In the early 1800s, the Diamond was the location of the courthouse (moved to Grant Street in 1857), which put the courts at the bustling heart of the city. The market itself was a semicircle, and that unusual design has been revived for the newly reconfigured Diamond.
When Pittsburgh was just a frontier town far from the civilized East; when the American Revolution was not yet won; when wars with Indian nations kept Pittsburghers looking over their shoulders every time they left their mostly log houses—one extraordinary man came here to Pittsburgh with the idea that, if he could not find civilization here, he would make it.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge was at Princeton with James Madison and Philip Freneau, where they founded the American Whig Society. Already in college Brackenridge was scribbling furiously. He and Freneau wrote the commencement poem in 1771—“The Rising Glory of America.”
When the Revolution broke out, Brackenridge was not one of the military leaders. But he was the first to write a blank-verse tragedy on the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was performed by the students at the Somerset Academy. Brackenridge was master of the school: it is a good principle for dramatic writers to remember that, if they have difficulty rounding up actors, they can take over a school and simply require the students to perform their work.
In 1778, Brackenridge tried founding a magazine in Philadelphia; but in spite of sharp and clever writing by Brackenridge and his friend Freneau, the publication could not make money. So Brackenridge studied law; but Philadelphia was already stuffed with lawyers.
But Pittsburgh, three hundred miles to the west, had none.
In 1781, therefore, Brackenridge moved to Pittsburgh, where he could make something of himself by making something of the place.
Brackenridge was always involved in politics, and he often held political office—culminating in a seat on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. But literature was his first love. In politics he had to adapt to the whims of the people; in writing, frequently under pseudonyms, he could say what he liked, and indeed contradict himself as much as he pleased. Brackenridge was a man of well-considered contradictions. He was a lifelong believer in the American experiment, and fought hard for the ratification of the Constitution; but he was a thorough cynic as well. He was able to balance the two contradictory ideas that it was right that the people should rule, and that “the people are fools” and would botch the job completely given half a chance. The Constitution was important to him precisely because it also is a careful balance between those two contradictory ideas. “No man was a more convinced democrat than Brackenridge,” said the 1917 Cambridge History of Literature, “but he was also solid, well-read, and deeply bored by fools who canted about free men and wise majorities.”
As a literary man, what outlet would Brackenridge have in a town of less than a thousand people? None whatsoever when he arrived; but he backed an ambitious fellow named John Scull, financing the hauling of a printing press across the mountains. The result was the Pittsburgh Gazette—still clinging to life today, under the name Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as the second-oldest metropolitan newspaper in America and one of the oldest in the world. The Gazette’s columns were filled with clever articles by many correspondents with comical names, most of whom were Brackenridge.
Brackenridge does not loom large in the standard histories of the United States, but it is arguable that his delicate tightrope act in the Whiskey Rebellion saved the young nation from civil war. His memoir of those times, Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794, is in print from our friends at the Franklin Head, and it is not only vital history but also first-class entertainment.
The work for which Brackenridge was long remembered, however, was Modern Chivalry, the first important novel published in America. If you look up “first American novel,” you will probably be led to The Power of Sympathy, which was published three years before the first volume of Modern Chivalry came out; but no one read The Power of Sympathy until it was rediscovered in the late 1800s, when it was given a second chance for no one to read it. Everyone read and laughed over Modern Chivalry, and it remained in print for a generation after Brackenridge had died. The book collector Charles Frederick Heartman believed that it would have been an acknowledged classic if it had been published in Europe. “Millions of copies would have been printed of this book and every bookseller would have a half dozen editions on his shelves. As it is but few people know that such a book was ever written, and fewer still have read it. It is, in fact, one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. One has to borrow names like Swift, nay, Rabelais, to find equals.”
John Quincy Adams was one of the many early fans of the book. After a Pittsburgh friend sent him a new edition of Modern Chivalry in the 1840s, Adams wrote back,
I had read the first part of Modern Chivalry and formed a pleasant acquaintance with Captain Farrago and his man Teague, at their first appearance more than half a century since, and they had then excited much of my attention as illustrations of life and manners peculiar to the times and localities, not entirely effaced when I became more familiarly acquainted with them, by this visit to the latter.… The reappearance of this work, as a second edition, since the author’s death, more than half a century after its first publication, well warrants the prediction that it will last beyond the period fixed by the ancient statutes, for the canonization of poets, a full century. I shall read it over again, I have no doubt, with a refreshing revival of the pleasure with which I greeted it on its first appearance; and if this expression of my opinion can give any satisfaction to the remaining relatives of Judge Brackenridge, or to yourself, it is entirely at your disposal, being with a vivid sense and grateful remembrance of your kindness, and that of my fellow-citizens of Pittsburgh and Allegheny.
Dr. Boli’s Eclectic Library has a number of copies of Modern Chivalry, along with a few other critical assessments.
Judge Brackenridge left an equally literary son, Henry Marie Brackenridge, whose family founded the borough up the Allegheny that still bears their name.
We might add that the portrait at the head of the article belongs to the University of Pittsburgh—a school that was another gift of the far-seeing Hugh Henry Brackenridge to his adopted city. It was painted by Gilbert Stuart, whose most famous work is the portrait of Washington adapted for our dollar bill.
An undated postcard from the Pittsburg News Company, found stuffed in a book that Father Pitt recently acquired. On the reverse is this legend:
Schenley Park is Pittsburgh’s first and greatest park. It contains 422 acres, which have been improved by drives, bridges, walks, landscape gardening and the planting of thousands of trees and bushes.
Note the two spellings on the same card: “Pittsburgh” in the legend, “Pittsburg” in the name of the company. The standardization of the spelling is surprisingly recent. Though the Post Office relented in 1911, after twenty years of suppressing the H, and reverted to the spelling “Pittsburgh,” some local institutions continued spelling the name without the H: the Press, for example, was the “Pittsburg Press” until 1921.
Our headline is a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. Today Pittsburgh City Council is a group of nine representatives; but in the early 1900s, it was a bicameral circus consisting of a a select council and a common council, with the membership adding up to more than a hundred on a good day. It was notoriously corrupt, which made it very amusing that one of the chief arguments in favor of the annexation of Allegheny was the corruption of the smaller city’s government. Mayor George Guthrie had been elected on promises of reform and did his best, but he was one man against an army of petty crooks.
Here is the story of how a few civic-minded leaders decided to do something about that corruption. They succeeded—but it cost them a lot.
The author, Albert Jay Nock, was quite a character himself. He was a confessed elitist who thought that democracy could produce only the kind of corruption of which Pittsburgh was an extreme example. He was a free-trade fanatic who hated tariffs. He was accused of being anti-Jewish; his response was that it was true that he didn’t like Jews, but not because they were Jews but because they were folks, and he didn’t like folks. In this story, though, his tragic hero and shining incorruptible figure is Jewish: A. Leo Weil. Nock takes pains to point out the contrast between his disinterested civic heroism and the comfortable corruption of “Pittsburg the pious, church-going city, the focus of stanch, uncompromising North-of-Ireland Presbyterianism for the whole United States.” “Is the iron-clad militant Protestantism of Pittsburg worth having if the city has to feel its way toward elementary social Christianity under the leadership of a Jew?”
One thing even his detractors agreed on: Albert Jay Nock was an exceptionally entertaining writer. Without further introduction, then, here is as exciting a detective story as anything Dashiell Hammett could have cooked up.
From The American Magazine, October, 1910, beginning on page 808.
Read the article…
Except for the replaced and filled-in porch, this house is in remarkably good shape, with most of its characteristic details intact. By chance the Pittsburgh City Photographer happened to capture it on May 27, 1910, while it was still under construction, so we can compare its current state to what it looked like when it was new.
Perhaps you have wondered, as you walked down Wood Street, what “Fint-x” was, whose prominent sign mostly reappeared a few years ago after having been covered for a long while.
Fintex was a men’s clothing shop founded by Morry Goldman, noted Pittsburgh haberdasher. In its heyday, Fintex had multiple locations and advertised high style at low prices.
In the 1950s, Fintex expanded into the suburbs: here we see the announcement of a new store at the Great Southern shopping center in Bridgeville.
Morry Goldman was the sponsor of a pro basketball team called the Pittsburgh Morrys, and a glance at their Wikipedia article will take you back to a lost age of small-time professional sports of which most modern sports fans have no notion.
The Diamond or Market Square is our most fussed-with public space. Here we see it being completely reconfigured fifteen years ago, and that reconfiguration is now being completely reconfigured. This view of Pittsburgh has changed more than most in the past decade and a half; two landmark skyscrapers, the Tower at PNC Plaza and Tower Two-Sixty, have risen on spots once occupied by low buildings in the background.
A look at the interior of the Cafe Reineman on Fifth Avenue shows us what was expected of any establishment claiming to be the best restaurant in Pittsburgh, and indeed west of the Allegheny Mountains. It is brightly lit by gas—the artist has made the illumination by large chandeliers a prominent feature. It has tables for couples and families arrayed in efficient rows to accommodate many guests and leave room for the waiters to navigate. It has an ornate bar with immense mirrors and proper facilities for expectoration on the floor. For single gentlemen diners, there are stools along the wall. For unaccompanied ladies, there is a Ladies’ Entrance as far from the bar as practically possible, allowing them to pass into the eating part of the establishment without enduring rude remarks from the expectorating drunks—who appear to be starting a fight even in the drawing, as if a bar without a fight would be an unacceptable omission in the most complete establishment in the West. And, of course, the location is important: just across from one of the main theaters, the Opera House, whose last incarnation became the Warner. (Note that address numbers on Fifth Avenue have changed: this would be at about 343 Fifth Avenue now.)
This is a strangely elaborate gateway for a postwar modernist apartment building. But anyone who knows the history of Fifth Avenue can guess that the gateway indicates where a grand mansion once stood on the Shadyside Millionaires’ Row. (Although city planning maps make Fifth Avenue the boundary between Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, traditionally both sides of the street were counted as “Shadyside.”)
Atherstone was the mansion, or “castle” as locals would have said, of hardware and steel magnate John Bindley.
It was built in 1890, greatly expanded during the First World War (when these pillars were built), abandoned in 1929, and torn down in 1938.
When the demolition began, the Bulletin Index, Pittsburgh’s high-toned society magazine, ran an article about the house that we reproduce below. The magazine had been infected by Timestyle with its horror of conjunctions and its quirky capitalization, but we trust our readers to interpret it without too much difficulty. The article gives us a picture of Depression-era Fifth Avenue at its lowest point, before the postwar housing boom filled many of the vacant estates with modern apartment buildings.
Forty years ago young Theodore Dreiser used to spend his evenings reading Balzac in the Allegheny Public Library, his Sunday afternoons walking out Fifth Avenue and back again. It was then one of the wealthiest, swankiest, most famous streets in the world. Dreiser gaped at the great mansions, marvelled years later in his autobiography that “even the lamp posts were better than in other parts of the city.” One of the most magnificent of the castles he gaped at was “Atherstone” (see cut).
Atherstone was a work of art, a baronial symbol of the great-spending paleo-industrial age of which William Randolph Hearst is the sole remaining big figure. Pittsburgher John Bindley, having grown rich with his Grant Street hardware store, richer as co-founder of the Pittsburgh Steel Co., built his four-story gargoyled castle (in 1890) in the grand manner, with crenellated turrets and 80 windows with leaded panes, named it after his ancestral home place in England. A widower with only two of his six children living, he travelled through Europe every year with his niece Elmina, brought back paintings, furniture, hand-carved panelling, marble mantel-pieces in the fashion of one who feels it a class privilege and duty to patronize the arts. Fixtures he had made to order in Manhattan to match the furniture he bought, for the Chippendale dining room, the Japanese room that was his favorite. During the prosperous war years Steelman Bindley spent $200,000 to remodel, add a wing to his castle. In an enlarged residence of 24 rooms, six baths, he installed an electric elevator, new copper drains, plumbing and kitchen equipment, added cupboard space that virtually equalled the room volume of an ordinary house, put two carved stone pillars at the driveway entrance, two huge solid oak doors at the entrance of the hand-carved oak panelled hall.
Four years later, at the age of 75, Steelman Bindley died. Atherstone and contents were left to Son Edward Houston Bindley, who died in 1929, to Daughter Adelaide Bindley Davidson, who closed up the castle, put most of the furniture (including the Japanese room) into one end of the Hoeveler warehouse, moved to California. Installed above the spacious six-room coachhouse in the rear was Niece Elmina McMillin, her four servants.
Many a great mansion Theodore Dreiser looked upon forty years ago now stands boarded up and weed-choked, many another has been torn down to leave great toothless gaps in swank Fifth Avenue. Fortnight ago came word that John Bindley’s Atherstone, scene of many and lavish entertainments, was to be given into the hands of home-wrecking Austin Givens, Inc. (who eleven years ago tore down John Bindley’s hardware store to make way for the Gulf Building). Last week the curious and buying public poked and peered through the cold bare rooms of Atherstone, being auctioned bit by bit. This week Wrecker Givens began to tear down, cart away.
—The Bulletin Index, December 8, 1938, p. 33.
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.
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.
