Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s Clark Mausoleum

Thirteen years before he died, William Andrews Clark Jr. built his final resting place at Hollywood Cemetery: a marble mausoleum situated on its own island.

Clark Mausoleum in the mid-1920s (California State Library)

In 1920, the philanthropic millionaire—who founded and financed the Los Angeles Philharmonic—purchased the plot in the middle of man-made Sylvan Lake, and within weeks he began construction on the family vault, designed in a Greco-Roman Classical Revival style by architect Robert D. Farquhar.

The most expensive building of its size in the world, it cost $500,000 … equivalent to $7.7 million today (with inflation).

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