Photos courtesy of King Mansion
The King Mansion was a welcoming family home long before it blossomed into a breathtaking venue.
Grandma leapt from balcony to balcony so she could scare the kids by hopping through their bedroom window. Family slept on the balcony to catch summertime breezes. Guests danced at the foot of the grand staircase while the band played on the landing.
“You could really make an entrance coming down those stairs,” said Will King, grandson of Horace King, the attorney who built the masterpiece for his musician wife and six kids.
This year, the King Mansion celebrates its centennial as a remarkably preserved testament to Harrisburg’s 1926 City Beautiful-inspired renaissance. If all goes well for the next 100 years, it will help lead the city’s post-pandemic revitalization and continue standing as a premier destination for weddings, events and a taste of Jazz Age opulence.
“This place,” said current owner Marc Kurowski, “was absolutely made to entertain.”
Home for the Kids
Horace and Rose King wanted a family home at Front and Woodbine streets, facing the Susquehanna River.
The tax attorney commissioned Harrisburg’s trending architect, Frank Gordon Fahnestock Jr., for a massive, Mediterranean-style, Indiana limestone house that “practically set a new standard for living on the riverfront,” wrote Ken Frew, research librarian for the Historical Society of Dauphin County, in “Building Harrisburg,” his seminal review of city architecture.
At a time when the average working American earned $2,000 a year, the stately home cost nearly $135,000 to complete.
Horace King had “big ideas” to occupy the kids, and Fahnestock accommodated. Gymnasium on the third floor. Swimming pool, billiard room and bowling alley in the basement. For guests, accomplished musician Rose King—“she had an amazing voice,” said Will King—played the grand piano and sang.
King called his grandfather “a very creative, pioneering man” who organized Loyal Order of Moose lodges nationwide. The former minor league baseball player played one-base baseball with his kids on the mansion grounds.
We can also thank Horace for preventing the city from building Hoffman Street straight through the William Penn High School campus—a case he took to the state Supreme Court and won.
“I’m glad we were able to do something to save the campus, do something for the school children,” King told the Harrisburg Telegraph at the time.
After Horace’s death in 1938, Rose sold the house to a rest home, beginning its transformation to business use. From 1947 to 2003, it was headquarters of the Merchants & Business Men’s Mutual Insurance Co.
In the 1950s, Will King was growing up north of Harrisburg, and his family sometimes got tours of his father’s childhood home. The bowling alley, King told TheBurg, was converted to a shooting range because the humidity from the pool had warped the lanes.
The elegant mansion has “always been an inspiration” for King, who has built and renovated homes. Attorneys have “a sense of style and architecture,” he said. “It’s such a work of art, so well-proportioned and balanced and beautifully done.”
Owners have taken meticulous care of the building over the decades, he added, and Kurowski’s group is “doing the best job of all of them, in my opinion.”
Red Land High School sweethearts Paige and Cole Wagner were attending the University of Georgia and looking for a wedding venue when their mothers toured King Mansion. Fifteen minutes on FaceTime clinched the deal.
“Yep, that’s our wedding venue,” Paige said.
Then they experienced the mansion and its riverfront idyll in person.
“This is as stunning as it gets,” Cole said. “When you walk up to the front of the mansion, it’s absolutely breathtaking. The memories are going to last a lifetime, but the photos you get are what you keep coming back to.”
Even the July weather didn’t upset the proceedings. The outdoor ceremony went off smoothly after a 15-minute storm delay. The cocktail hour was intended to be partly on the long porch, but the heat sent everyone inside, and no one was cramped.
“It’s awesome with the rooms because there’s seating everywhere,” Paige said, a feature appreciated by grandparents and older guests.
Marc Kurowski
Falling in Love
Several years ago, Kurowski wanted a city site for his business, K&W Engineers. His real estate agent connected him with Josh Gray, who was moving the company, Webclients.net, out of King Mansion.
“He wanted somebody who would be a steward of the building,” Kurowski said.
He was intrigued by Gray’s offhand comment that he got married there. Others occasionally asked about using the space for weddings, Gray told him.
JDK Catering—today, one of the mansion’s exclusive caterers—liked the venue idea, and Kurowski decided on a test drive. During COVID, he “dived in with both feet” with renovations. The first “for-real, full-time wedding” was held in March 2021.
The ballroom gallery that hosts up to 160 guests was gutted to the concrete floor, now polished to a gleam, and stripped of decades of HVAC components. Columns on the wall that look original were actually built to conceal utility chases.
“They look like they’ve been here,” Kurowski said. “Those guys did a hell of a job.”
Italian newspapers found tucked in upstairs walls attest to the original builders and the “old-world craftsmanship from the 1920s,” he added. “The bones are phenomenal. It’s held up because of the way it was built.”
In late 2024, Kurowski added luxury, river view suites on the third floor, where the King kids played basketball. Almost inevitably, wedding parties rent them.
“It’s such a fun idea for couples to escape upstairs after your wedding,” said Venue Manager Courtney Cerjanic.
Cerjanic “fell in love with the mansion” when she was hired in late 2023.
“It’s like a little piece of Europe in Harrisburg,” she said.
Wedding couples—97 weddings are booked for 2026—come from the midstate and the Mid-Atlantic. Businesses host meetings, and nonprofits stage galas (including—shameless plug alert—TheBurg’s Friends of the TheBurg Bash every September).
“We want folks to come here to experience the King Mansion,” Kurowski said.
It is a venue for celebrations but also, he hopes, a place “to share ideas, whether that is political or community-minded folks having a place to connect and informally talk about the business of the city.”
Nathan Imboden, CEO of Boden Wealth in Lemoyne, regularly attended an informal gathering of area businesspeople as the mansion was converting to event space, and he realized he found the ideal setting for client appreciation dinners.
Guests are greeted with champagne. Before dinner, they mingle in the foyer, parlor, bar and sitting room. They take photos with the “gorgeous fireplace background.”
“I see people in pockets of different areas,” he said. “They’re laughing and engaged. All this stuff happens naturally.”
The venue reflects and continues to uphold its business heritage, Imboden said.
“You hear of places tearing down these old structures and putting up something new or an apartment complex,” he said. “The fact that a building that has such a rich history and is now still used for some form of business helps to continue that legacy.”
Ahead for the mansion are more accommodations, “other fun stuff” like signage and landscaping, and at some point, upgrades for the basement, where the pool and its bathhouses remain, Kurowski said.
King Mansion attracts about 20,000 visitors a year who dine, stay in hotels, and support the local economy, he added. As Cerjanic put it, “We’re helping make central PA more of a destination for people, especially Harrisburg but also Hershey. People turn it into a long weekend.”
The mansion hits the trifecta of historic preservation, said Historic Harrisburg Association Executive Director David Morrison: an exterior in “tiptop condition,” nearly original Roaring ‘20s interior, and use by thousands of people yearly.
King Mansion’s preservation supports Front Street’s “world-class streetscape” that tourists are eager to experience.
“It was built for entertaining,” Morrison said. “It’s living its best new life.”
In a moment of serendipity for the Wagners, guests watched from the mansion lawn as the Harrisburg Senators set off their Friday night fireworks.
Cole called it the “cherry on top” of a wedding that guests called one of the best ever.
King Mansion allowed them to relax, said Paige, and Cole has “no doubt at all” that the space launched their marriage on a great note.
“If we had the chance to do it all over again, we wouldn’t have changed a thing,” he said. “That was exactly where we wanted to be.”
Will King “can’t tell you how thrilled I am” to see the mansion’s rejuvenation. His grandfather “made such a statement with a house that is still there, and we’re still talking about it and still talking about him,” he said. “It really is inspirational that this is the way to leave your mark, to leave something that endures.”
The King Mansion is located at 2201 N. Front St., Harrisburg. For more information, visit www.kingmansionpa.com.
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