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GALLERY TO HOUSE MELLON ART RISING

Foundations Complete and Building Begun Year After Breaking of Ground

SETTING OF MARBLE NEAR

Vast and Beautiful Washington Structure is Scheduled to Be Ready in Mid-1940

[[right margin]] '38 [[/right margin]]

Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
WASHINGTON, July 2.--On the first anniversary of the breaking of ground for the Andrew W. Mellon Gallery of Art here, the trustees announced today that work on the structure was about one-fourth completed. The structure, to cost about $15,000,000, will be finished in mid-1940, it is expected. 

Photographs of the site and a scale model released by the A. W. Mellon Education and Charitable Trust show the immense size of the building. It will rank in size, it is said, with the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan in New York, and the Uffizi in Florence. 

The site is two large city squares in downtown Washington. Its northeast corner is at the junction of Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues and at the south it fronts on the Mall. The Mall is being cleared of old temporary wartime buildings and its avenues replotted and replanted to resemble the Champs-Elysées in Paris, but, as the trustees pointed out in a statement today, the remodeled area will be wider and half a mile longer than the famous Paris avenue. It will stretch from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. 

One wing of the first story of the "National Gallery of Art," as the Mellon structure is official titled, has risen, and the foundations have been completed on the rest of the area. The building will be 784 feet long and 305 feet wide. 

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