Remembering Pittsburgh

by Len Barcousky

  The most titillating offering was May Irwin’s Kiss. It was the filmed re-creation of a lingering stage smooch between the full-figured Irwin and her Broadway costar, John C. Rice. The pair had appeared the previous year in a musical comedy called The Widow Jones.

  While the Bijou offered a traditional play as its principal attraction, the Avenue Theater on Fifth Avenue had built its variety show around a competing “cinematographe” program of ten short films made by France’s Lumiere Brothers. “The pictures of active life thrown upon the canvas were thoroughly enjoyed by the audience,” the Press reported. “The presentations were so lifelike as to be actually startling.”

  “Among the views was that of the Ninety-sixth French infantry on the march, charge of the French cavalry, a wrecked building scene, showing a falling wall and workmen carting away the debris, two scenes of infantile life and a view illustrative of the French method of drawing coke.” There is no indication that Henry Clay Frick, the region’s King of Coke, took in the program to see what his European competitors were up to.

  Both Edison’s Vitascope and the Lumieres’ cinematographe used highly flammable celluloid film, and theater fires were common. The worst occurred the next year at a charity bazaar in Paris, and more than one hundred people were killed.

  Pittsburgh came close to having a similar tragedy on November 25, 1903, at the Avenue Theater, which was managed by Harry Davis. “A celluloid film in a cinematograph machine ignited, and the blaze swept through the upper balcony in the rear of the auditorium,” the Pittsburgh Gazette reported the next day. “Cool heads saved the lives and limbs of hundreds of people, and the intelligent work of the firemen confined the blaze to one corner of the building.”

  About three hundred people were in the theater when the fire started. Projectionist George MacKenzie had just threaded the film for the second short into the projector when “the audience was startled by a sharp report and a vivid flash of blue light.”

  “Instantly the blaze caught the woodwork, and in a few seconds long tongues of red flame rolled up the wall and out of the window opening in Fifth Avenue.

  “MacKenzie was burned about the face and hands and was so disabled that he was unable to fight the fire,” the paper reported.

  Things could have been much worse. “There was not the slightest semblance of the panic,” according to the Pittsburgh Press’s report on the blaze. “The lights were turned on and the spectators…walked out…quietly.”

  “So well was the work done that women stopped to put on their wraps and some stood with their checks at the cloak room while the fire engines were roaring down Fifth Avenue and the excited crowd in the street was shouting that ‘the whole block was burning up.’”

  The same theater was gutted in a second fire two years later, just a few weeks before Davis and Harris opened their Nickelodeon nearby.

  1912: MISS RUSSELL, A NEW BRIDE, ADVISES

  It was business before romance for Pittsburgh newspaper editor Alexander Moore and actress Lillian Russell.

  The two were married June 12, 1912, at the Hotel Schenley in Oakland—now the University of Pittsburgh’s student union.

  “Miss Russell, who is here with the Weber-Fields company, will leave at 12 o’clock tonight for the east,” the Pittsburgh Leader, Moore’s newspaper, reported the day of the wedding. “About the same time, Mr. Moore will leave for Chicago to attend the Republican national convention, in fulfillment of a promise he had made to Colonel Roosevelt some time ago.”

  Russell, fifty-one, was one of the stars of the Weber and Fields Jubilee, a variety show that was touring the country. A reporter for the Leader called it “the most conspicuous theatrical event [in] years.” Moore, forty-four, was—by most accounts—Russell’s fourth husband. He had to leave his bride because he was expected in Chicago to build support for the presidential campaign of former President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was feuding with his handpicked successor, President William Howard Taft. He was seeking to deny Taft a second term and run as the GOP candidate himself in 1912. When Roosevelt did not get the Republican nod, he ran as the candidate of the new Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. He polled more votes than Taft, but both lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

  While the story about the wedding of the editor and the actress was a modest three inches or so, Pittsburgh readers did not lack for information concerning Russell. She was the author of an advice column, “Lillian Russell’s Philosophy,” that appeared regularly on the Leader’s Women, Home, Heart, Beauty page.

  During the month of her marriage, she had advice on the most attractive ways to sit and on the benefits of vigorous dance.

  Awkwardly placed feet were an aesthetic danger, she warned. “I have seen a tall, beautiful, graceful woman walk through a room full of admirers, sit down upon a piano seat, lean her arms gracefully up the piano, making a charming picture,” she wrote in a column that appeared on her wedding day. “Then spoil it all by twisting her ankle around the leg of the seat to steady herself, toes turned in and heel out of her slipper. She had studied every stance for a fascinating effect and those disagreeable little feet betrayed her.”

  Russell had a solution to the problem. She recommended that her readers hang a few mirrors at floor level in various rooms of their homes. Those looking glasses would permit an occasional “glance at your unconscious little offenders” to make sure they were fetchingly displayed.

  Dancing, she advised a few days later, would be of particular benefit for women who work outside the home. “Some women who are in business assume a manner of stiffness in their walk and carriage which is unwomanly,” Russell wrote. “Such women should dance…they should lighten up when away from business, drop responsibilities and feminize themselves.”

  Russell had been a Broadway and London star since the early 1880s. Joe Weber and Lew Fields had been doing a Dutch act—two characters speaking with thick German accents—almost as long. In 1896, they opened their own theater where they performed satires, known as burlesques, of popular Broadway musicals.

  The Weber and Fields Jubilee, which ended its national tour with two Pittsburgh performances June 14, 1912, was capitalizing on nostalgia. “Many prominent actors and actresses of old-day fame appeared in the all-star cast,” an anonymous reviewer wrote in the next day’s Leader. “The performances consisted of a medley of old Weber and Fields nonsense with the added spice of burlesque of the New York comedy success ‘Bunty Pulls the Strings,’” the reporter wrote.

  After a long career on the New York stage, singer-actress Lillian Russell married Pittsburgh newspaper editor Alexander Moore. She is buried in the city’s Allegheny Cemetery. Courtesy Robin Rombach of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  The audience expected stereotypes. Weber and Fields offered their “language destroying dialogues, which end up in highly amusing choking scenes.” John T. Kelley was “the famous old Irishman,” and George Beban appeared as “the affectionate and excited Frenchman.”

  The boss’s wife wasn’t forgotten. “Lillian Russell was radiant in a number of beautiful gowns and sang splendidly,” the reviewer noted.

  After her marriage, Russell appeared in a few more plays and silent movies. In her later years, she lobbied for women’s suffrage. She died in Pittsburgh in 1922 at age sixty-one. She and her husband, who died in 1930, are entombed in Lawrenceville’s Allegheny Cemetery.

  1927: STUNT DRIVER INCLINED TO TEST HIMSELF

  Flagpole sitting and marathon dancing are among the fads associated with the Roaring Twenties.

  In Pittsburgh, you can add “incline driving” to that list.

  “A spectacular stunt was enacted yesterday afternoon when Chick Murray drove a four-cylinder Whippet roadster up and down the Seventeenth Street incline of the Pittsburgh Railways Company,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on October 8, 1927. “The grade is 37½ per cent, about twice as steep as the deepest street grade in Pittsburgh.”

  Murray’s Whippet was manufactured in Toledo, Ohio, by the
Willys-Overland Motor Co. Its base price was $625, equivalent to about $7,750 today. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Willys-Overland had been a major maker of automobiles in the United States. Surpassed during the 1920s by competitors like Chrysler and General Motors, the firm became a regional producer of smaller, less expensive cars.

  Workers tore down the Seventeenth Street Incline in 1955. In 1927, a stunt driver drove a four-cylinder Whippet roadster up and down the steeply sloped track bed that linked Pittsburgh’s Strip and Hill Districts. Courtesy Tom Toia of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.

  Willys-Overland later became best known as one of three companies responsible for development of the military jeep. In that effort, it made use of designs originally developed by Butler County’s American Bantam car company.

  The incline stunt was designed to show that cars made under the Whippet name could handle the region’s many mountains and valleys. Pittsburgh at one time had more than a dozen inclines, sometimes called “funiculars,” to carry people, freight and even vehicles up and down its hills. The system used two counter-balanced cars connected by a heavy cable that traveled simultaneously in opposite directions on steeply sloped, parallel trolley tracks.

  Two examples remain within the city. The Duquesne and the Monongahela inclines continue to ferry passengers between the base and the summit of Mount Washington.

  The 850-foot Seventeenth Street incline linked the city’s Strip District to the Hill District. Its route passed over the Pennsylvania Railroad yards and Bigelow Boulevard.

  The Post-Gazette had a brief story and two photos the morning after the event. The newspaper followed up with a longer feature for its midweek automobile pages. “Spectacular Test Shows Power and Speed of Auto” was the headline on the October 12 follow-up story. “Crowds at both ends of the incline cheered wildly at [Murray’s] daring efforts,” the story said. “Traffic on Bigelow Boulevard and trains in the Pennsylvania railroad yards, beneath, were halted to enable passengers to see the Whippet four’s triumph.”

  “Hundreds of skeptics, who had declared the feat impossible and who expected to see man and car crash back to the bottom of the incline, were held breathless.”

  The two-seat roadster traveled on a narrow board “tramway” laid on top of the incline’s wooden ties. The lumber prevented the auto’s twenty-inch wheels from getting stuck in the twenty-two-inch spaces between the ties. “It required exactly 46 seconds by the stop watch for Murray to make the grade,” the newspaper said. “Murray had calculated 90 seconds as the minimum time possible and so shared in the amazement and gratification of Pittsburgh Willys-Overland officials over the high rate of speed obtained.”

  Once he reached the top, Murray then drove back down the incline, relying on his vehicle’s “dependable four-wheel brakes…which are capable of holding the car at a nearly 45 degree angle.”

  Murray stayed around the city for a week after his incline climb. Both he and his car were put on display in the sporting goods department of Kaufmann & Baer Co. Its building at Smithfield Street and Sixth Avenue later housed Gimbel’s department store and now is the downtown home of Burlington Coat Factory and other businesses.

  The Seventeenth Street incline, also known as the Penn incline, was torn down in the early 1950s. Willys-Overland halted production of Whippets in 1931.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

  Baldwin, Leland D. Pittsburgh: The Story of a City. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

  Darlington, Mary Carson, ed. Fort Pitt and Letters from the Frontier. Pittsburgh, PA: J.R. Weldin, 1892.

  Dixon, David. Never Come to Peace Again. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.

  Dohan, Mary Helen. Mr. Roosevelt’s Steamboat. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981.

  Dorian, Frederick, and Judith Meibach. A History of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh Symphony, 1986.

  Harpster, John W., ed. Pen Pictures of Early Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1938.

  Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion. New York: Scribner, 2006.

  Lambing, the Reverend Andrew Arnold, trans., annotator. Register of Fort Duquesne. Pittsburgh, PA: Myers, Shinkle, 1885. Memorial edition, Pittsburgh, PA: Diocese of Pittsburgh, 2004.

  Lorant, Stefan. Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. Fourth edition. Pittsburgh, PA: Authors Edition, 1988.

  McCollester, Charles. The Point of Pittsburgh. Homestead, PA: Battle of Homestead Foundation, 2008.

  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh 1758–2008. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

  Swetnam, George, and Helene Smith. A Guidebook to Historic Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.

  Thomas, Clarke M. Front-Page Pittsburgh: Two Hundred Years of the Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

  Thurston, George H. Allegheny County’s Hundred Years. Pittsburgh, PA: A.A. Anderson & Son, 1888.

  Toker, Franklin. Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.

  Washington, George, and Christopher Gist. Edited and annotated by Kevin Patrick Kopper. The Journals of George Washington and Christopher Gist: Mission to Fort Le Boeuf 1753–1754. Slippery Rock, PA: Friends of the Old Stone House / Slippery Rock University, 2003.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Len Barcousky started writing for newspapers in 1970 and has never stopped. Along the way, he took breaks to earn degrees at Penn State in English and at Columbia University in business. Since 1986, he has been a reporter and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the oldest newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains. He and his family live in Ben Avon, Pennsylvania.

  Visit us at

  www.historypress.net