Father Pitt

The Schenley Farms section of Oakland was crusty with clubs a century ago, but few were as influential as this one.

Charles Bickel designed this elegant clubhouse for a Jewish gentlemen’s club made up mostly of members of the Rodef Shalom congregation. To call it a gentlemen’s club brings up images of well-dressed men sitting inert with newspapers in their hands, but these gentlemen were far from inert. These were gentlemen who got things done. This club was the incubator of Reform Judaism; it was at the club (when it lived on the North Side) that the Pittsburgh Platform was signed.

This clubhouse was built in 1913, and the club continued to use it for almost a century. It finally fell to the same forces that evicted most of the other clubs in this section: declining membership in our antisocial age, and the bottomless well of money that the University of Pittsburgh can draw on. It was sold to Pitt in 2009, and is now known as the O’Hara Student Center.

Share