I'm here once again at the walled garden at Mellon Park.

It's a place many tourists to Pittsburgh might never visit, and a place that many residents might not know well.

But it's one of my favorite places in the entire city because it provides a direct link to Pittsburgh's more glamorous past.

You see, this entire complex of gardens was once part of an enormous estate, maybe the biggest estate in Pittsburgh's history, which sat at the top of this hill.

And this estate was home to one branch of the Mellon family, basically Pittsburgh royalty.

They had other mansions all across the city.

Almost all of which are now gone.

So if you want to know more about the missing Mellon mansions of Pittsburgh, stay tuned.

I'm Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

The name Mellon is omnipresent in Pittsburgh.

You can't make it halfway across the city without seeing their name emblazoned on some fancy building.

But for all their philanthropy, they always tended to shun the limelight.

They've always been an intensely private family.

So while you've almost certainly heard the name, you might not know anything about them.

About a year ago, I made an award winning video on the Mellon family tree, detailing who they are and what they're known for.

So if you have not seen that video, I highly recommend going to watch it first before continuing with this one, because it will provide some much needed context to the people and places we're going to talk about in this video.

If you already know who the Mellons are, then stick with me.

We're going to go check out a rather obscure memorial and woods of Highland Park, where a few of their ancestors are buried.

So we're coming in off the Main Loop road in Highland Park, and it ran for like an hour before I went out and filmed this morning.

So this area's all kind of swampy, but it's definitely worth it.

This is one of Pittsburgh's most obscure little memorials, and unfortunately, it seems to me like the city does all in their power to keep this thing as ugly as possible.

They keep digging this kind of muddy pit around it.

You'll see what I mean in just a second.

This is the Negley Memorial Grove.

It was put up by Sarah Negley Mellon towards the end of her life, and it honors the walking on mud.

It honors her grandparents and other settlers in the East End Valley.

Her grandfather, Alexander Negley, came here in 1788 and bought a 300 acre estate called Fertile Bottom.

Yes, that's really the name of his estate, in north of Bryant Street, in the neighborhood that is now, of course, Highland Park.

And it covered a lot of the area of what is actually the park of Highland Park as well.

So as you can read on this side of the stone, there's actually about 50 early pioneers buried in this plot.

There's just the one stone, of course, to represent everybody.

And I haven't been able to find a definitive list of who all is actually buried here.

Now, Alexander Negley did build his farmhouse not too far from here, up at the top of the hill that way.

But it was torn down, and he built reservoir number one for Highland Park in the late 1800s, Alexander's son Jacob married Anna Barbara Winebiddle, the daughter of a wealthy local family, and they bought 443 acres next door called Heath's Delight.

Their house went up in 1808 on the corner of what is now Negley and Stanton.

After Alexander died, Jacob inherited his property, making him the owner of basically the entire East Liberty Valley.

The 1808 house is no longer standing either.

Jacob Negleys property is described by Thomas Mellon in his autobiography.

The first object which excited my admiration was the Great Meadow, the largest I had ever seen.

It was bounded by what is now Penn Avenue, Negley Avenue, Collins Avenue, and Stanton Avenue, and comprised about 100 acres.

The Negley Mansion house and orchards appeared to be included in it, and it was not marred by division fences, except on the line of what is now Highland Avenue.

It presented an uninterrupted surface of tall green grass and as the breezes passed over it, causing it to undulate in light and shade like the waves of the sea, it left an abiding impression of natural beauty.

There was the steam mill in one direction of the northeast corner of what is now Penn and Collins avenues, with a pillar of black smoke rising from its chimney and the white puffs of escaping steam, and this great meadow, and the land on either side of it, as far as I could see.

All belonging to Jacob Negley, as I was told in the village, and the great brick mansion in the other direction towards the river.

It was one of the finest mansions about the city anywhere.

Now Thomas Mellon married Jacob Nagy's daughter, Sarah, and they began the Mellon dynasty as we know it.

There were five branches of the family, and we'll get to each of them in turn.

After Jacob Negley died in 1827, his widow Barbara built a new house because she couldn't stand to live in the old one without him.

That house is actually still standing.

It's behind me here as a part of Highland Park, and this section of the park is now called Farmhouse Playground.

You know, because there's a farmhouse and a playground.

Not too far from Highland Park is Bay wood, the enormous Second Empire estate built by Alexander King in 1880.

It remained in the King family until 1954, and over the last few decades its uses have varied, and it's been up for sale quite a few times in the last few years.

Now, it's not a melon mansion per se, but Alexander King's daughter Jenny did marry R.B.

Mellon, son of Thomas and Sarah, so I'd say it belongs on this list.

Thomas and Sarah were married in 1843, when Pittsburgh was a small city right at the confluence of the rivers.

They originally lived on Fifth Avenue and downtown, but Thomas writes that the smoke and crowded conditions seemed to have a depressive effect on Sarah's health and spirits.

They moved in with her mom for a while at the farmhouse, then back to downtown, where he was a lawyer, then back to the old Negley property in a small cabin.

Then finally, in 1850, they bought three acres off of Mama Negley on the west side of her driveway, which is now called Negley Avenue, East Liberty and Highland Park, were the countryside in those days.

And so it was there they built their country home, 401 Negley Avenue.

It was a white painted brick farmhouse in which they would live for the next 50 years, until their deaths in 1908 and 1909, nearly half a century after Thomas and Sarah died, the property was still in the family.

A grandson, Thomas AML and Jr, and his wife Helen Whiteman, had raised their three children in the house.

Then in 1939, his cousin Thomas Mellon, the second, who was intensely interested in historical preservation, bought the place, but he died in 1945.

The property was described as having 22 rooms with a walled in tennis court and golf and greens, as well as the original stable, carriage house and spring house.

The backyard included a vine covered stone bell tower, remembered by some family members as a kind of Irish tower that was rimmed with statues and busts of prominent figures in the family.

It also had an enormous copper beech tree in the side yard.

A favorite on hot summer days.

But in 1956 a local developer bought the land and turned it into a cul de sac called Rippey Place, line with 18 run of the mill mid-century modern homes.

The type one might find anywhere and certainly wouldn't expect on the property of a man like Thomas Mellon.

But remember the first rule of Pittsburgh architecture, where a modern building now stands?

The Grand Building once had to fall.

For decades, most of East Liberty belonged to Thomas and Sarah Mellon.

Slowly, over time, their orchards and their pastures were divvied up, subdivided into lots, and developed into neighborhoods.

So it only seems appropriate in a way that their once grand country estate should meet the same fate.

But there are still two pieces of evidence denoting where the house once stood.

These huge stone pillars on either end of the property are the original property boundary markers fronting on Negley Avenue.

Across the street, this large apartment complex has a conspicuously old style wrought iron fence and pillars lining its property.

These are all the remains of James Ross Mellon's once grand estate that sat here at 400 Negley Avenue.

J.R.

was Thomas and Sarah's second son, and in 1872 he and his wife, Rachel built an eight room frame house across the lane from them.

A few years later, they added a tower with a balcony so Rachel could indulge her love of astronomy.

She also loved to paint, so in addition, with skylights was added.

In the 1890s, a veneer of brick was added to modernize the home.

J.R.

and his brother, Thomas A Mellon, made most of their money by running a lumber yard in East Liberty, which supplied the wood that basically every house in the East End of Pittsburgh.

The house sat empty for many years after his death in 1934, and by 1958, the Negley Garden Apartments had opened.

Thomas, a melon or to.

He lived next door to his parents at 327 North Negley.

He died in 1899.

His widow died in 1902, and the property transferred to the Bope family in the mid 1920s.

The property was transferred to the B'nai Israel Congregation, which built the B'nai Israel Synagogue.

At the same time.

The synagogue closed and has since been converted into apartments, and because three major branches of the Mellon family lived within a few hundred feet of each other, here, and plenty of other Mellons and Negley owned property throughout the surrounding few blocks.

This area of town became known as the Mellon Patch, a name which the family didn't exactly love.

At least according to the autobiography of W.L.

Mellon.

William Larimer Mellon, or W.L., was the son of James Ross Mellon.

In the late 1800s, he made his money by investing in oil and streetcars, which at the time were perfect recipes for acquiring wealth.

And with that newfound wealth, he built a five and a half acre estate here in the heart of Squirrel Hill named Ben Elm.

And though, like the rest, it's gone.

You can still see outlines of where it used to be.

This 45 room mansion was built in about 1901.

The landscaping was designed by the Olmsted Brothers, who also designed the landscaping at RB and AW estates.

The most notable and lasting piece of that landscape design was this heavy rusticated stone retaining wall, which still fronts Darlington Road.

The nearby entrance to Schenley Park actually had to be redesigned to accommodate the property, which included 45 rooms, 13 bathrooms, more than a dozen fireplaces, stained glass carved wood paneling, gold stamped leather wall coverings, and an entire room telephone system.

They died in 1949, and in 1951, Squirrel Hill builder Jacob Simon bought the property, razed it, and turned it into 19 decent mid-century homes.

At least Darlington Court is prettier to look at than Rippey place.

Now here's the coolest part, at least for me, since W.L.

owned basically every streetcar line in Pittsburgh.

He would often take them to go to meetings downtown and things like that.

And because he could, he had his own private stop installed on Forbes Avenue down below his house.

And in order to access it, he had this stone staircase built from his mansion up on top of the hill down here to Forbes Avenue.

Andrew William Mellon, or A.W., is undoubtedly the most famous member of this family, not only for leading Mellon Bank for many decades, but because he became Treasury secretary in the 1920s.

So it seems fitting that his house is the only one still standing.

He lived at home with his parents until he got married at the age of 45.

In the year 1900.

Then he and his wife bought a new house at 5052 Forbes Street, located about where the Cohen University Center now stands at Carnegie Mellon University.

He donated that house to the university in 1921, where it served as a women's dormitory called Mellon Hall from 1921 to 1960.

After A.W.

and Nora got divorced in 1912.

He bought this old place, the Laughlin House, on Woodland Road here in Squirrel Hill, and he made some pretty extensive renovations, including an elevator and indoor swimming pool and a basement bowling alley.

Andrew Mellon was at the time the richest man in the world, but he was also a single father.

He would play hide and seek and blind man's bluff with his children.

He went sledding with them road bikes and brushed off playing poker with his peers to play house or slide down the banisters with them.

This house on Woodland Road was donated to the Pennsylvania Women's College, now known as Chatham University, in 1940, and it serves as an administrative building.

And now, after a short trip down Fifth Avenue, we're back to where we started in Mellon Park, which used to be the estate of Richard Beatty Mellon.

He was the showiest of the Mellon Brothers, and his 65 room mansion at 6500 5th Avenue reflects that.

It was built in 1909 on ten and a half acres.

There were 11 bathrooms lined with tile and marble grand staircases with bronze railings to put you up to the next floor.

Each ceiling was 12ft high.

There was a bowling alley, refrigerators, and maybe most impressively, washers and dryers.

There was a pipe organ with tubes to pump the music throughout the house.

There were two elevators and a dumbwaiter.

The walls were lined with hand-carved wood paneling.

We know a lot more about this Mellon mansion than many of the others, mainly thanks to one event which put it all over the newspapers a century ago.

In 1927, R.B.

's daughter, Sarah Cordelia Mellon, married local industrial Air Alan Magee Scaife.

The ceremony took place on a stormy night in November at the East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

The reception, however, was the real news.

You know how people will sometimes rent tents for a backyard reception?

Well, R.B.

did that more or less, okay.

Way more.

He spent $100,000, or 1.8 million in today's money, putting up a three room pavilion complete with seven foot chandeliers, marble floors, tapestries and frescoes, a concealed orchestra, golden columns, gold cages with live birds in them, and an artificial lake.

There were over 1000 wedding guests, including President Coolidge and the First Lady.

The newlyweds received over $6 million worth of gifts, enough to fill up three of the 65 rooms in this mansion.

R.B.

's gift to his daughter and new son in law.

Was this Tudor Revival house, built in 1904, which happened to sit right next door to his property.

R.B.

died in 1933 and his kids inherited the property.

They allowed soup kitchens to operate here, and it even became the headquarters for the East Liberty Red cross.

But in 1940, the City of Pittsburgh levied a $19,000 property tax on the property, and neither Sarah Mellon Scaife nor R.K.

Mellon felt that was very fair, as they'd been oh so charitable with the property.

So despite the city, they had the mansion torn down and donated the land back to the city on the condition that they preserve the gardens their mother loved so very much.

So what happened to all the material from such a massive house?

Well, it should be noted, first of all, that not everything was torn down.

The old carriage house behind me, evidenced by this old driveway, is now the Phipps Garden Center here at Mellon Park.

Otherwise, the contractor sold most of it off.

Some of the statues ended up in the Rotary Room at Phipps Conservatory, and many of the decorations from the mansion's interior and exterior ended up in place.

You might not expect.

The Mount Saint Peter Roman Catholic Church in New Kensington.

To quote from the church's website.

What was the railing around?

A swimming pool is now the parapet on the rear balcony.

The two marble angels at the bottom of the stairway have become holy water fonts.

The beautiful sculptured alabaster bowl, once filled with electric light, is the baptismal font.

The massive granite balustrade around the terrace is the communion rail.

The large swinging doors of the dining room in the mansion were placed as panels in the entrance to the chapel of the Seven Sacraments.

The carved wood of the library went into making of the confessionals.

The letter M that was carved into the wood can be seen around the framework of the doors.

The many cabinets of the vast kitchen are now in the church sacristy.

That may be all for Mellon mansions in the city, but the true scale of their wealth becomes visible once you head to the Ligonier Valley, about an hour east of Pittsburgh.

The necklace and the Mellons traveled over these mountains over 200 years ago to get to the frontier town of Pittsburgh, and in many ways, they've never left.

But before we head out there and get a breath of fresh air, I want to take you around some landmarks in Pittsburgh that I bet you didn't know were built with Mellon money.

You see that steeple over there?

Yeah.

That one.

That's East Liberty Presbyterian Church, and it's actually the fifth East Liberty Presbyterian Church to have that name and sit on that site.

The original was built in 1819 on land donated by Jacob and Barbara Negley.

It's where their daughter Sarah married Thomas Mellon in 1843.

And began this whole dynasty.

In 1931, construction began on the current church, funded entirely by R.B.

Mellon and his wife in memory of their mother's.

A block away is Motor Square Garden, which was built to be the East Liberty Market House in 1898.

Mellon brothers were planning a residential subdivision here, but it didn't sell enough lots, so they decided to go with a commercial property instead.

It's never been a successful commercial space, but it is a neighborhood landmark.

The Mellons have owned properties downtown since before the Great Fire of 1845.

In 1869, the first Mellon Bank went up at 145 Smithfield Street.

Properties built with Mellon money are many, and they include the Golf Tower, home to Golf Oil corporate headquarters and also designed by architect E.P.

Mellon.

The Alcoa Building, which housed the Aluminum Company of America and was the first building to have an all aluminum exterior.

The Kopper's Building, home of the Koppers Company and the greatest Art Deco skyscraper in the city.

Personal opinion.

The citizens Bank tower, whose entire top floor used to be R.K.

Mellon's office.

And the BNY Mellon Center, the second tallest building in the city.

Frustratingly, BNY Mellon changed their name last year to just BNY, and so the Mellon name no longer lights up the night sky in the city.

They shaped the destiny of their is, of course, Mellon Green, Mellon Square, and the Mellon Institute as well.

And finally, that brings us to Pittsburgh's most famous landmark of all, the Cathedral of Learning.

The University of Pittsburgh built this skyscraper in the 1920s, largely with their own money.

But can you guess who led the fundraising efforts for private donations?

Can you guess who donated millions of their own dollars?

And can you guess who donated the 14 acres of land this building sits on?

I'll give you one guess.

That's right.

It's the Mellons.

It's always the Mellons.

Let's go get some fresh air out east, Our first stop east of the city is in Poverty Point.

Well, at least that's what they called it more than 200 years ago.

Now it's just called North of Morrisville.

When Thomas Mellon's parents settled here in the 18 tens, they built this six room log farmhouse.

Two centuries and a few additions later, it's still here.

And there's even a plaque to commemorate it.

In the 1870s, Thomas Mellon and his sons had built the Ligonier Valley Railroad and also built Idlewild Park, by the way.

And Thomas had held on to thousands of acres of land for years.

He left those to his son, Richard Beatty, who in 1915 set out to build a third home there.

His wife said absolutely not, since she didn't want to play housekeeper for his huge parties.

So he turned them into Rolling Rock farms, which wasn't a third home in the style of his brothers, but was a country club on steroids.

They had a nine hole golf course, but also 28 horse stables, a huge log cabin style clubhouse, stocked trout streams and duck ponds, and many square miles for fox hunting.

The membership criteria was Did Richard Mellon like you?

If so, for as long as he was alive, no one ever paid any dues.

The members had the responsibility for maintenance and R.B.

paid the bills.

It began as 20mi and the entire complex today is about 40mi.

For reference, the City of Pittsburgh is 58mi.

Rachelwood An estate on 3500 acres on the eastern slope of the League in their valley, was begun by J.R.

Mellon in the early 1900s and named Rachel Wood in honor of his wife and his mother in law, who both bore that name.

He had a summer home already in Palatka, Florida, which is now abandoned, by the way.

So this became his weekend home to honor his own mother's ancestry.

He had the house built in a German mountain style.

To quote from W.L.s biography, somewhere father dug up an Austrian architect who undertook to create with stones of native rock, a home resembling an ancient German mountain castle.

Its square tower had a crenelated top and built into it.

Stone walls were slot like apertures, as if for archers to defend the castle.

Unhappily, the very first rainstorm transformed the top of the tower into a most inconvenient reservoir that drenched all the interior walls of the tower bedrooms.

So father conceived the idea of changing the whole thing into a pagoda.

An umbrella like roof was fixed on the tower.

This corrected the original fault, but robbed the structure of any resemblance to any castle, ancient or modern.

The 30 room house, which was built of local stone and wood, was apparently filled with curios and souvenirs of the couple's world travels.

The garden was filled with statues, and the grandchildren had free reign over the property, which teamed with wildlife.

J.R.

built a chapel modeled after the tomb of the Biblical Rachel in Bethlehem.

The property even had its own coal mine.

He had plans to build a 90ft tall statue of a Native American to honor the first inhabitants of the valley.

But World War One limited the necessary supply of concrete.

Rachel would pass to Jewish children and then to his nephew, Richard King Mellon.

In 1947.

He decided to turn the property into a game preserve for hunting, but also as an outdoor research laboratory.

The 30 room mansion was torn down in 1951, and some materials were reused to build the nearby West Fairfield Community Center, which still stands today.

Although it has reportedly been disused for decades.

It's unclear whether Rachel Wood still operates as a game preserve today, but while we're on the subject, we should point out that the nearby Powder Mill Nature Preserve was donated to the Carnegie Museum by the very same Richard King Mellon in 1956.

Rachel Wood Preserve, active or not, is currently 5100 acres, and the other holdings in the league in your valley add up to about 28,000 acres.

This means that, conservatively, the Mellons still own about 4% of Westmoreland County.

Further south in the valley, actually not that far from rolling Rock.

Sarah and Alan Scaife built a 50 room mansion on their 923 acre estate in 1938.

Sarah's favorite bird was the African penguin, and for many years there were ten of them living in igloos on the property.

Thus, the entire estate became known as Penguin Court.

No one is quite sure what happened to the penguins, but we do know the fate of the house.

Their son, Richard Mellon Scaife, apparently always hated the mansion.

It was austere and cold and damp.

And after his mother died, he came across a letter she had written to his father in which she said she'd always hated the house, too.

And so when it became Dicks in 1966, he had it torn down.

The rest of the property remained his until he died in 2014, and now the estate is owned by the Brandywine Conservancy.

I took a tour of Penguin Court recently, but they don't allow commercial use of photography or videography, so allow these photos from the internet to suffice if you get a chance.

I highly recommend taking the tour yourself.

The tour guide there watches my video so you know you'll be in good hands.

You can also check out the floor plans of the former mansion on the Library of Congress website.

But if you want a glimpse into what the rooms themselves at Penguin Court look like, search no further than this walnut.

paneled hallway inside the Carnegie Museum of Art.

In 1950, Sarah Mellon Scaife commissioned miniature models of rooms of the country estate.

And there are some of my favorite things inside the museum.

So, have you seen the miniatures in the museum?

Of all the Mellon properties we talked about today, which one was your favorite?

Was there anything you found particularly surprising or amusing?

Let me know.

Anything you want to let me know in the comments down below.

I really do read every single one, and I love hearing what you guys have to tell.

And the next time you're driving the streets of East Liberty or Squirrel Hill, or enjoying the cool mountain air of the Ligonier Valley, maybe you too will be thinking about the mansions long gone and considering the incredible legacy of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh.

That's all I've got for you.

So as always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.