Kaufmann’s was the Big Store, but Frank & Seder, facing Kaufmann’s across a whole block of Smithfield Street, was hardly small. The building is now under restoration.
The restoration has peeled away later accretions, and we can see the shadows of an old sign at the corner of Forbes Avenue.
Two layers of ghost signs still memorialize the old department store to pedestrians on Fifth Avenue.
Compare the photograph to this illustration of the store in 1927.
This was actually built as the Kaufmann and Baer department store in 1914—the Kaufmann of the name being another branch of the family that owned the even bigger Kaufmann’s department store two blocks away. In 1925 it was taken over by Gimbels, and it remained Gimbels until the chain evaporated in 1986, so every old-timer in Pittsburgh remembers it as the Gimbels Building. The lower floors are occupied by retail stores now; the upper floors are offices.
The architects of the building were the New York firm of Starrett & van Vleck, who were responsible for many of the flagship department stores in big Eastern cities.
This building at the corner of Carson and 17th, known to today’s Pittsburghers as the home of Nakama, a well-known Japanese restaurant, was once Lorch’s, the “South Side’s Big Store,” as we can see in this advertisement preserved by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation:
To run a department store on the South Side in about 1901, you had to be able to serve your customers in Polish—and probably Ukrainian and Serbian and several other languages as well.
For decades this clock, on the Kaufmann’s department store at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street, marked the busiest corner of Pittsburgh’s retail district. “Under the clock” was the designated meeting-place downtown, and Kaufmann’s premier restaurant was called the Tic-Toc in its honor.
The Kaufmann’s building (like everything else) is being redeveloped as condominium apartments, and the clock is featured prominently in the advertising art.
