Father Pitt

This building at the corner of Carson and 17th, known to today’s Pittsburghers as the home of Nakama, a well-known Japanese restaurant, was once Lorch’s, the “South Side’s Big Store,” as we can see in this advertisement preserved by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation:

To run a department store on the South Side in about 1901, you had to be able to serve your customers in Polish—and probably Ukrainian and Serbian and several other languages as well.