Volume 30 No. 1
January 2014
Art museum reflects on anniversary By Alyse Horn
Zukin said plans for the Masonic building are complete and he is waiting for approval from the National Park Service to grant historic status. Zukin has until June to close on the building. The Central Northside City of Asylum signed the lease for the Masonic Building, where they plan to build a literary center, bookstore and café called Alphabet City. Recently, Zukin’s exclusive time period on the Bradberry
It takes truly creative minds to see something in nothing. Take Barbara Luderowski, founder and co-director of the Mattress Factory art museum, 500 Sampsonia Way. When she first moved to the Northside in the 1970s, she bought a condemned house on Monterey Street. “I don’t walk into houses and see crap,” Luderowski said in a 2009 interview with Pittsburgh Quarterly.” I see what I want to make out of them,” The same goes for the worldrenowned art museum she founded 35 years ago. Before it was the Mattress Factory, it was a mattress factory. The abandoned Sterns & Foster mattress warehouse caught Luderowski’s eye in the mid1970s when it went up for sale. The building was located along the walk Luderowski would make between her Monterey Street house and Sampsonia Way studio. Luderowski said she tried to get several other people to purchase the warehouse with her, but no one accepted the offer.
See Garden, page 7
See Mattress Factory, page 8
Photo by Alyse Horn Construction workers renovate The Garden Theater on December 6. The theater was built in 1915.
Garden Theater rennovations continue into the New Year By Alyse Horn
Construction for the Garden Theater Building, 10 W. North Ave., is underway. Wayne Zukin, Zukin Realty president, said with the Garden Theater in progress construction should move more easily and quickly. “[The Garden Theater Block] is a complicated series of buildings,” Zukin said. “Restoring the buildings is much more expensive than tearing them down and building them new, so it becomes that much more complicated to
INSIDE
find financing and grant money.” Gigi Saladan, chief communications officer for the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which is involved in the development of the Garden Theater Block, said Zukin is waiting on funding for the Masonic building, 12 W. North Ave., in the form of Historic Tax Credits from the Department of Interior’s Parks Service. Generally, if the Masonic building is certified to be a historic structure, it will give the developers a 20 percent tax credit.
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