This photograph of the Great Soho Curve, a maintenance nightmare for the cable cars that very briefly made up Pittsburgh’s transit system, was taken in 1893. It appears to have been taken from the roof of a house about where the ramp from Fifth Avenue to the Boulevard of the Allies is today. Fifth Avenue still makes this double curve, though the street is one-way inbound now, and the cable cars are gone.
This picture tells the story of why we don’t have cable cars anymore. Pittsburgh streets have curves, and curves are bad for cable cars. In this picture, the entire curve is lined with cable access points about every six feet, and the picture shows cars stopped while men are fussing with one of the cables. In San Francisco, the one city where cable-car lines are still in service, the lines are all perfectly straight, except for turns at intersections. When electric traction came along, it was obviously more suitable for Pittsburgh—except where hills were prohibitively steep, and for those places we have inclines, which are a kind of cable car permanently attached to the cable.
That fairy castle on the hill at upper left is the Ursuline Young Ladies’ Academy, designed by Joseph Stillburg. It has long since been replaced by more mundane buildings at Carlow University, but this picture shows the impression it must have made as you rode the cable car out from downtown toward Oakland.
This article is a first attempt at a history of the Mercantile Library, and it is doubtless riddled with errors and misapprehensions. It is the product of two afternoons of obsessively trawling the depths of old newspapers, and Father Pitt will correct and improve it as better information comes in.
On June 2, 1845, the Pittsburgh Gazette ran this little item:
☛Thomas H. Perkins of Boston has presented $2500 to the Mercantile Library Association of that city. We wish some of the rich men about Pittsburgh would take it into their head to give a handsome sum toward a Library Association of that kind in this city.
It is possible that a movement was already afoot when the unknowing editor wrote those words, because only two years later we find officers being elected for a Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association and Mechanic’s Institute (Pittsburgh Gazette, July 31, 1847, p. 2). On September 20, 1847, we find an advertisement in the Post that “The Young Men’s Mercantile Library and Mechanic’s Institute is open to subscribers from this date. ☛Hall in Gazzam’s Buildings opposite Philo Hall.”
At this point you may be wondering why the name Carnegie is stuck in your mind as the founder of public libraries in Pittsburgh. The answer is in those little words “open to subscribers.”
In the early and middle 1800s, big cities had circulating libraries open to the public, but most of them were subscription services. You had to pay for the privilege of checking out books. Thus, even though the library was ostensibly aimed at the education of young men, there was a barrier to entry. Andrew Carnegie remembered the charity of Col. Anderson in Manchester, who had a large library and opened it for free to working boys on Saturday afternoons, meaning that even the poorest could educate themselves if they were motivated. There is a reason “FREE TO THE PEOPLE” is engraved over the entrance to the main Carnegie Library in Oakland: that was Carnegie’s great ideal.
Still, a public library was a good thing to have in a growing city, even if you had to pay for a subscription. It was consistently difficult to keep that subscription money coming in, though; reports from the directors usually showed about a quarter of the subscribers in arrears. Nor was there ever a very large number of subscribers; the numbers, as far as old Pa Pitt can determine, never went much above 500. A report in 1852, for example, showed 305 subscribers, including 10 life members.
From the start, “lectures of a popular and scientific character”—one of the primary forms of intellectual entertainment in Victorian times—were an important part of the program at the Mercantile Library. The admission charge was supposed to help pay for the library establishment, but even with a program of popular and talented lecturers, it was hard to fill the seats. In that same 1852 report, the directors took the opportunity to chastise the taste of the public.
The Board of Directors do not like to complain, but it some times happens, when complaint is made, that the proper remedy is provided and a cure effected.
They therefore state—yet with regret and mortification—that in this city, noted for the enterprise and industry of its citizens, lectures got up for their gratification and improvement, the proceeds arising from them, to be applied to an object so praiseworthy as a public library, have not been fully sustained, whilst thousands of dollars are annually taken from their pockets to line those of strolling musicians, and mountebanks of every grade. The fact is bad enough, and we forbear comment on the subject.
Buried in this item, by the way, is a priceless glimpse of the lively Pittsburgh street life in the 1850s.
After the Civil War, there was a general sense of unbounded prosperity in Pittsburgh, and in 1868 the ambitious directors of the Mercantile Library Association undertook to give the Mercantile Library a magnificent new home—the building you see at the head of the article. From a report of the directors published in January of 1869:
“The plans for the building submitted by the architect, (Leopold Eidlitz, of New York) were adopted by the Board of Managers in May last, and Messrs. Barr & Moser of this city, were appointed superintending architects…”
Leopold Eidlitz was one of the most important American architects of the middle 1800s. Among other projects, he had designed P. T. Barnum’s eccentric Orientalist mansion Iranistan (which burned nine years after it was built). Barr & Moser were probably the most important Pittsburgh architects at the time; among their surviving works are the Armstrong County Courthouse in Kittanning and Old Main at Pennsylvania Western University, California.
The building was expected to cost $175,000—a prodigious sum in those days. To put it in perspective, the same report of the directors tells us that “the receipts for the past year, including $201.78 balance in Treasury, January 1st, 1868, were $4,608.21.” However, wealthy investors were persuaded to put up the money, and the building went up. The 1869 report contained a long description of the building as it was expected to be constructed, which you can find at the bottom of this article.
In order to separate the business of the building from the business of the library, a separate company called the Mercantile Library Hall Company was chartered to take charge of the building. The investors who financed it were financing this company on the expectation of getting a good return on their investment. Once those investments had been paid off, the building would become the property of the Library Association.
The profit was expected to come from rentals. The library would occupy the second floor; the ground floor would include storefronts and a magnificent auditorium. “It will be constructed upon the plan of a theatre, with a single gallery and will seat comfortably about 1,400 persons.” (For comparison, the Byham Theater today has a seating capacity of 1300.) This auditorium could be rented for a theater when it was not in use as a lecture hall, and an 1883 guide (from which the picture of the hall was taken) describes the building as “Library Hall, frequently called Penn Avenue Theatre.” By the late 1880s the theater was known as the Bijou.
Program from 1888 (a performance of The Jilt with Dion Boucicault), one of several at Historic Pittsburgh.
An 1890 article in the Dispatch tells us that the Panic of 1873 was very destructive to the fortunes of the Mercantile Library Hall Company. We forget today that the depression of the 1870s used to be called the Great Depression until we had a greater one. It was a bad time to be trying to pay off an extravagant building. Instead of making a profit, the company accumulated debts, and it could not dig itself out of the hole even when better times came. In 1889 the building just escaped a sheriff’s sale, and again in 1890.
“Street Scene, Penn Avenue,” from Pittsburgh Illustrated, 1889. Library Hall is the prominent building in the middle of the picture. Enlarge the photograph to see a poster for the Bijou with an illustration of a dramatic scene.
Meanwhile, the theater that rented the auditorium was thriving, and its managers had their eye on the building. “As theater managers they have made a record of conducting the most successful and profitable theater yet known in Pittsburg,” says that 1890 article in the Dispatch. The directors of the library fought long legal battles with the theater managers, accusing them of plotting to force the Library Association into bankruptcy and acquire the building.
And at the same time, Andrew Carnegie was plotting the Mercantile Library’s downfall from another direction, although he had nothing against the institution. Construction of the Carnegie Library for Allegheny began in 1886, while the battles over the Mercantile Library were raging. In 1890, while the Mercantile Library was facing a sheriff’s sale, the city was occupied with the question of what to do with the magnificent gift Carnegie proposed to offer for the construction of a public library for Pittsburgh.
Small wonder that, though the Library Hall Company managed to avoid the auction block at the last minute, the stockholders were receptive to offers. In December of 1890, it was announced that the theater managers had purchased a controlling interest in the company. They had acquired the building.
In theory the Library Hall Company was still obliged to turn the building over to the Pittsburgh Library Association (as it was renamed at some point) when the investors had been repaid. In practice, that was never going to happen. The Association quivered on the brink of dissolution for several years, and in 1899 it moved out of the building. Rescued by the generosity of a rich resident of the up-and-coming borough of Knoxville, the books were moved to the Knoxville Public School, and in May of 1899 a gala opening was held for the new location.
After that Father Pitt has lost track of the library for now. It was still going in 1910, when it was mentioned among the area’s many public libraries as “the Mercantile Library upon the South Hills, rich in Shakespeareana.” But the fact that, on this list, it came after the main Carnegie Library, all the branches, and the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny shows that the old Mercantile Library had sunk into at best local relevance for the Hilltop neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the theater in old Library Hall flourished for many more years as the Bijou, and then in a larger building on the same spot as the Lyceum. Most of its patrons probably forgot or never knew that a library had once been there.
The building will occupy a ground space of 120 feet front on Penn street by 160 feet deep along Barker’s alley. Its architectural style is Byzantine, with a Manzard roof. The front will be of dressed stone, the sides and rear of brick, with stone dressings. The town story will be divided into six compartments. That which is nearest to St. Clair street [Sixth Street today] will be occupied for the main entrance and staircase to the Library and auditorium. That on the east side will be arranged for a confectionary and restaurant for ladies and gentlemen, and the four intermediate, will be handsome store rooms extending back the entire depth of the building. At the northwest and north east corners will be additional staircases leading from the auditorium.
On the first floor (or second as we are accustomed to call it [that is, the floor above the ground floor]) in front will be the accommodations for the Library. The Library hall will be one hundred feet by forty, and forty-six feet high, with a gallery surrounding it at seventeen feet above the floor, the gallery to be ten feet wide and to have a handsome cast iron railing. It will be reached by ornamental iron staircases.
At the west end of the hall is a special reading room for ladies, forty by eighteen feet two inches, Including small dressing apartment. Over this room, and accessible from the galleries, is a room of corresponding size for gentlemen.
In the rear of the east end is the Librarians room 54 feet 4 inches by 17 feet 2 inches, which ls entered from the main floor and has also a door opening to the delivery room. Over the Librarian’s room is the Directors’ room of the same size, reached from the gallery. Both of these front on Barker’s alley.
Adjoining the north side of the library, and between the last mentioned rooms and the staircase, is the Book Delivery room, 79 feet by 84 feet four inches, which it is proposed shall be used also as the newspaper reading and for conversation. It will be lighted by skylights, and a part of the floor will be of slate glass, so as to convey additional light to the stores below.
In the rear of these apartments will be the Auditorium, 116 feet by 78, inches, [sic] inclusive of stage and foyer. It will be constructed upon the plan of a theatre, with a single gallery and will seat comfortably about 1,400 persons. The seats and all the arrangements of the hall are proposed to be of the most approved kind.
On the third or upper story, immediately over the auditorium, is a space 118 feet long by 68 feet wide and 17 feet high, which can be divided as may seem best for the uses to which it may be devoted, A portion of it will be required for a small hall for the ordinary meetings of the association, and it has been suggested that the north half of this space, or a part of it, would be admirably adapted to the requirements of the Academy of Design.
In the front part of the building, over the library, is a room 116 feet long by 40 feet wide, and 16½ feet high, which at some future time will be needed in connection with the library, but which until then may be devoted to other uses. It would make a very good gallery for the exhibition of pictures. By introducing the light from above (a modification easily made,) it would be particularly well suited for that purpose. The objection to a location on the upper story, which would be of force in other cities, would be more than counterbalanced in our dark atmosphere by the advantage of being free from any other obstruction to the light.
This building was probably put up shortly after the Great Fire of 1845, to judge from the fact that it appears in an engraving of the Diamond as it was before 1852. Few buildings from before the Civil War are left downtown, and this is almost certainly the largest.
The building in the engraving is not quite the right dimensions, but the engraver (at the firm of John C. Bragdon, Pittsburgh’s busiest engravers) was probably working from hasty sketches.
Note the volutes and incised decorations in the lintels over the windows, bringing the building up to date with the latest trends in Greek Revival style.
The front of this house in Mission Hills has changed very little since it was new. It was sold in 1930, probably when it was newly built, and the Sun-Telly printed its picture.
“Mission Hills Home,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, June 1, 1930, p. 48
Forgive the blurry microfilm reproduction of what was already a photograph reproduced in halftone on cheap newsprint; it is enough to show us that, except for the filled-in side porch, not much is different in front, although the tiny sapling in the newspaper picture is a major tree now. There appears to be an addition in the back, where it does not alter the impression the house makes from the street.
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.
