Pittsburgh's East
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Pittsburgh’s East End – A Legacy of Innovation By Mark Vernalis | FocusCFO Dear ACE Hotel: I am looking forward to my first ACE hotel visit tonight and dining at Whitfield. Not long ago I read in The Architect’s Newspaper (archpaper.com) that you would be coming to Pittsburgh. The archpaper.com writer expected to see Edison bulbs in the Pittsburgh ACE, which got me thinking about the neighborhood you will be joining and motivated me to pass along some history. The Pittsburgh ACE is squarely in Pittsburgh’s East End which is comprised of the Point Breeze, Highland Park, Shadyside and East Liberty neighborhoods. The East End’s heyday was around 1900 when it was the world’s richest neighborhood whose inhabitants controlled 40% of the nation’s assets. In 1900 more millionaires lived in Pittsburgh’s East End than anywhere on earth. It would not be uncommon at that time to take a walk along Penn Avenue and see a Carnegie or Frick (steel), H.J. Heinz (pickles), George Westinghouse (airbrakes, natural gas & electricity), Richard or Andrew Mellon (banking), Alfred Hunt (founder of ALCOA aluminum), Robert Pitcairn (founder of PPG glass), Charles Lockhart (co-founder of Rockefeller’s Standard oil), Thomas Armstrong (cork), James McCrea (president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), James Guffey (founder of Gulf Oil), Charles Schwab (first president of J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel Corporation), Henry Laughlin (Jones & Laughlin Steel), Lillian Russell (national theatre star) or a congressman, an ambassador or cabinet secretary and many others of wealth and influence. Before the Civil War East Liberty was a village with rural charm. It had several popular taverns with sleighing and equestrian parties being common. Things began to change with the opening of the East Liberty Passenger Railway in 1860 when the neighborhood would become a commuter suburb of Pittsburgh. Much of East Liberty was owned by the Negley family who operated a steam gristmill and were farmers. One of the Negley girls married neighbor Thomas Mellon, a rising lawyer and banker, whose sons would amass one of the world’s great fortunes. Many East Enders were of Scotch-Irish or German descent who believed in thrift, hard work, and giving back to the community. They tended to be Presbyterians, Freemasons, Republicans, abolitionists, staunch supporters of Abraham Lincoln and became the world’s models for philanthropy. East Enders had a distaste and distrust for New York City society; East Enders stood out like boring sore thumbs in the glitz of the eastern elites. New Yorkers looked down on Pittsburghers because they ‘made things’ while Pittsburghers had a similar disdain for New Yorkers because they inherited everything or manipulated stocks. Pittsburgh’s East Enders were largely a dour and sober group. The Pittsburgh ACE’s most important neighbor is the East Liberty Presbyterian Church known as one of the neighborhood’s “cathedrals of capitalism.” The Mellon sons presented it as their Mother’s Day gift in 1933 and was the largest construction project in the city during the Depression. The Mellon’s often had a formal lunch after Sunday church service where reportedly silence was only broken when the conversation turned to business. The church was designed by Ralph Cram who, with his earlier partner, Bertram Goodhue, were the pre-eminent Gothicists of their age, perhaps best known for the iconic architecture at the US Military Academy at West Point. A similarly important building stands nearby, the Highland Building (1910), a Frick project, designed by the visionary architect and planner D.H. Burnham of Chicago. Burnham reshaped the face of American cities whose commissions spanned the country. He headed the architectural design for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and famous commissions include New York’s Flatiron Building and Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Railroad Station. The East Liberty Highland Building was a later Burnham design and showed the evolution of the skyscraper’s base-shaft-capital format. The entire building is much more homogenous from street level to top, compared to predecessor skyscrapers, which would become standard. Sadly, the facades have been ‘modernized’ over the years losing important Burnham refinements such as a topside molding that presented a wonderful scalloped skyline. The first car purported to be in Pittsburgh was a Panhard Tonneau purchased in Paris in the summer of 1900 by Howard C. Heinz, son of Henry J. Heinz of Pittsburgh’s pickle dynasty. It reached a top speed of 40 miles an hour and was known in the neighborhood as the “Red Devil.” This car is now on display at the Frick automobile museum on Penn Avenue. In 1906 there were 12 automobile dealerships in the East End, two of which sold electric cars. The city’s first traffic light was at the intersection of Penn and Highland Avenues, a few steps from the ACE. Gulf Oil built the world’s first drive-in gas station on Baum Boulevard. It is believed that the nation’s first traffic accident occurred in Pittsburgh’s East End. The East End industrialists had conveniences too: the U. S. Post Office delivered the mail seven (7) times a day to East End residences, the first alternating current electrical power plant illuminated East End homes, the first private telephone lines were installed in East End homes so their residents could care for their business affairs downtown without going through a switchboard and, they were the first to use aluminum in their homes and natural gas for heating and cooking. The first electric light installed by Westinghouse was at the home of James Mellon at 401 Negley Avenue. The Pennsylvania Railroad had a private station in the East End where the Pittsburgher made direct trips to Wall Street. Westinghouse, Frick and others had private railroad cars. While princes, artists, politicians and scientists often visited the East End a hundred years ago perhaps its most famous gathering was a July 4th luncheon held for President Teddy Roosevelt in 1902. Roosevelt had come to pay tribute to the East End industrialists who, while staunch Republicans, were not pleased with Teddy’s progressive ‘trust busting’ ways. The lunch occurred at Clayton, the East End home of Henry Clay Frick and was catered by New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Frick never warmed up to Roosevelt but gave generously to his campaigns. Frick (like Carnegie) had written $250,000 checks to McKinley’s campaigns, whom he admired, but only $50,000 to Roosevelt. Frick would nonetheless call in his marker asking Roosevelt for the formation of U. S. Steel to be done without trust review. Politics had always played a huge role in the East End. It has been said that four US Presidents were nominated in the parlors of the East End industrialists. Pittsburgh’s East Enders were fine art collectors. It is believed that in the late 1800’s no museum in the world could match the paintings and Egyptian antiquities contained within an eight-block residential section of the East End. Ultimately the vast art collections of Carnegie and Frick departed for New York while Mellon’s established the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It was believed that artwork would succumb to Pittsburgh’s harsh industrial air. East Liberty’s future as a transportation hub was foretold when the first through trains from Philadelphia began to stop on December 10, 1852. On the platform that day in East Liberty was a 17-year old Pennsylvania Rail Road telegraph operator named Andrew Carnegie who was on hand to meet the incoming Philadelphia train. Traffic expanded over the years and in 1905 a greatly enlarged new station was built of handsome red brick and terra cotta. In 1913 more trains ran through the East Liberty station than Broad Street in Philadelphia. The station had wide sweeping driveways, landscaped lawns and manicured flowerbeds that spelled out “East Liberty.” The East Liberty station, which had been one of the most elegant on the Pennsylvania line, was demolished in 1963. East Liberty along with most of the East End neighborhoods was annexed into the City of Pittsburgh in 1867. East Enders were prominent members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club near Johnstown, PA. It was a retreat for the exceptionally successful. But while sparing the opulence of Newport, Road Island, for example, South Fork was without peer for wealth and influence. It’s members, limited to 100, were mostly East Enders such as Frick, Carnegie, Mellon a future Ambassador to Great Britain and Secretary of the Treasury, Philander Knox, a future US Attorney General and Secretary of State, Samuel Rea, future president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, steel magnate Thaw, (whose son Harry would murder one of America’s greatest architect’s, Sanford White, over a woman and go on to successfully plead the first ever temporary insanity defense), Scaife, and others. The central feature of South Fork was the world’s largest man-made lake, created by a vast earthen dam. Members used the lake for boating and fishing. Fish were brought in on rail tankers to provide excellent fishing at an extraordinary cost of $1.00 each. When it rained the fish often overflowed into the spillways which caused the members to install grates to keep the fish contained during periods of rain. While never proven, it was believed that when the rains fell and the dam broke on May 31, 1889 that the fish grates became clogged with debris and were a key factor in the dam’s demise. Over two thousand people died in ten minutes when the flood waters reached Johnstown. The East Enders who were so prominent in the South Fork membership were never absolved of blame for the calamity.