
Richard Grossklaus, the preservation chair of the Northern New Jersey Chapter of the Victorian Society, presents a preservation award to Stephen N. Adubato, the founder of The North Ward Center.The award was presented during a ceremony at the mansion on Monday, May 16 to Stephen N. Adubato, who founded the North Ward Center in 1970.
Adubato’s organization, then called the North Ward Cultural and Education Center, purchased the 33-room mansion in 1972, when many of the city’s residents and merchants were leaving Newark.
“Buying the building was our way of showing the community that we were committed to the neighborhood,” Adubato said.
In 1976, a devastating fire ravaged the third floor and caused extensive damage to the second and first floors.
“The fire was a setback, but we decided to rebuild from the ashes,” said Adrianne Davis, the co-founder of The North Ward Center. “We were able to restore the mansion to its former glory through the hard work of volunteers and generous contributions of foundations and corporations.”
The mansion was built in the 1880s by William Clark, a Scottish immigrant who owned a thread business. The mansion overlooked Clark’s manufacturing facilities along the Passaic River, which at one time employed as many as 6,000 workers, many of them Scottish immigrants.
“You can’t talk about the industrial revolution, without talking about Newark, and you can’t talk about Newark, without talking about the Clarks,” said Liz Del Tuffo, a historian who attended the ceremony.
The Clarks lived in the mansion until selling it in 1925 to the Prospect Hill Country Day School for Girls, a private school that shuttered the school in the early 1970s.
Today, the mansion houses the administrative offices of The North Ward Center, which operates five separate preschools, a recreation program that serves 3,500 children, an adult medical day care center, a family success center and a center for autism. The North Ward Center also founded the Robert Treat Academy, one of the state’s top-performing charter schools with two campuses in Newark.
During the ceremony, the Victorian Society also gave an award to The Westfield Historical Society for the organization’s restoration of the historic Reeve House on Mountain Avenue in Westfield.
