Source:Fleming-postoffice
George T. Fleming. "Old postoffice once noted structure: History of postal conditions is being repeated here: Fine site abandoned." Pittsburgh Gazette Times, Oct. 29, 1916, sec. 5, p. 2. Newspapers.com 85411937.
THE story of the second court house of Allegheny county in last Sunday's Gazette Times awakened many to the realization that there were other historic buildings in old Pittsburgh that have passed away and that our downtown streets are new, as far as architecture is concerned.
Chief among the public buildings downtown and second in importance to the court house, was the old postoffice at Fifth avenue and Smithfield street on the site of the Park Building.
Both buildings were landmarks, both were resorted to most frequently by the public; both became inadequate, cramped, dingy and insanitary. Each served its day. The passing of each was progress.
Thousands still among us saw these buildings become inadequate to the demands of our great community. Our new city and county building approaching completion is confidently expected to serve the wants of the public for 30 years. The builders of the old court house and old post office counted longer than that.
The federal building was commonly called the post office on Smithfield street, has long since failed of its purpose, by reason of faulty construction, inadequate quarters and poor light. The betterment of conditions in postal facilities in Pittsburgh has long perplexed the government authorities, and conditions today with the immense growth of the postal business, and now no better than in 1891, when the building at Fifth avenue and Smithfield was abandoned.
But the old building had a history and served its day. When opened for business in 1853 it was so large and convenient in comparison with the former rented quarters in old Philo Hall on Third street (now avenue), near Market street, that it was long regarded as a wonderful structure, and was a source of great pride. All the old-time illustrators when Pittsburgh was written up in the magazines of the ante-Civil War period and all the "views" of the city that appeared until the demolition of the building, paraded it as one of the principal architectural features of the city.
Even down to the days of photo-view books and photo engravings, the old postoffice was featured as prominent and important.
Two pictures shown today are reproductions from a small album of photographic views of Pittsburgh, published by a New York firm in 1888. This was still in the horse car era and the great stride in the matter of passenger transportation was about to be made, and that was the cable line of street cars, long since abandoned.
The Smithfield street side is shown in picture No. 1 with a horse car on the spur switch. This line was called the "Peoples Park Passenger Railway Company" and is now the Madison avenue line of the Pittsburgh Railways Company.
The Fifth avenue front is shown in picture No. 2. The lot on which the postoffice stood is the same as that occupied by the Park Building, 120 feet square, but the postoffice did not occupy all the lot. There was a driveway next to Municipal Hall about 12 feet in width, leading to a small one-story annex at the rear, known in postoffice circles as "the ring," on account of containing circular tiers of [boxes?] for newspaper and package distribution. At the annex building the mails were loaded and unloaded.
The main building did not occupy all the first floor. On the Smithfield street side there was a hall in the center of the building meeting another at right angles from the yard, or driveway, at the foot of the stairs leading to the upper stories.
The Smithfield street rooms on the first floor were occupied by the surveyor of the port of Pittsburgh. In the olden days the postoffice had two classes of boxes, the call box and the lock box. The lock boxes were under the call boxes. There were several windows for handing out call box letters.
The stamp window was first at the upper end of the Smithfield street corridor. The German window at the lower end of the Fifth avenue side. The money order and registered letter windows were placed afterward at right angles to this window and the stamp window moved to the place of the German window. The carriers' window was at the Smithfield street side.
The distribution postoffice or "D. P. O." for outgoing mail occupied the center of the space for the purposes of the office.
The "city" end was towards Smithfield street. There were some round steps on the Fifth avenue side below the fourth window on that side which led into the stamp windows and postal order and registered windows in the latter days of the office. The general delivery window was at the Fifth and Smithfield corner.
The second set of steps immediately below the round ones led to the executive offices. From time to time there was much shifting about of the various department and changes in the interior as the volume of business increased from year to year and the postmaster and his staff were usually at their wits' ends. So much so that the old timers who worked there can now look back and say: "How did they ever do it?" for the mails came and went.
There were no substations nor branch offices. Previous to 1868 when the East End wards were taken into the city, there were two suburban offices, "Arsenal," in Lawrenceville, and "Wilkins," at East Liberty.
In 1874 when the South Side boroughs became part of the municipality, the offices there were discontinued. These were "Buchanan," in old Birmingham borough, about Twelfth and Carson streets; "Mt. Washington" on "Coal Hill," "Temperanceville," in the West End; Wilkinsburg, a mere hamlet, was served from East Liberty.
On the North Side there were "Allegheny," "West Manchester" for the lower part, and "Duquesne" for the upper end. With the exception of Mt. Washington all these offices existed previous to the Civil War.
Coming down to 1871 we find all these offices yet in existence and new ones as follows: "Wilkinsburg," for that locality; "Woods Run" for that locality, and "Ormsby" for the upper South Side. Buchanan had become a presidential appointment.
By 1877, with the exception of Wilkinsburg and Allegheny, all these offices were served directly from the Pittsburgh office.
Again, the fact that Pittsburgh was a D. P. O., or relay office for Western mails, made business heavy here. There were no long postal routes in those days and no immense railroad systems.
Redistribution points were established, mainly in large cities, and distribution agents at important railroad junctions. Such labels on pouches as "Pittsburgh D. P. O." and "Crestline Agent" were common. Pouches and boxes so labelled had to be reassorted.
It is well known now that for many years this work has been done on the postal cars.
Again, the Pittsburgh postoffice was the distribution point for much of Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio, and with the introduction of the registry and money order systems, the steady growth of the carrier service and the wonderful increase of the Western states in population after the Civil War, necessitating a corresponding increase in the daily postoffice business in Pittsburgh to be considered as factors, it is natural to inquire, when we know the conditions under which our postal business was once done, "How did they do it?"
However crowded the postal space became in the old office, there was no room to overflow. The upper floors were all in use. On the second floor were the United States courts, the judges' chambers and the clerk's and marshal's offices. The pension office was on the third floor, the local inspectors of steamboat boilers and hulls had offices on the second floor. On the third floor were also jury rooms.
The collector of internal revenue, the United States assessors for war tax purposes, the United States Board of Enrollment and some others had to find quarters elsewhere. There was no room for them in the Postoffice, or "Custom House," Building.
In Civil War days the offices or headquarters of the military in charge here could not be accommodated in the postoffice. For that reason the government rented the old Girard House at Smithfield street and Third avenue, subsequently with the remainder of the block called the Central Hotel and more recently the Griswold, recently razed for the new Americus Republican Club.
In the Girard House were quartered the commander of the Department of the Monongahela when that department existed (Gen. William T. Brooks, commander), the headquarters of the military post of Pittsburgh, Capt. Edward S. Wright, deceased, commander; the quartermaster's department, the mustering officers' headquarters, Capt. William J. Moorhead, United States Army, and Lieut. George Williams, mustering officers. During most of the war, however, Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania was in the Department of the Susquehanna with headquarters in Chambersburg.
In those war days there were two distinct government buildings in Pittsburgh with animated activities always—these buildings devoted to entirely different purposes, one for our share in carrying on the great war, the other for its original and specific purposes, the business of the government that pertains primarily to peace.
It must not be forgotten that The Pittsburgh Gazette and the Pittsburgh postoffice were in close touch. In fact, they could not have been closer, for the United States postoffice when first established in Pittsburgh was located in the "Gazette Building," a log house in Water street near Ferry. John Scull, founder, editor and proprietor of The Gazette, was the first postmaster, serving until 1797, in all 10 years, and all that time in the Gazette Building, a two-story house which stood for more than a century, but weatherboarded over the logs and otherwise transformed.
When the first government-owned building was opened at Fifth and Smithfield streets the Gazette buildings were located in Fifth above Smithfield street, about the center of the Fifth avenue front of the Kaufmann Stores Building. When the paper left that site, about 1871, the building passed into the ownership of The Pittsburgh Telegraph, now The Chronicle Telegraph, where the first issue of The Telegraph appeared.
Between the Gazette buildings and Smithfield street there was a row of shanties, some of one story only. From the picture made in 1883 (No. 1) it may be seen that only the southwest corner, or that across Smithfield street from the Kaufmann Building, remains unchanged. This is part of the Howard Block erected in the early seventies, the corner noted in the directory of 1815 as the location of Abner Updegraff's shop. Mr. Updegraff was a cutler and edged-toolmaker. The property is still owned by his descendants.
Diagonally across Fifth street, now avenue, was the postoffice site, previous to its sale to the government occupied by Ballmans, Garrison & Co. as a foundry. The old foundry buildings extended to Virgin alley, now Oliver avenue, a long ramshackle frame building existing as late as 1867, when it was razed when the present Municipal Hall was begun. For the ground the city paid $100,000 in 1866.
The site of the old postoffice was purchased by David E. and William G. Park about 1888. The price was about $250,000. The building cost upwards of $700,000. Standing at the corner of Pittsburgh's two busiest highways, in the heart of the business district downtown, the location for a postoffice site event to a transient will appear an ideal one.
The lot, 130 feet square, was deemed too small for a government building. Steel-frame construction was yet to come. The I beams of the Bessemer age were yet to pierce the erstwhile smoke clouds of Pittsburgh, 400 feet above the pavement. It is now recognized that it is feasible and advantageous to build upwards as well as outwards—a plan that has been suggested to better conditions in the present government building—by adding stones [sic].
Compared with the old postoffice with its plain old-fashioned walls, utterly devoid of ornament, its compactness and early convenience, the present structure with its excess of ornamentation and its waste of expensive space may be characterized justly as an architectural jim-jam.
The site of the old postoffice was bought by the government for $31,000. It is worth more than $1,000,000 today. The demand for a government-owned building began during the incumbency of Chambers McKibben as postmaster, his term extending from 1845–1849. He was succeeded by Samuel Roseburg and the long-suffering public were assured that their want would be gratifided [sic]—and it was. Congress made an appropriation of $75,000 for the building. Postmaster Roseburg, the father of the late William Roseberg, began operations at once. He and Joseph Kerr, architect of the building, were appointed commissioners to superintend its construction.
The foundry firm did not own the grounds. It belonged to Lyon Shorb & Co., who operated the old Sligo rolling mills at the south end of the Monongahela Bridge, with offices in the Monongahela House, a moiety of which they also owned. The foundry firm was paid $8,000 for the lease. They moved to the South Side, then Birmingham, where they still operate. Lyon Shorb & Co. owned also the Municipal Hall site.
The masonry work on the old postoffice was done by Col. James Andrews of Allegheny. The walls were of dressed sandstone and the job in its day was lauded as the finest piece of work of any magnitude undertaken by Col. Andrews, at that time only 21 years old.
Prices, too, counted in the economy of the building. With brick at $3 25 per thousand delivered, and wages low, masons receiving about $1 50 per day, hod carriers 75 cents, laborers 62½ cents and a work day was 11 hours. George Thompson was the contractor for the carpenter work.
Mr. Roseburg's term expired before the completion of the building. He was a Whig, appointed by President Taylor. Mr. Roseburg had served as recorder of Allegheny county from 1842 to 1848. He was a native of Pittsburgh, born in 1798. He died in 1855 after a brief illness. His son, William, later and for years cashier of the Bank of Pittsburgh, was his father's chief clerk in the postoffice.
Col. Robert Anderson, a veteran of the Mexican War, had the honor of being postmaster when the new building was opened. He had served as a clerk in the office as early as 1840 under Postmaster James K. Moorhead. Mr. Roseburg's term expired in 1853. Col. Anderson was commissioned May 13, 1853. He opened the new office October 28, 1853.
In the Mexican War he served as private in the Duquesne Greys, Company K, of the First Pennsylvania Regiment of Volunteers, for that war. In 1861 he recruited Company D of the Ninth Pennsylvania Reserves and later became colonel of that noted regiment, recruited in Pittsburgh and vicinity.
Col. Anderson entered the postal service again in 1866 as chief clerk for Postmaster Wade Hampton, a brother of Capt. Robert Hampton of Hampton's Battery in the Civil War.
Col. Anderson resigned in 1872 and died in 1876. He was succeeded as postmaster by John C. Dunn, who had been a clerk under him. Mr. Dunn had been a newspaper man, editor of The Pittsburgh Chronicle, now The Chronicle Telegraph.
Successive postmasters were Sidney F. Von Bonnhorst, appointed early in 1861 by President Lincoln; Wade Hampton, 1866; James H. McClelland, 1867–1870; John H. Stewart, 1870–1873; Edward C. Negley, 1873–1876; George H. Anderson, 1877–1881; Benjamin Darlington, 1881; William H. McCleary, 1882–1885; John B. Larkin, 1885–1889; James S. McKean, 1889–1893.