It’s appropriate that innkeeper Mary Ann Graf should purchase the flour and wheat berries for the breakfast bread she serves her guests from the Benedictines at St. Vincent’s College; after all, the Priory was once a monastery. Mary Ann and Edward, her husband, purchased the building in 1984. They promptly embarked on a million-dollar renovation, transforming the brick, tinceilinged monks’ residence into a 24-room inn complete with private baths and handsome public rooms for business
and social events. What was monastic more than a century ago is now warmed by Victorian lace, oil lamps, wrought-iron beds, and armoires. As testimony that Mary Ann has done something right, the YWCA named her Pittsburgh’s Entrepreneur of the Year in
1988.
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