Pennsylvania’s next U.S. senator lives in a century-old former Chevrolet dealership outside Pittsburgh.
John Fetterman, a Democrat who defeated TV doctor Mehmet Oz last week in the nation’s most expensive Senate race, converted two floors of the Superior Motors building in Braddock into his family’s home. Their main living quarters are where the service department operated, and ramps that employees used to drive cars between floors still provide access to a rooftop patio.
Fetterman and his wife, Gisele, bought the space in 2013 during his 13-year stint as the city’s mayor. The couple, who have three children, had to have an abandoned Chevy taken out of the building by crane, according to a 2020 profile in Pittsburgh Magazine.
“I suspect I’m the only mayor in America that can say he lives directly across the street from a steel mill,” Fetterman said in a 2017 video by PennLive.com. “I count Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill as my neighbor.”
Superior Motors was one of the first indoor car dealerships in the country when it opened in the early 1920s, Fetterman said. The mill, the last of many that used to be in the area, has been in continuous operation since 1875 and is now owned by U.S. Steel.
Fetterman, who stands 6 feet 8, said he was drawn to the building in part by its 12-foot ceilings. He chose not to move his family to the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor’s mansion in Harrisburg after being elected to that position in 2018.
A restaurant called Superior Motors — mentioned in a 2018 Time magazine feature on the “World’s Greatest Places” — operated on the building’s first floor until closing last year.