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Imagine owning a construction business in Center City Philadelphia.
Imagine squiring potential big-ticket clients around the city.
Imagine pointing to the Philadelphia Museum of Art or the Packard Building and saying to said client: "Oh yeah, my grandfather built that."
Talk about a built-in advantage.
But that's the reality for Lowell Shay and his 7-year-old company, Shay Construction. The builder has deep family roots in the area, thanks to his grandfather.
"My grandfather, Howell Lewis Shay, got his start as a building designer at Trumbauer and Associates back in the 1920s," the 50-year-old Lowell Shay said. "He did a lot of design work on what we now know as Philadelphia landmarks places like the Packard Building, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The U.S. Customs House and the Drake Hotel."
Shay said architecture and design was in his father's blood, too.
"My father, William Dixon Shay, was a fixture at my grandfather's design company," he said. "He sort of veered off into campus design work, with schools like Penn, Villanova and the library at the University of Delaware. He was really hitting his stride when died in a plane crash in 1962."
Shay said his father and grandfather were in his thoughts when he founded Shay Construction in 1997. The firm is a high-end custom renovator and homebuilder that draws from its family history to make a name for the next generation of Shays. Even Shay's nephew, Dixon Shay, recently climbed aboard, after a brief Washington, D.C., law career, to help run the family business.
The firrn's Web site describes Shay Construction as a full-service project management and general contracting firm that will handle...