Mary Gianetsas, 88, Who Owned `The House Money Couldn't Buy'

SPOKANE - Mary Gianetsas has died at 88, but the house that symbolized her fighting spirit still stands.

The palatial, four-story home is surrounded on all sides by the medical buildings and parking lots of Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Gianetsas, a Greek immigrant who spoke no English when she came to this country in 1924, resisted nearly 50 years of pressure from administrators who wanted to expand the hospital onto her property.

Gianetsas died Monday (March 4), a patient at the very hospital she thwarted for so long.

``She loved that house,'' said Gianetsas' son, George Alex. ``I don't think it was that she was extraordinarily stubborn or was out to get the hospital; she just did not want to sell it.

``That's where she wanted to die.''

Gianetsas turned down continuous offers for the 25-room house, known as the McAtee estate, after she bought it for $20,000 in 1944. The McAtee family offered the property to Sacred Heart first, but the hospital wasn't interested.

Hospital administrators spent years regretting the mistake.

When plans to expand began in the early 1960s, administrators took it for granted that Gianetsas would sell.

But she turned down the $200,000 offer, and the expansion was delayed about two years. Architects were forced to redesign the patient tower to run north-south rather than east-west. The change required excavation of 80,000 cubic yards of rock.

Alex said administrators approached him just a few years ago about persuading his mother to sell to make room for a new heart-research institute. She wouldn't, and the center was built south of the hospital instead.

Instead of making money by selling, she converted the house's huge yard into a parking lot where hospital visitors can leave their cars for 25 cents an hour.

Sacred Heart President Gerald Leahy said in a statement yesterday that Gianetsas was a good neighbor and she'll be missed.

The hospital has not decided whether to make another attempt to buy her property, spokeswoman B.J. Morton said.

She was 22 when she left Greece to be with Christopher Alex after corresponding with him for about a year. He met her at Ellis Island in New York, and they married that same day. Ten years later, Alex died.

``She spoke no English when he died, had three children and nothing but a few thousand in insurance money,'' said her son George, 57.

She remarried in 1938 to railroad man Pete Gianetsas, and had another child. In time, the family found the money to move from a one-bedroom apartment into the new house.

Alex said his mother's determination to keep the house made her something of a celebrity. After her story was told in a Spokane newspaper, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times both ran articles about the house that money couldn't buy.

Alex said he's not sure what the family will do with the property. He says he's torn over whether to keep it in the family, turn it into a business operation or sell it.

He said he and his siblings will decide what to do.

Besides her son Alex, of Spokane, Gianetsas is survived by son Constantine Alex in San Pedro, Calif., and daughters Dorothy Alex of Spokane and Xenia Gianetsas of Seattle.