It is an old story, but with a new, humiliating twist - the loss of the Mellon grip in Pittsburgh.
What illustrates it better than the headquarters shift of Alcoa Inc. to New Yorkâ¢
Here was a quintessential "Mellon company," rooted here for 118 years, the world's premier aluminum manufacturer. Now its corporate command post is gone.
And Pittsburgh never knew until it was over. Directors approved the move as if it were nothing, without public notice. A Securities and Exchange Commission filing made it official. A pin drops on a floor louder.
But let us count the ways in which the dynasty left by Judge Thomas Mellon (1813-1908) and his sons keeps fading away.
Gulf Oil Corp., the diamond in the crown, disappeared in a 1984 merger under threat of takeover. Shareholders received a one-time payday, but Gulf's 2,000 local jobs dying left a hole in Pittsburgh deeper than any oil strike.
The Mellon's bank is now a financial management corporation. Still standing, still big, but no longer in "retail" banking. Worse, the monumental main office that brothers Andrew W. and Richard B. Mellon left at Fifth and Smithfield, Downtown, was gutted for a retail store. The hapless Lord & Taylor failed, but an architectural treasure disappeared forever.
The old Koppers Co. Inc., builder of coke ovens and blast furnaces, went in another 1980s takeover. A new Koppers Industries Inc. rose from the ruins, but without Mellon influence.
Other erasures and exits have dissipated the family's onetime industrial power. Historians really should probe why, as with the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and other moneyed clans. Was it a shortage of younger Mellons "interested in the business?" Or freeze-out by professional managers resentful of those born to the spoonâ¢
Some Mellons haven't helped by just going away. Andrew Mellon himself left for Washington, D.C. around 1920. His able son, Paul, never applied his talents in a then dirty steel city. Aggressive cousin Thomas Mellon Evans made enemies and a fortune here but lived afar. Paul Mellon's cousin, banker Richard K. Mellon, son of Richard B., did make Pittsburgh his base for the city's post-World War II "renaissance." But this proved more show than substance. It helped entrench a one-party political regime allied with unions. Half the city's population has gone in a half-century, while City Hall remains clueless how to bring about the low-tax, market-enhancing conditions for global enterprises.
In this state of community decline there apparently was nobody on Alcoa's board with the clout to call CEO Alain Belda to order. It's just an outrage for a major corporate command center to leave town, under no competitive pressure to do so, and laden with high-paying jobs and legal, accounting, and other economic multipliers. "Mellon directors" would have made that point.
Managers come from everywhere. Families come from places. Pittsburgh misses what the Mellons used to bring to the table.
