Father Pitt

Category: History

  • Rowe’s Department Store, East Liberty

    The C. H. Rowe Co., Penn and Highland Avenues

    Here is a drawing of Rowe’s department store that was published in 1907, when East Liberty was booming as it became the business hub for rapidly developing East End neighborhoods. The building, put up in 1898, still looks much the same today, though it has been many years since it housed a department store. By choosing Alden & Harlow, the most prestigious firm in the city, as his architects, Mr. Rowe declared to East End residents that he would offer them as high a class of merchandise as they could find anywhere downtown.

    Rowe Building

    The drawing came from a lavishly illustrated book published in 1907 by the Pittsburg Board of Trade—a book that, oddly, has two titles: Up-Town: Greater Pittsburg’s Classic Section/East End: The World’s Most Beautiful Suburb. Here is what the book tells us about Rowe’s:

    C. H. ROWE CO.

    To the residents of the East End the department store of C. H. Rowe Company, at Penn and Highland avenues, is a household word. Little can be said of it which every woman and child does not already know, yet no history of the development of the East End would be complete without mention of this enterprising company.

    It was in 1898 that C. H. Rowe Co. began to relieve the residents of the East End of the necessity of going down town to meet any requirements they had in the matter of dress goods, undermuslins, white goods of every description, millinery, children’s outfittings, all that the feminine domestic economy required.

    Such enterprise as the firm of C. H. Rowe Co. has shown has naturally received a hearty response from the residents of the East End. The aim of this section of the city is to provide every want that its citizens require. So far as the dry goods business is concerned that is what this company has done.

    It takes a modern four-story establishment, with 58,000 square feet of floor space to accommodate the company’s stock of goods. It requires 125 persons in the dullest season to attend the wants of the customers of C. H. Rowe Company and many delivery wagons are employed in distributing the goods to such customers who prefer that accommodation.

    The directors of the company include Messrs. C. H. and W. H. Rowe, D. P. Black, H. P. Pears and J. H. McCrady. James S. Mackie is the general manager.

    It is little wonder with such attention to all the requirements of the East End public that C. H. Rowe Company’s store has become the veritable center of the East End trade, and that its growth is so much a matter of pride not only to the members of the firm but to the residents of the entire East Liberty community.

    More pictures of the Rowe’s or Penn-Highland Building.

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  • The Baptism of Fire

    Pittsburgh After the Fire from Boyd’s Hill, by William C. Wall, 1845. In the Carnegie Museum of Art.

    “Every year, on the 10th day of April, the fire-bells ring out the number 1-8-4-5, in memory of the baptism of fire that comes, sooner or later, to nearly every city. Like all great disasters of this kind, the origin was trifling. While the loyal but noisy fire-cracker decorates the historical shield of the fire department of Portland, Maine, and the combination of a kicking cow and a coal-oil lamp that of Chicago, the homely but useful wash-boiler stands as a reminder of the greatest disaster that has ever fallen on Pittsburgh. Early in the morning of the 10th of April, I845, an extra hot fire under a wash-boiler, in a poor tenement at the corner of Ferry street and Second street, now second avenue, started a fire which, for lack of water, was soon beyond the control of the fire department. A high wind carried the burning fire-brands over the different portions of the city, and in a few hours one-third of the geographical extent of the city and two-thirds of its value, was only a mass of charred cinders. The estimated loss was from six to eight million dollars, while twelve thousand people, most of whom had been in good circumstances, were rendered homeless. Fortunately but two persons lost their lives, one being Mr. Samuel Kingston, and the other Mrs. Malone. This was a severe blow to the business interests of the city, but with remarkable pluck the work of rebuilding was begun at once. The most liberal settlements were made by those having goods here on commission, generous aid was extended to the sufferers, and the city rallied rapidly from what otherwise would have been its death knell.”

    —The Illustrated Guide and Handbook of Pittsburgh and Allegheny (1887), p. 20.

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  • No Tap-Dancing in Rooms After 9 p.m.

    Hotel Roosevelt

    The Hotel Roosevelt, as it appeared in a 1928 advertisement in the National Vaudeville Artists Year Book. The advertisement was designed to appeal to performers on the vaudeville circuit (which was just about to come crashing down and would be nearly extinct in five years), and it was certainly a convenient location, within a block’s walk of at least five theaters. The Roosevelt still stands today, converted to apartments, and it is still surrounded by theaters.

    The ad carries the name of L. Fred Klooz, President and Managing Director, and it includes a bit of doggerel so awful that we can only presume it was written by Mr. Klooz himself.

    Ad for Hotel Roosevelt

  • Keech Block

    Keech Block
    This picture has been manipulated on two planes to match the perspective of the 1889 image below. It is no longer possible to stand in exactly the same place, because other buildings have sprouted in inconvenient places.

    W. H. Keech was a dealer in furniture and carpets. In the 1880s he built this towering six-floor commercial palace on Penn Avenue at Garrison Place in the furniture district. The main part of the building has hardly changed since the photograph below was published in Pittsburgh Illustrated in 1889:

    Keech Block

    Probably in the 1890s, an addition was put on the right-hand side of the building, matching the original as well as possible.

    Keech Block with addition

    This building is festooned with decorative details in just the right places, including some Romanesque carved stone above the entrance. (Addendum: The architect of the original building and additions, including one to the right later destroyed by fire and another one after that, was James T. Steen, according to a plaque on the Conover Building three doors down, which was originally part of the expanded Keech Block.)

    Detail of the Keech Block
    Romanesque capital
    Romanesque foliage
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Dimling’s Ghost Sign on Exchange Way

    Dimling’s Candy Shops sign

    Old Pa Pitt recommends wandering in back alleys as a hobby. You never know what you might find, from antique sculpture to ghost signs. Dimling’s hasn’t had a candy shop here for more than fifty years, but this sign still sits on the back of the building the shop once occupied, facing Exchange Way at the intersection with Tito Way.

    When it was prospering, Dimling’s Liberty Avenue shop occupied two buildings and covered them with tiles that made the entire Liberty Avenue façade a giant billboard. The picture above is a detail of a much larger photograph taken by the Pittsburgh City Photographer in 1965: it may still be encumbered by copyright (although probably not, unless the copyright was renewed), but if the city of Pittsburgh wants a fee for using it Father Pitt can probably afford a quarter or so.

    By the 1970s, the buildings were still a billboard for Dimling’s, but a photo from 1973 shows that the tenants were Arthur Treacher’s, an adult theater, and a massage parlor.

    The wheel of history kept turning, however, and the restoration of Liberty Avenue brought these buildings back to respectable use. Peeling away the tiles revealed the old Victorian fronts, which have been lovingly restored and now make up part of the extraordinary Victorian streetscape of Liberty Avenue in the Cultural District.

    800 block of Liberty Avenue
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • Why We Have Pennsylvania Broad Gauge

    Pennsylvania streetcars do not run on standard-gauge track. This is not just a local quirk: it was a law of the Commonwealth. Streetcar companies must not lay standard-gauge track. Why did we have such a law? Well…

    From Pittsburgh Illustrated, 1889.

    This is Liberty Avenue in 1889, where a railroad ran down the middle to serve the wholesalers. Now imagine one backroom deal with the streetcar company, one little switch, a few extra feet of track, and suddenly the Pennsylvania Railroad has access to every major street in the city.

    But that can’t happen, because the streetcar tracks are a different gauge.

    That is why, to this day, streetcars in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia use Pennsylvania Broad Gauge or Pennsylvania Trolley Gauge, 5 feet 2½ inches, instead of the standard American rail gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches. (Actually, Philadelphia is off by a quarter-inch at 5 feet 2¼ inches.) Most other American transit systems use standard gauge, although New Orleans streetcars use Pennsylvania Broad Gauge, too.

  • Bellefield Bridge

    Bellefield Bridge and Carnegie Library
    From Greater Pittsburg, 1905.

    A view across the Bellefield Bridge toward the Carnegie Library in Oakland. The bridge is still there, but you can’t see it. The hollow was filled in with the bridge still in place, and the Mary Schenley Memorial Fountain sits on top of the buried bridge now.

    This view shows the library building before the enormous expansion in 1907. The two towers were victims of the expansion—but also perhaps victims of some negative criticism. The building in general—designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow—was highly praised, but some critics thought the towers a bit embarrassing. When Alden & Harlow (Longfellow had decided to stay in Boston) designed the new addition, the towers came down.

  • The Mon Wharf in the 1890s

    Mon Wharf in the 1890s
    From History and Commerce of Pittsburgh and Environs, 1894.

    The busy and chaotic Mon Wharf, where goods were loaded and unloaded and passengers came to board downstream-bound steamboats. This picture was published in 1894, and we can see the dawn of the skyscraper age just beginning to break: the Conestoga Building, finished in 1892, was the first building in Pittsburgh built on a steel frame, and one of the first in the world.

    Conestoga Building

    The view is quite different today (or in 2021, when these pictures were taken), though many of the same buildings are there. The Robert Moses plan ringed downtown Pittsburgh with expressways, as Moses had done with Manhattan, cutting off the people from the rivers. It was an understandable adaptation: if there must be expressways, the riverfronts made space for them without knocking down a lot of buildings. But it took us decades to begin to reclaim the shores with a system of parks and bicycle trails.

    Firstside in May of 2021
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  • How Many of These Pittsburgh Skyscrapers Can You Name?

    How many of these Pittsburgh skyscrapers can you name? Advertisement for Alcoa aluminum

    From The Pittsburgh Bicentennial in 1958, an advertisement for Alcoa aluminum as the new wonder material in construction. All these buildings are still standing, though the Heinz Food Research Center badly needs a rescue.

  • First Methodist Protestant Church

    First M. P. Church

    From Closing Services, First Methodist Protestant Church, Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, some engravings of the old downtown church on Fifth Avenue, built in 1832. It was a sad day, of course, when the congregation moved out in 1892, but the consolation was that they were moving into a grand new Romanesque church designed for them by Frederick Osterling (still standing today as the Korean Central Church of Pittsburgh). They were probably also taking a pile of money for their church: the Kaufmann Brothers had leased the land on which the church stood, and soon a huge addition to their department store would rise there.

    The First M. P. congregation had succumbed to the forces that were changing Pittsburgh from a dense medium-sized city to an urban colossus. The “Introductory Note” to the commemorative book explains the circumstances very well.

    That those who worshipped together in the old church were strongly attached to it was a matter of course, and when at the close of the last service in it, Sabbath evening, May 15, the large congregation slowly retired, many went away with heavy hearts, sorrowing most of all because they should enter their old church home no more. If it is asked why did the church dispose of its home the answer is: The inexorable logic of events so decreed.

    When the church was built probably no better location could have been found. It was then almost in the centre of the city and was easily reached from every point in the town. The population was held within a comparatively small territory, but as the city grew the need for business property became more and more urgent, and consequently the people were gradually forced away from their homes in the business sections of the city and scattered into surrounding suburbs. Many of the churches located in what was Pittsburgh sixty years ago have found in these later years their membership steadily and inevitably diminishing in number, and the difficulty in recruiting their ranks has increased with almost every passing year; and the explanation of both facts is the plain one: That the people have moved away and built other churches convenient to their homes.

    Interior

    So the church was abandoned to the inexorable march of commerce—but the land was not. For many years thereafter, Kaufmann’s, the Big Store, stood partly on land that was owned by and paying good money to the First Methodist Protestant Church, now in the tony suburb of Shadyside.

    Lecture room and library
    Lecture room, front view
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