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Customers at The Bread Room, the new Center City cafe led by the James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Ellen Yin, may not realize that when they are ordering a mushroom leek quiche or a fougasse at the counter, they are eating off of history.

The countertops of the rustic bakery are made from marble slabs laid down in 1876 as the floor of Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, built for the Centennial Exposition. The first home of what later became the Philadelphia Museum of Art was designed in an extravagant Beaux-Arts style with an eye-popping 70,000 square feet of marble flooring.

“No doubt, it made a grand impression 150 years ago to folks coming from across the country and across the world to the World’s Fair,” said Melissa Weiler Gerber, president and CEO of the Please Touch Museum, the current occupant of Memorial Hall.

But after generations of foot traffic, the substrate of the floor had deteriorated, causing many marble slabs to come loose, crack and crumble. Many slabs in the children’s museum had gaps stitched together with tape.

“We had a wild mosaic of tiles that didn’t match, things were replaced over time, and the infamous tape was absolutely everywhere to try to hold this space together,” Gerber said. “It took nearly a decade of fundraising until the project could officially begin in February of 2024.”

About 18,000 of the original 70,000 square feet of marble had to be restored, sourcing new black, white and red marble from Spain, Italy and Belgium.

Some of the marble slabs were too damaged to be reset in Memorial Hall, and they were diverted into the salvage market. They are now reappearing in Philadelphia restaurants and hotels, including The Bread Room, the forthcoming bar that will replace the old Palm Restaurant in the Bellevue Hotel, and the upcoming redesign of Kampar, the James Beard-nominated Malaysian restaurant.

“Stone doesn’t go bad,” said Brian Bendel, of Marguerite Rodgers Interior Design. “It always kills me to see people tear stone out and throw it away. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Bendel designed The Bread Room’s aesthetic of repurposed fixtures and distressed furniture. He discovered the Memorial Hall marble slabs in Beaty American, the now-closed architectural salvage shop in Kensington run by Bob Beaty.

When it came to finishing the marble-topped counters, Bendel did not buff out foot traffic marks, keeping the slabs’ telltale scratches in place.

“The feeling we were trying to invoke was to have a space that felt like it was always there as part of Philadelphia,” he said. “That sense of craftsmanship and things that are local.”

At Kampar, the marble will be used to rebuild the bar that was damaged by a fire last year. The owner of the James Beard award semifinalist restaurant in Bella Vista, Ange Branca, said it will reopen this summer.

The stone is King of Prussia marble, also called King of Prussia blue, quarried in Montgomery County in the 19th century. The material was used to make many local buildings, including the Merchant Exchange building in Old City, the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown and the Atwater Kent Museum building, formerly the Philadelphia History Museum.

In the 19th century, Montgomery County was one of only a handful of places in the United States where marble was quarried. But that is no longer the case. The only slabs of King of Prussia marble available now are repurposed from 19th century buildings.

“It’s rare and very interesting,” woodworker John Staack said. “It’s a very strong piece of American history, especially at that time. That was when the Americas were new. It was our marble.”

Staack built The Bread Room counters and is using more slabs from Memorial Hall in the Bellevue Hotel, which is now in the process of rebuilding its former restaurant into a new concept called Bar Bella, he said.

Bar Bella will be built of material reclaimed from the Clairmont Mansion, built in 1917 by the co-owner of Strawbridge and Clothier department store, Morris Lewis Clothier. The mansion was demolished in 2019 to make way for a school.

Before demolition, the walnut trim and floor-to-ceiling wall paneling designed by architect Horace Trumbauer were salvaged. They are now being reinstalled in the Bellevue.

Staack is using marble reclaimed from Memorial Hall for the hearth and surround of the Trumbauer fireplace.

“We thought it would be perfect with the very historic location, very historic Philadelphia room, very historic setting,” he said. “To use the right marble in that space was really exciting for us.”

Staack and his partner, Jim Moore, also have wealthy clients who have historic homes with fireplaces built of King of Prussia marble. Staack and Moore grabbed as much reclaimed Memorial Hall stone as possible from Bob Beaty for future restorations.

“It has a really lovely blue color. It ranges from a very dark blue to a white,” Staack said. “The flooring is a very rare set of the very dark King of Prussia marble.”