Another picture of this building, this time a composite made from four separate photographs. There is no reason not to repeat what Father Pitt wrote the last time he mentioned the Schiller Glocke Gesang und Turn Verein:
On the whole, the South Side Flats were East European and the Slopes were German. But a large neighborhood like the Flats has room for diverse microneighborhoods, and we find this “Schiller’s Bell Singing and Athletic Society” on Jane Street. The building is now turned to other uses, but the inscription remains. Pittsburgh and Allegheny used to be full of German singing societies; the Teutonia Männerchor in Dutchtown is the most prominent remnant.
0 responses to “Schiller Glocke Gesang und Turn Verein, South Side”
What an absolutely lovely building. What happened here in America. Where are these kinds of buildings for the common man now. Our group has bounced from place to place looking for somewhere to meet. Boy would it be nice to have our own meeting place.
Old Pa Pitt had prepared a windy and gloomy reply to the effect “that the common man seldom has buildings like these because the common man no longer finds it worthwhile to make sacrifices for the common good.” But he decided that he was all wrong about it, so he erased it. The common man can still surround himself with splendor whenever he likes: he can have a night out at some themed restaurant like the Cheesecake Factory, or go to an expensive shopping mall, or see a show at the Benedum Center. What has changed is that the individual family, rather than the larger group, has become the unit in which these money-spending decisions are made. The common man does not pour his life into a club; he may join one, but he will always put his own private enjoyments over the needs of the club when it comes to spending money. So the club is a poor thing, begging for temporary space, because its members are spending all their money on eating out at the Cheesecake Factory. A nineteenth-century German immigrant on the South Side, on the other hand, would laugh at the idea of going out to an expensive restaurant every Saturday, because of course he had his club.
As I suspect you already know, this building housed the Sokol Club through the 70’s into the 80’s until it caught fire after a weeknight bingo. A lot of the beauty you see in this building was a result of the rebuild after the fire.