How Mellon took to the bank ‘corporate modern’ architecture
Most old Pittsburgh banks are cathedrals of earning with massive columns and hushed marblelined interiors that lend a formal air to financial transactions.
Richard Beatty Mellon, the banker and industrialist, continued that approach when Mellon Bank opened its Downtown headquarters in 1924 on Smithfield Street. The gray granite structure, supported by interior marble columns, fit his mantra of “quality withoutshowmanship.”
By 1965, Mellon Bank remained obsessed with quality, but its architectural language had become modern. Employees in its building supervision department teamed with architects, creating a unique collection of innovative neighborhood branches that featured tall windows, warmly decorated interiors flooded by natural light and, in some cases, glazed emeraldgreen brick exteriors — a subtle formof branding.
“Banking at midcentury had a different vibe. In the modern era, banking offered the possibility of transparency,” said Brittany Reilly, a member of the Pittsburgh Modern Committee at Preservation Pittsburgh.
Ms. Reilly and her colleagues are researching local architecture between 1945 and 1979 so people can understand how Pittsburgh reinvented itself after World War II and the role Mellon Bank played in that transformation.
An excellent example of its “corporate modern” style is the former Mellon Bank branch in East Liberty. Citizens Bank wants to demolish the vacant building, which it owns, and build a small branch and surface parking lot. On that same triangular plot bounded by Penn Avenue, Centre Avenue and SheridanSquare, a competing bank, Chase, plans to demolish a CVS at 6100 Penn Ave. to builda drive-through branch.
Earlier this year, the city’s historic review commission and planning commission approved the Pittsburgh Modern Committee’s request to designate the former Mellon Bank branch a historic landmark.
Those rulings halted Citizens’ internal demolition workat 6112 Penn Ave.
City Council will decide the building’s fate. If Kai Gutschow had his way, it would remainstanding.
“It has a beautiful patina to it. It sparkles. We should not be tearing down perfectly good buildings. We should be reusing, recycling, repurposingand, if necessary, remodeling. To build anything new is to make the climate worse,” said Mr. Gutschow, an associate professor who teaches architectural modernism at CarnegieMellon University.
Opened in 1970, the bank “memorializes the era in which urban planners decided that they had to improve East Liberty by turning it into an island with a circle around it,” he said.
The building occupies a primelocation.
“This is the entrance to East Liberty, or at least it was atone point. It’s seen by a lot of people. All those brand-new apartment centers across the street could use a day care center or a nice bakery,” Mr. Gutschow said, suggesting otheruses for the building.
Another option, he said, is making it a museum that shows urban planners’ disastrous attempt to revive East Liberty’s commercial district by making it a pedestrian mall isolated by a ring road called Penn Circle. Urban renewal became “urban removal” of buildings and poor people, he said.
A Mellon Bank branch builtaround the same time as the East Liberty branch still stands in Squirrel Hill. It’s now a Citizens Bank. Another former Mellon Bank branchis slated to open in the heart of Lawrenceville in September. After renovations, it will have an Oliver’s Donuts, a ground-floor restaurant with the building’s original 12-foot-high ceilings and space for nine smallbusinesses.
Brian Mendellsohn of Botero Development said he renovatedthe interior but left much of the building’s signature architectural details intact, uncovering all of the 10 originalwindows.
“I had to see past the CitizensBank aesthetic,” he said.
A vacant former Mellon Bank branch on upper Fifth Avenue in Uptown also has the signature glazed green brick that “allowed you to recognize it as a Mellon Bank branch without heavy signage,” Ms. Reilly said.
Starting in 1950, Pittsburgh’s Downtown skyline beganto change radically.
“If you begin at the Point, you won’t make it very far before you find yourself appreciating a montage of modern architecture,” Ms. Reilly said, citing the portal bridge as a frame for Gateway Center, a complex of 10 buildingsbuilt on 25 acres between 1950and 1969.
Justin Greenawalt, president of the East Liberty Valley Historical Society, said the former Mellon Bank branch in East Liberty meets the threshold for National Register of Historic Places status. “It is one of the few buildings from this era that remains intact. This building is 51 years old.”
The daring Squirrel Hill branch that Mellon Bank built, now a Citizens, is circular with barrel arches and topped by a continuously pouredconcrete dome.
“This period in architecture — we’re really pushing theenvelope. Pittsburgh was trying to reinvent itself and slough off the smoky city moniker,” Mr. Greenawalt said.
In East Liberty, the Mellon Bank branch’s Penn Avenue facade employed classical architectural language in a new way with tall pillars of glazed greenbrick.
“The front of the building is perfectly symmetrical,” Mr. Greenawalt said. “It looks like an arcade with columns flanked by these book-ending piers. The architects designed this so that the Penn Avenuefacing facade was meant to be viewed on foot. You can walk pastit. You can appreciate it.”
By contrast, the building’s Centre Avenue side features a symmetrical sawtooth pattern that matches the street’s busy rhythm, allows for lots of natural light and, “shields the offices from automobile noise. That was the part of the building that held administrative offices,” he said.
“If we are to demolish this building, we are effectively saying that the last 70 years in East Liberty don’t matter. But they do. They absolutely do. Demolishing something that has been there for 50 years is not being neighborly,” Greenawalt said.
BennettGriesmer, a spokesman for Citizens Financial Group, said the bank’s representatives met with East Liberty groups last July to hear comments on its proposed design for the new bank branch andrevised its plans.
“We have engaged with the community throughout this process and have revised our site plan based on direct feedback. We look forward to continuingthis work with the city of Pittsburgh and local community groups to build a new space in this location to help us best serve the East Liberty community for many years to come,”Mr. Griesmer said.