PCA Buildings
For the industrialists in the early 1900s, a major living area was Pittsburgh's East End, where a building boom was underway. A parade of mansions were commissioned along Fifth Avenue to what became known as “Millionaires Row” for some of the wealthiest and most celebrated families in Pittsburgh, such as the Mellons, the Benedums, and the Fricks.
In 1909, one of the most impressive mansions built was the 65-room Richard Beatty Mellon House on the 11 acres (4.5 ha) of land bordering Fifth Avenue, Shady Avenue and Beechwood Boulevard on what is now known as Mellon Park. Richard Beatty Mellon and his wife Jennie King Mellon raised two children, Sarah Cordelia King Mellon and Richard King Mellon. Jennie King Mellon had a love for flowers and had two very large flower gardens facing Beechwood Boulevard, which still exists in Mellon Park today. Next to the mansion was a garage and carriage house, which housed servants on the second floor. This carriage house was donated to the City and is now the Phipps Garden Center. The 65-room mansion was torn down in 1941.
In 1904, there was another earlier Tudor revival mansion built on the Mellon Estate. It was given as a wedding gift in 1927 to Richard Beatty’s daughter Sarah, who married Alan Magee Scaife, fifth generation industrialist and the Director of Mellon National Bank. In February 1946, the Scaifes also donated their home and property to the City. This mansion is now the Scaife Building that houses the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts School.
Next door to the Mellon Estate, on the corner of Fifth and Shady Avenues, Charles D. Marshall, president and co-owner of the McClintic-Marshall Construction Company, which later became Bethlehem Steel, built his mansion. Completed in 1912, the Marshall mansion was an impressive formal 17th-Century Carolean-inspired building. In 1943, Charles Marshall also donated his house at 6300 Fifth Avenue to the City. The City was responsible for only the exterior maintenance. The Marshall mansion became the Arts and Crafts Center of Pittsburgh in 1945. In 1980, the name was again changed to what is presently known as the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Read more about this topic: Pittsburgh Center For The Arts
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)