The Magical, Mysterious Mr. Bean

LANSDALE - Architect Milton Bean might be an unknown figure to residents of Lansdale, where he lived for about 40 years beginning in 1880; but Leopoldo Montoya thinks Bean should be a household name, not just in Lansdale, but across the country.

“He was a major figure in architecture. He needs to be known, he needs to be put back into architecture scholarly works,” Montoya said. “I would hope the people of would be very proud of him. He was here.”

Montoya made his proposal for Bean’s canonization Tuesday at the , in a presentation called “The Mystery of Architect Milton Bean.” The program was sponsored by the Lansdale Historical Society.


Montoya, who owns a Bean-designed house in Wyncote, has spent more than a decade researching Bean’s life and work. He included a video presentation featuring many of the buildings the architect designed, such as the former Garrick Theater in Norristown, as well as the Music Hall theater block and the First National Bank, both in Lansdale.

Montoya said his research was fraught with blind alleys and dead ends due to the dearth of historical data on Bean. Only a few of the architect’s plans still exist, which goes for the physical buildings that came out of those plans.

Of the “hundreds” of churches, houses, schools, and commercial buildings designed by Bean, “about 50 percent are still standing, the other 50 percent are gone,” Montoya said. Still, he persevered to amass enough material for a book soon to be published by the Montgomery County Historical Society.

So just how elusive a figure is Milton Bean? Historical Society President Dick Shearer provided the best answer at the start of the program.

“He kept a very, very low profile to the point where very few people are aware of the breadth of the work that he did,” Shearer said.

“How low out of public view is he? We don’t even have one picture of Milton Bean to share with you tonight,” he continued. “There is one distant shot of him in his horseless carriage, but it’s too out of focus.”

He then made a plea to anyone in the audience who might have a picture of Bean or know where to get one. No one came forward.

Montoya focused on Bean’s largest body of work concentrated in and around Ambler where he was the chief architect for Dr. Richard Mattison, the owner of the Keasby and Mattison asbestos empire.

Mattison hired Bean to design many of its buildings, including his own palace, Lindenwold. Bean drew up plans for dozens of other structures in Ambler including single and row houses for employees of K&M, the Ambler Gazette building, the opera house and .

Montoya lists this last structure as his favorite Bean creation.

“It is simply exquisite,” he said of the church at 708 South Bethlehem Pike.

The original Trinity, built in 1898, was destroyed by fire in 1986; it was rebuilt three years later containing some of the original artifacts.

For all his ability to praise, Montoya is equally adept at heaping scorn on what he considers to be the wretched state of architecture today. Throughout a slide-show presentation, he would tell of “some modern monstrosity” that had taken the place of a Bean-designed building long since gone and forgotten.

 “This business of abolishing anything, at anytime, for any purpose, particularly to make more room. ‘Oh, we need a bigger school, a bigger church.’ That’s not good enough,” he said, adding that too many “McDonald’s and pharmacies” are built on land that once held a beautiful school or Victorian-era house.

Such as with the case of the former Hotel Tremont in Lansdale.

The presentation ended with Montoya, once again, heaping praise on the man whose architecture “will always surprise you ... He put things into his designs that you just can’t find anywhere else.”

“My task is done. It’s now up to you to continue talking about him,” he continued. “He could have lived anywhere in the world. He could have had more fame, more money, more everything, but he chose to live here, in Lansdale.”

Ever the passionate Spaniard, Montoya finished by leading the audience in a chant: “Viva Bean! Viva Bean! Viva Bean!”