U.S. Bureau of Mines/Hamburg Hall

This building on Forbes Avenue once housed the U.S. Bureau of Mines Pittsburgh Research Station. It’s now Carnegie Mellon’s Hamburg Hall.

At the turn of the 20th century, a rash of deadly mine explosions and fires prompted the U.S. government to form the Bureau of Mines within the Department of the Interior.

The original mission of the bureau was to provide information and to develop techniques so the mining industry could use explosives safely in the presence of flammable mine gases and dust.  It later added the promotion of safety and efficiency in mining and metallurgy to its list of duties.

Since the city was a hub for a major coal region, the Pittsburgh Research Station became the center of the bureau’s efforts.

Its first location was a plot of land at the Allegheny Arsenal provided by the War Department. In 1917, a new building designed by architect Henry Hornbostel, who also created the buildings at  nearby Carnegie Tech (see Hamerschlag Hall), was dedicated on Forbes Avenue in Oakland.

The main building contained labs between wings for  chemical and mechanical engineering, and a 250-seat auditorium behind the building.

In the 1960s, Carnegie Mellon University acquired the building, renamed it Hamburg Hall and eventually located the H. John Heinz III School there.

While the building was designed separately from the rest of the campus, its still fits in quite well with the rest of Hornbostel’s work there.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines Building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Source: “A History of the Bureau of Mines Pittsburgh Research Center” by Robert J. Tuchman and Ruth F. Brinkley

Allegheny Arsenal

 A powder magazine buried into a small hill is the only structure remaining from Allegheny Arsenal.

Arsenal Park and Arsenal Middle School, located along 40th Street in Lawrenceville, derived their names from Allegheny Arsenal, which the U.S. Army established on the site in 1814.

The arsenal, designed by Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the U.S. Capitol, stretched from Penn Avenue to the Allegheny River. It was the central supply depot for the military’s western operations and served the nation well in all its conflicts through the Spanish-American War.

Among the items the Army Ordinance Department manufactured there were  rifle and artillery ammunition, saddles and gun carriages.

As tensions continued to build toward the Civil War, John B. Lloyd, the Secretary of War under President James Buchanan, began to shift arms from northern arsenals to the south as a reaction to John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, VA.

In late December 1860, Allegheny Arsenal commander Major John Symington received orders to ship cannon to fortifications on the Gulf of Mexico. Citizens of the Lawrenceville area were outraged that “traitors” were trying to take what they considered their guns while a war with the South was brewing.

The uproar and threat of popular insurrection caused Buchanan to force Lloyd to countermand the order.

Right: This cannon, which was fired nearly 1,700 times during the Siege of Richmond, sits behind the middle school in Arsenal Park.

A more tragic event centered on the arsenal arose Sept. 17, 1862, when an explosion ripped through the facility, killing 78 employees -- the majority of them young girls.

The blast was heard two miles away and shattered windows throughout the neighborhood. It also created a grisly scene, as body parts were strewn across the grounds and pieces of the girls’ dresses hung in the trees.

About half of the victims were unidentified and now lie in a mass grave in nearby Allegheny Cemetery.

However,  the largest civilian disaster during the Civil War was overshadowed by the Battle of Antietam, which was fought the same day, and the tragedy made the pages of few newspapers outside Pittsburgh.

In the 1900s, the Army began selling off the arsenal's land, which led to the creation of Arsenal Park, the later construction of the school and the beginnings of modern Lawrenceville.

A September 2010 story in the Post-Gazette sheds more light on the lives of the people who worked --  and died -- at the arsenal.

This monument in Allegheny Cemetery is located at the site of a mass grave containing victims of the 1862 explosion at Allegheny Arsenal.

Hello Pittsburgh, Hello World

While doing some research on singer Florence Warner, who I featured in my post TV on the Brain, I came across the above blast from the past: a 1981 WTAE promo titled “Hello Pittsburgh.”

The talented Ms. Warner did the vocals on this version, and the lyrics reminded me of a “Hello Cleveland” promo.

More looks at YouTube found plenty of “Hello” shoutouts to many cities and states, and it made me curious about the campaign’s origin. I came across  a February 2010 column by Duane Dudek of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that revealed the definitive answer through an email from ad man Jerry Smith, who came up with the first “Hello” in the mid-1970s.

When the Hearst TV station in Milwaukee, Smith wrote, a sister station to WTAE, suffered from low ratings and an even lower image, the general manager hired Smith to come to his rescue.

Smith went home and slept on it. In the the middle of the night, he awoke with an idea: a love song for Milwaukee. Smith contacted a composer friend, Frank Gari, to bring his idea to fruition.

Those who heard the early version loved it, but the station GM said penny-pinching Hearst wouldn’t pay for the campaign.

Enter John Conomikes, the GM of WTAE-TV, who was coming to town the next day. When Conomikes heard it, he persuaded his counterpart to give the green light for “Hello Milwaukee.”

A camera crew roamed Milwaukee, getting shots of the city at its finest as the video counterpart to Gari’s song.

The campaign did its job, lifting the Milwaukee station’s ratings and creating a sense of civic pride. After its debut in the Badger State, “Hello” campaigns with customized song lyrics eventually hit Pittsburgh and 166 other cities around the world. Warner was the vocalist for many of them, including one with the Nashville Symphony.

It also hit home with the millions of viewers, some of whom fondly recalled the special “Hello” for  their towns in YouTube comments.

Here is Warner singing “Hello Calgary” for a promo that was used in the leadup to the 1984 Winter Olympics in the Canadian city.

Warner’s vocals graced this 2002 update of “Hello Cleveland” for WEWS-TV

McCook Mansion/Mansions on Fifth

  The McCook Mansion is now part of Mansions on Fifth.

Lawyer and business executive Willis McCook wanted a new home  for his large family, and $300,000 got him the above Jacobean mansion on Fifth Avenue in Shadyside  in 1906.

The mansion contained plenty of handcrafted woodwork, stained glass windows and even its own chapel.

Born in Ohio in 1856, McCook graduated from Yale, where he was captain of the university’s first football team, and studied law with a Pittsburgh firm and at Columbia University before joining the Allegheny County Bar in 1876.

McCook was a pioneer in corporate law and was the personal attorney for Henry Clay Frick.  McCook helped form coke companies for Frick and served as his attorney in a protracted lawsuit against Andrew Carnegie. The legal fees the attorney collected from that grudge match helped pay for McCook’s mansion.

Scandal touched the McCook family in early 1911 when Willis Jr., one of McCook’s 10 children, ignored his parents’ objections and eloped  with Margaret Norris, the daughter of a poor carpenter, and married her in Cumberland, MD.

The Catholic McCooks’ objections were centered on the bride’s Presbyterian faith. Both families initially disowned the couple, and Willis Jr. was forced to find employment at the Pittsburgh Steel Company in Glassport.

The elder McCook eventually relented and offered his forgiveness – and his financial support – in exchange for Margaret’s conversion to Catholicism. She did so in McKeesport in February 1911.

The measure of McCook’s national fame was displayed by the coverage the New York Times gave to this episode.

McCook had a happier time when his daughter, Bessie, became engaged and he built a Tudor mansion  on Amberson Avenue, around the corner from his mansion. The house, now known as the McCook-Reed Mansion, was completed in 1905, a year before the main house.

The family lived in the house until the late 1930s, but the Great Depression took its toll on the McCook fortune and the city of Pittsburgh took possession in lieu of  $65,000 in back taxes.

Emil and Margaret Bonavita bought the property in 1949 and for 50 years it housed Carnegie Mellon University students. Residents included Shirley Jones, George Peppard and Andy Warhol.

But a February 2004 fire on the third floor ended the house’s time as student housing.

Richard Pearson, his wife Mary Del Brady and a group of investors bought the McCook Mansion for $1.4 million in 2005 with the intent of turning the mansion and the adjoining McCook-Reed Mansion into a boutique hotel.

After six years and about $8 million were spent bringing historic McCook Mansion back to its original condition as much as possible, the Mansions on Fifth opened earlier this year. It has 13 rooms, including two suites; a 1,000-square-foot presidential suite; a small bar; a fitness room; a spa and a wine cellar.

The McCook-Reed Mansion is still undergoing renovations.

The Mansions on Fifth was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April.

Visit Mansions on Fifth for information. Click HERE for photos taken before renovations began.

As the Dumpster indicates, the McCook-Reed Mansion on Amberson Avenue is still undergoing renovations.

Highland Building

Daniel Burnham’s Highland Building has stood empty for decades.

Near East Liberty Presbyterian Church is the Highland Building, another skyscraper Daniel Burnham built for Henry Clay Frick in 1909.

From about 1850 to 1950, East Liberty was the third-largest business district in Pennsylvania,  after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, so its no surprise that Frick, whose returns from real estate deals nearly matched the pile he made from his coke empire and with Carnegie Steel, would want to be where the action was.

In “Pittsburgh, A New Portrait,” Franklin Toker writes that  Burnham copied features from buildings by his bête noire, Louis Sullivan, who has been called the father of modern American architecture.

Sullivan didn’t hide his distaste for the Beaux-Arts “White City” Burnham helped realize for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Sullivan, who coined the term “form follows function,” wrote in his autobiography that Burnham set the course of American architecture back “for half a century from its date, if not longer.”

In designing the Highland Building, Toker writes that Burnham took the terra cotta ornament design from Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott Department Store in Chicago, and Sullivan's Guaranty Building in Buffalo inspired the cornice.

This East Liberty landmark, which has stood empty for decades, has been the target of several redevelopment plans – all of which failed.

But recent efforts to turn it into a hotel are getting closer to fruition as state funding for a parking garage , which the potential developers say they need to make the plan viable, has been approved.

While definitive plans for the hotel conversion still haven’t been put forward, the future of the Highland Building is brighter than it has been in nearly 40 years.

Here’s hoping this comes to pass because it would be a huge contributor to the turnaround of East Liberty.

A closer view of the Highland Building cornice Daniel Burnham cribbed from Louis Sullivan.

TV Stuck in My Brain

The vast maj0rity of my recent posts have covered history of the architectural kind. Today, I’m taking a look at how local TV operated in the Dark Ages, a.k.a. my youth.

While suffering through a mostly sleepless night, I decided to surf’ the ’Net and ended up on YouTube. I stumbled across the following videos, some of which I remember, and it gave me the idea to tack them up here.

You, dear visitor, probably won’t remember any of them if you are under 40 or didn’t grow up within the range of Cleveland TV signals or both. I have included a golden oldie from the ‘Burgh, however.

Regardless, these clips should spark nostalgia for your own local TV personalities and shows, as well as engender a wistful feeling for a simpler time in those who share my advanced age bracket.

Younger visitors should get a chuckle watching these crude forms of entertainment and communication.

Back in ancient TV times, local stations didn’t broadcast 24/7 by filling the extra time with program-length ads. Instead, on Sundays through Fridays, at least, they would shut down at 1 or 2 a.m.

Before doing so, they would offer a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, a prayer, and/or an editorial. After that, viewers sometimes were hit with a load of legal boilerplate like WKYC in Cleveland ended its broadcasting day with in 1976.

Other broadcasters wanted to have a little fun and skipped the fine print. KMJ, a Fresno, CA, TV station that was owned by McClatchy Newspapers – yes, it’s the same family as former Pirates head honcho Kevin McClatchy -- went that route.

Three of the company’s newspapers are named Bee, so this goofy sign off shows the mascot busily preparing for bed.

Another local TV staple was the late night movie host. Stations bought cheap movie packages containing mostly Grade Z films and found a host or hosts to introduce them on Friday and Saturday nights, and to provide entertainment at commercial breaks. They all had a gimmick, some more creative than others, and they often performed skits or humorous monologues.

The above clip features a short skit and show intro for the “Big Chuck and Little John Show” that appeared on WJW in Cleveland from 1979 to 2007.

As the skit illustrates, Big Chuck and Little John leaned on visual humor that was heavy on puns.

For my native Pittsburgh visitors, I found this show-opening skit for Chilly Billy Cardille’s “Chiller Theater” on Channel 11 that was a big hit among the region’s insomniacs and connoisseurs of a more sophisticated brand of silly humor.

Chilly Billy was so popular with the two films he hosted each Saturday night that he kept “Saturday Night Live” off the NBC affiliate for four years until the station bowed to network pressure and cut him to one movie that started at 1 a.m. When the station pushed the show an hour later for “Entertainment Tonight,” it spelled the end for “Chiller Theater,” which ran from 1963 to 1984.

In the above clip from 1966, Pittsburgh-area native and Carnegie Tech grad Barbara Feldon appeared as her Agent 99 character from the hit TV show “Get Smart.”

This news promo for Cleveland’s WEWS will give my younger visitors a taste of the swinging Seventies.

I can’t give a better description of this than the person who posted it on YouTube:

“Between the psychedelic animation, goofy photo-flipbook effect, saccharine-sweet music, and the all-around goofy news team, this local news promo is everything the movie ‘Anchorman’ should have been.”

The crazy thing is that I often can’t recall what I did the day before, but I REMEMBERED THIS THROWAWAY from 40 years ago!

The final clip is another WEWS promo that I have a good reason for remembering. This lovely lady with the wonderful voice and totally Eighties hair and leather pants is Florence Warner, and I would have paid to watch her sing the telephone book.

I first learned her name when I found this clip last night. She did make some records and was featured on a disc that came with the first Philips CD players. But she spent most of her career singing in ads like this one and as a backup singer.

Thanks for joining me on this somewhat self-indulgent journey through time. I say “somewhat” self-indulgent because my hope is that those of you who grew up with three networks and PBS connected with your own TV legacy and memories of that time.

For everyone else, I hope you found it at least a little informative and fun.

More Mellon Monuments

In Wednesday’s post on the Mellon Institute, I listed the buildings the Mellons helped to construct during the Great Depression.

Today, I’m spotlighting one of those buildings, as well as one they put up at the turn of the 20th century.

The congregation of East Liberty Presbyterian Church has been in the neighborhood since 1819 and built five buildings, including the present beauty on South Highland Avenue.

The large church was built with money from the Mellon and Negley families between 1931 and 1935, and designed by architect Ralph Adams Cram, who created the nearby Calvary Episcopal Church in Shadyside.

Cram also did Holy Rosary Church on Kelly Street in 1928.

Left: A closer look at the tower.

In “Buildings of Pittsburgh,” Pitt professor and author Franklin Toker  describes East Liberty Presbyterian Church this way:

"Although [Cram]  believed that no other church in the nation achieved such completeness of utility and art, the design lacks the élan of his earlier (though scarcely much bigger) St. John the Divine in New York City.

"East Liberty works best as part of the urban fabric: its Spanish Gothic Revival crossing tower, a 300-foot massive tower …, dominates the East End as a pendant to the Mellon-backed Cathedral of Learning in Oakland."

According to Toker in "Pittsburgh: A New Portrait," East Liberty was derived from a British term in which "liberty" referred to land just outside a city or town reserved for grazing.

While Cram called this work the crowning achievement of his career, some neighborhood wags called it "the Mellon fire escape" because they supposedly built it to atone for their sins.

Richard B. Mellon and his wife Jennie King Mellon were so attached to the church they helped to build that they decided to make it permanent. After their deaths, they were buried in a marble chamber off the nave.

The church is more than just a building. It's also a place to bring the community together, and it has been since the beginning. The good folks at what also is called the Cathedral of Hope offer tutoring, food for the homeless and has an outreach to the gay and lesbian community.

The dome of what’s now called Motor Square Garden has loomed over Centre Avenue for more than a century.

Another Mellon project in East Liberty, Motor Square Garden has had failure written all over it most of its existence:

• Created in 1900 as East Liberty Market House to boost sales in neighboring housing developments, it failed by 1917.
• Its time as a sports arena wasn't a winner, either, flopping in the 1920s.
• A Cadillac showroom crashed there in the 1960s.
• An indoor mall and food court went belly up in the 1980s.

The nearly-century long losing streak finally ended when the Automobile Association of America, better known as AAA, bought it out of bankruptcy in 1991. The building now holds an AAA branch and offices.