A. James Clark, the billionaire “King of Concrete” whose firm Clark Enterprises built the American Ballet Theater at Lincoln Center along with several other iconic structures around the U.S., died on Friday. He was 87.
The cause was congestive heart failure, Robert Flanagan, an executive at the firm, told the New York Times. Clark, a native of Richmond, Va., started his career in construction in 1950 and took business courses on the side because, as he described it to the magazine Warfield’s in 1989, “I did not want to go out at 5:30 in the morning with my stocking cap and my navy pea coat on and shoot lines and grades for the rest of my life.” His wealth was recently estimated at about $1.4 billion, according to Forbes.
The firm’s resume includes Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the Juilliard School in New York and the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. [NYT] – Hiten Samtani