Pittsburghers know it as the Gimbels Building, because for most of the twentieth century it was the home of the Gimbels department store in Pittsburgh. But it was built for the Kaufmann & Baer Company, which Gimbels bought out a few years later.
In November of 1913, this colossal department store was still going up. But in the front of the directory that went to every telephone subscriber in Pittsburgh was this beautifully executed rendering, part of a full-page ad to build up enthusiasm for the store’s opening in the spring of 1914. The architects were Starrett & Van Vleck, specialists in department stores; the drawing is signed with a name that Father Pitt could not read, but he is fairly certain it was neither Starrett nor Van Vleck. Probably it was a draftsman in their office, and in old Pa Pitt’s opinion they could not have paid that employee enough. It’s a first-rate piece of work.
“The vast new building of the Kaufmann & Baer Company,” said the advertisement, “having a floor area of about 800,000 square feet (nearly 20 acres), will be opened for business in the Spring 1914. It will be not only the BIGGEST, but also the BEST and MOST MODERN shopping center in the city of Pittsburgh. Its stocks will be the largest and most varied; its prices, the lowest. It will be the store for ALL THE PEOPLE.”
It would not be possible to get a photograph from the same angle, either in 1913 or today, without picking up the Oliver Building and setting it aside somewhere. The closest old Pa Pitt could come to replicating the angle of the drawing with a photograph from his collection was this:
The Kaufmanns in the name, by the way, were a different branch of the same Kaufmann family that owned that other department store a block away.
The Tower at PNC Plaza will be ten years old this year. It occurred to Father Pitt that he had enough pictures in his collection to make up a visual story of the construction of the building, so here they are. Above, the progress as of February 18, 2014.
June 27, 2014, before the construction of the cap began.
In the engraving, the Fidelity Building on Fourth Avenue as it was designed. In the photograph, the building as it exists today (or actually as it existed in 2015, but not much has changed—even the posters for ABC Imaging were the same the last time old Pa Pitt looked). Father Pitt has tried to arrange the comparison to make the one substantial difference obvious: at some point between design and construction, one more floor was added.
The architect, James T. Steen, was an early adopter of the Richardsonian Romanesque style: Richardson’s courthouse, which set off the mania for Romanesque in Pittsburgh, was still under construction when this building was put up. This was before the age of skyscrapers, when the base-shaft-cap formula gave architects a simple way of extending height indefinitely by multiplying identical floors in the middle. Here, Steen seems to have decided that just duplicating one of the floors would make the top of the building undersized and underwhelming. Instead, he added a new sixth floor between the fifth floor and what had been the sixth but now became the seventh floor. He gave this new sixth floor arches smaller than the ones below but larger than the ones above, and transferred some of the weighty stone detail from the fifth floor to the new sixth floor. The result was a composition that still seems rightly balanced, and you would probably never guess that the height had been extended if you had not seen the earlier drawing.
This was the home of the Rodef Shalom congregation for a very short time. It was downtown on Eighth Street, a narrow one-block alley where its site today is a parking lot. In those days, however, Eighth Street was crowded with buildings and institutions, including the Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Christian Home for Working Girls, and the North Public School. Having outgrown their previous building, the Rodef Shalom congregation hired Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, to design a magnificent temple that told the city its Jewish residents were proud to be part of the social fabric.
Building the new temple required tearing down the old one, but the people of the Second Presbyterian Church around the corner (not the Reformed Presbyterians next door) opened their doors to their Jewish neighbors, and for a year the two congregations shared the Second Presbyterian building, one worshiping on Saturday and the other on Sunday. A news story at the time tells us that, among the Rodef Shalom congregation, “there were many expressions of good feeling over this neighborly act on the part of the Presbyterian neighbors” when the agreement was announced.
The new temple opened in 1901. But the congregation was growing so quickly that, by 1904, it was already too small. Rodef Shalom had to find new quarters, with more land to spread out.
Rodef Shalom today worships in one of the most admired synagogue buildings in America, the magnificent temple on Fifth Avenue designed by Henry Hornbostel.
When we look at the two buildings, designed less than a decade apart, it’s striking how different they are in style. Bickel’s design looks old-fashioned; Hornbostel’s looks forward to the future, and it has stood the test of more than a century’s radical changes in taste.
But a comparison of the two buildings also reveals how much they have in common. Almost all the same design elements are in both buildings (with the prominent exception of the turbaned towers on the Bickel building); it almost looks as though the congregation had told Hornbostel, “We want the same thing we have downtown, but bigger.” (Though it’s not visible in either picture, another feature both buildings share is a large central dome.)
The Bickel building had several decades of life after Rodef Shalom moved out. The congregation sold it to their good friends at the Second Presbyterian Church, who moved into the relatively new building, and were thus able to sell their valuable corner location at Penn and Seventh, where Katz Plaza is today. For many years, the Second Presbyterians and the Reformed Presbyterians coexisted side by side on Eighth Street. The old Bickel building was still there in 1957, according to aerial photos; by 1967 it was replaced by parking lot, which is what has been there ever since.
The Manor, which opened in 1922, was designed by Harry S. Bair, who did a number of theaters around here (including the Regent, now the Kelly-Strayhorn in East Liberty). As the caption says, it was “a distinct departure from the conventional,” and the Tudor half-timbering of the exterior advertised the sumptuous club-like atmosphere of the interior. Today the exterior has been simplified, and the building expanded, but it still feels like an outpost of Merrie England on Murray Avenue.
This gable on the Darlington Road side of the building still preserves all its intricate diagonal brickwork and half-timbering.
These little chimneys should have their own separate landmark status.
Almost nothing remains of the original interior, though the Manor is still a movie house, now divided into four small theaters. Originally, the lobby was a feast of luxurious furniture and decoration.
And that was just the entrance lobby. If you were meeting someone or just waiting for something, you could retire to the parlor:
There was also a men’s club room with the atmosphere of an old English manor:
After all that, movies seem almost superfluous, but the auditorium was just as luxurious as the rest of the building:
Old Pa Pitt particularly likes the arrangement of tropical plants in the orchestra pit.
Today, although the Manor is still a very pleasant place to take in a movie, almost nothing is left of that sumptuous interior except a bit of ceiling and this fine chandelier:
The 1922 pictures all came from a two-page feature in Moving Picture World for August 5, 1922, and we reprint the text of the article here (making a few silent typographic corrections).
The flag on top of the cupola shows us that what today’s designers call “Photoshopping” has a long history reaching far back into the analogue era.
The Wabash Terminal was a magnificent folly, like the railroad it represented. The building was designed to say that Jay Gould’s new railroad, a competitor to the well-established Pennsylvania Railroad, was here to stay. It opened in 1904, and the railroad went bankrupt four years later.
The Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway had to perform enormous feats of engineering just to get into Pittsburgh. The Wabash Tunnel, now a little-used automobile highway, led to a new bridge across the Monongahela. All the land downtown was already taken up, so the Wabash had to make an elevated freight yard, which cost fabulous amounts of money.
The building itself was designed by Theodore C. Link (whose famous St. Louis Union Station still stands), and it was as extravagant as the rest of the enterprise. These pictures were published in The Builder for November of 1904, a Pittsburgh-based architectural magazine. They show us that the terminal building was up to the same extravagant standard as the rest of the operation. Carved decorations were provided to a lavish extent by Achille Giammartini, Pittsburgh’s best decorative sculptor.
After its railroad went bankrupt, the Wabash terminal still served passengers on some lines until 1931. It was converted to offices after that. Disastrous fires gutted it shortly after the Second World War, and it sat as a looming wreck until 1953, when it was demolished to make way for new buildings at Gateway Center.
This doorway shows us some of Mr. Giammartini’s work.
The Hotel Henry was on Fifth Avenue; it was replaced in 1951 by the Mellon Bank Building (525 Fifth Avenue). Here we see a huge banquet for the newspapermen of Pittsburgh in 1904, which incidentally gives us a look at the posh appointments of the banquet hall.
Hotel Henry logo from a fragment of plateHotel Henry at some time around 1900, from the Historic Pittsburgh site. Note that the offices of the Leader are two doors up from the hotel; those reporters didn’t have far to walk for dinner.
“Margaret Buckey, well-known soprano, who is familiar to the fans who tune in on Station KQV, Pittsburgh, is shown above.” A large portrait from the front page of Radio Digest, November 1, 1924.
In the 1920s, when radio was young, the relatively few stations could be heard for long distances, depending on atmospheric conditions and, of course, the size of your aerial. The days before radio networks were a brief glorious age of distributed talent, when the chief entertainers of any city might be heard nationwide and develop a following. Radio networks changed all that: by distributing the same programs nationwide, they concentrated all the radio celebrities in New York, where their studios were.
Father Pitt does not know much about Margaret Buckey, except that she seems to have been a familiar voice on KQV in its very early days. Here is a program scheduled on KQV for December 27, 1922:
10:00 P. M. Program will be given by Miss Margaret Buckey, soprano and Ken Hudson, ukulele and steel guitarist, both of Pittsburgh, who will present a holiday program of the most popular sort. Miss Buckey excels in the songs being heard on Broadway and will sing several new ones and Mr. Hudson will play guitar accompaniment to some of them. The Hawaiian songs, native to his own country to also be a part of the program. Interspersed a number of new dance novelties will be broadcast. A program with a flavor of the holiday season. Ralph Skiles, guitarist will furnish some of the ensemble for both instrumental and vocal numbers. Program: Soprano Songs: “Three o’clock in the Morning,” with duet guitar accompaniment: “A Kiss in the Dark,” by Herbert; “A Little Street in Gay Paree,” from “The Spice of 1922;” “A Corner up in Heaven,” by Berlin, “Home, Sweet, Home,” with string accompaniment. Instrumental numbers: “Kalima” Waltz, for two guitars; “Hawaiian Hula Medley,” two guitars; Hawaiian Song, with ukulele. (selected); “Kanaha Kiki,” ukulele solo. —Radio Broadcasting News, December 23, 1922 (PDF).
Harold W. Arlin, the first paid announcer in the history of radio, who was part of KDKA’s first programming and was still working for KDKA in 1924.
In the summer of 1924, commercial radio was only about three and a half years old. Yet it was already a thriving business, and stations were popping up all over the country. There were not enough of them, however, to clutter the airwaves too badly, so that a powerful station could often be heard coast to coast. Thus the national radio magazines ran schedules for all the stations across the country, and radio fans competed to see who could pull in the most distant station.
Pittsburgh had three radio stations listed in Radio Digest, and they all drew on local talent to fill their programming hours, which in those days were still limited. Their schedules for a week (which begins on Wednesday) give us a priceless snapshot of Pittsburgh culture in the 1920s.
Father Pitt regrets having missed some of these programs. Wouldn’t you like to know the story of Epaminondas and his Auntie?
Two of these radio stations are still going. KDKA, of course, has never been off the air. KQV has been kicked around since Richard Mellon Scaife, who had pasted it in his media album, passed on to his reward, but it was on the air again the last time old Pa Pitt checked. Most Pittsburghers have never heard of WCAE, and its call letters were reassigned decades later to a public television station in Indiana; it was a radio station operated by the Kaufmann & Baer department store, which was soon to be bought by Gimbels.
Wednesday, July 16
KDKA, E. Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, 326)
5:30 p.m., Pittsburgh Athletic association orchestra; 6:30, The Pied Piper, “Kiddies’ Buddy”; 8, Valeris Chambordon Gregory, soprano; Bert Berberick, tenor; Emil Wolff, violinist; Edwin Menznemalor, accompanist.
KQV, Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, Daylight, 270)
5-5:30 p.m., Sunset stories and “Diary of Snubs Our Dog” 8:45-9, “Fifteen Minute Song Revue,” Ben and Thelma Fields; 9-10, Mary Christine Seberry, reader; Eleanor Conley, lyric soprano; John M. Hierholzer, flutist; special adaptation with piano, voice and flute obligato of dramatic reading of “The Pied Piper of Hamlin.”
“The Pied Piper of Hamlin” was one of the “Headliners of the Week,” programs singled out for special notice. “ ‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin,’ that hoary old rascal of legend who lured all the kiddies away with his piping will be presented from KQV, Wednesday. The flute and piano will help to charm you.”
WCAE, Pittsburgh, Pa., (Eastern, Daylight, 337)
3 p.m., Fred Rosenfeld, pianist; 6:30, dinner concert, William Penn hotel; 7:30, Sunshine girl; 9:30, musical program, Prof. C. P. Schwan
Thursday, July 17
KDKA, E. Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, 326)
11:15 a.m., Scalzo’s orchestra; 5:30 p.m., KDKA Little Symphony orchestra; 6:30, songs for the children, Merry Heart; 7, “Shrubs and Perennials that Bloom in July”; 7:15, farm program; 8, KDKA Little Symphony orchestra; Barbara Wellman, contralto; 10, concert.
KQV, Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, Daylight, 270)
5-5:30 p.m., Sunset stories and “Diary of Snubs Our Dog”
WCAE, Pittsburgh, Pa., (Eastern, Daylight, 337)
6:30 p.m., dinner concert, William Penn hotel; 9:30, Julia Saam and co-operating artists, pupils of Casper Koch; 11, late concert.
Friday, July 18
KDKA, E. Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, 326)
11:15 a.m., Daugherty’s orchestra; 5:30 p.m., Paul Fleeger, organist; 6:30, Uncle Wiggely story for the children; 8, Pennsylvania Railroad system night: Altoona band; triple quartet, Car Service division; address, Elisha Lee; Louis Smith, tenor; I W. Dalrymple, xylophonist; Helen J. Upperman, soprano; H. W. Farrand, monologist; Blowden Lewis, contralto; Allegro Mandolin sextette; Ruth Radkey, pianist; Helen J. Upperman, soprano; Vera J. Burke, reader.
KQV, Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, Daylight, 270)
5-5:30 p.m., Sunset stories and “Diary of Snubs Our Dog” 9-10, regular artists’ evening program.
WCAE, Pittsburgh, Pa., (Eastern, Daylight, 337)
4:30 p.m., special children’s program, Sunshine Girl; 6:30, dinner concert, William Penn hotel; 9:30, Bohemian musical program, “Liberty,” National Croatian Singing society, J. V. Krabec, director
Saturday, July 19
KDKA, E. Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, 326)
5:30 p.m., dinner concert, Westinghouse band; 6:30, Epaminondas and his Auntie, Radio children; 8, Westinghouse band; Chester sterling, bass.
KQV, Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, Daylight, 270)
9-10 p.m., regular artists’ evening program.
WCAE, Pittsburgh, Pa., (Eastern, Daylight, 337)
6:30 p.m., dinner concert, William Penn hotel; 7:45, Lew Kennedy, baritone; Irene Setzler, pianist; 9:30, Brown’s Original orchestra.
Sunday, July 20
[No listings for Pittsburgh stations.]
Monday, July 21
[No programming on KDKA.]
KQV, Pittsburgh, Pa. (Eastern, Daylight, 270)
5-5:30 p.m., Sunset stories and “Diary of Snubs Our Dog” 8:45-9, fifteen minute song revue, Ben and Thelma Fields; 9-10, Marguerite Lang, soprano; Indira Hesh, contralto; James P. Johnstone, accompanist; artists from studio of Mme. Fitz-Randolph.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe, much more famous for his work on the United States Capitol, was Pittsburgh’s first resident professional architect. This is his only remaining work here, and the only original 1814 building left from the Allegheny Arsenal.
This plaque was originally on the gatehouse to the Arsenal grounds.
A memorial put up by the Daughters of 1812 appears to have had a bronze relief, probably stolen many years ago.
The Arsenal is most famous in history for exploding during the Civil War, killing dozens of the workers, many of whom were children. We note that the building where the powder was stored did not explode—an indication, perhaps, that the architect knew his business.
DESIGNED BY BENJAMIN H. LATROBE; BUILT BY CAPTAIN ABRAM R. WOOLLEY ON LAND PURCHASED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FROM WILLIAM B. FOSTER. SERVED AS AMMUNITION PRODUCTION CENTER DURING INDIAN, MEXICAN AND CIVIL WARS. THIS TABLET COMMEMORATES AT LEAST 79 CIVILIAN WORKERS—MEN, WOMEN AND MANY CHILDREN—KILLED IN THREE MYSTERIOUS EXPLOSIONS, SEPTEMBER 17, 1862.
Old Pa Pitt would add that the explosions were not as mysterious as all that. It was an arsenal. The place was devoted to manufacturing things that explode, using explosive materials. Everyone knew that Dupont & Co. had been supplying powder in leaky barrels, probably reused in spite of the specific requirement not to reuse them. Everyone knew there was explosive stuff dusting the ground here and there. The only mystery was which of several possible causes set off the first spark, and that mystery will probably never be solved.
The remains of the dead were buried in a mass grave in Allegheny Cemetery, where an expensive marble memorial was put up. The marble eroded into illegibility by the 1920s, and it was replaced with a new monument with a bronze plaque that will last a few more centuries if it is not stolen and melted down.
Today the powder magazine sits in the middle of a pleasant urban oasis called Arsenal Park. Instead of explosive materials, it has rest rooms.
