So I'm flipping through this book with short profiles of 678 men from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of whom went on to become street names.
Carmen DiCiccio, the wisecracking historian and instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, compiled the "Social Biographies of the Select and Common Council Membership of Pittsburgh from 1879-1906."
Back then, the city was run by an oversized, bicameral legislature similar to the one that runs our state so badly today. Each of the 36 city wards had two men in the Select Council and one in the Common Council, which meant there were 108 guys screaming for attention on Grant Street.
Lovely.
The government got that big because the city had annexed what we now know as the East End and the South Side and the state wouldn't let the city trim its government to suit the new landscape. So the city just kept adding wards and council members. It went on like that until the city annexed the city of Allegheny (now the North Side) in 1907. A few years later, the state finally allowed the city to usher in the nine-member City Council we know today.
What's striking about this long list of council members that stretches from William Aber to Charles Zollinger is its economic diversity. Grocers and laborers sat down with the likes of Thomas A. Mellon, first elected to Common Council in 1879, a decade after he started that bank you may have heard about.
Dr. DiCiccio, who compiled this list many years ago from contemporary newspaper, census and "mug books" information, found 63 clerks, 41 lawyers, 39 grocers, 36 carpenters and contractors, 34 saloon keepers, 32 manufacturers, 28 doctors and 25 laborers on the councils. That list is not all-inclusive, but "it was nice, participatory democracy at its purest," Dr. DiCiccio said.
Republican political bosses, William Flinn and Christopher Lyman Magee, stirred this council soup. Mayors of that era were figureheads with no patronage or power of the purse, according to Dr. DiCiccio.
"Chris Magee was a guy who could talk you out of your underwear" and his partner on the political tag team, Mr. Flinn, played the heavy. Mr. Magee never served on either council, but pulled the strings from his state Senate seat. After his death, his nephew, William Addison Magee, went on to be twice elected mayor in the more streamlined 20th-century city government.
The council roll call is unapologetically dry, but names such as Bigham and Baum jumped out because they now adorn familiar street signs.
John Roup Baum and George White Baum were born 23 years apart, in 1833 and 1856, and clearly related, although it's unclear from the data whether they were father and son. The elder Baum was a farmer in East Liberty and the younger was a manufacturing executive with interests in oil, gas, copper and real estate. Both Baums represented what was then the 20th Ward in Shadyside.
For this, one or both evidently earned a nice long boulevard that runs at the edges of Shadyside and Bloomfield.
Thomas Jefferson Bigham and son Kirk Q. Bigham both served on council. The son served longer, but the father was more famous in his day. T.J. Bigham was a lawyer who lost his house and Downtown law office in the 1845 fire that wiped out a third of the city. He lucked out the following year and married Maria Louisa Lewis. She had inherited a great spread on Mount Washington and they set themselves up in a mansion.
Mr. Bigham was big in the Whig Party and later the Republican Party, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives intermittently in the 1840s, '50s and '60s, and in the U.S. Senate from 1865 to 1869. He owned and edited a couple of newspapers, helped found the Allegheny Cemetery, and let his mansion be a stop on the Underground Railroad. When he was done with all that, he served five terms as a member of the Common Council from Mount Washington, and his mansion became the clubhouse for Chatham Village.
For all that, he gets a street on Mount Washington.
It would be a more memorable column if there were someone named, say, Jeremiah Horatio Sixth, who brought forth Pittsburgh's first oversized, deep-fried fish sandwich and for whom a grateful city named Sixth Street, Sixth Avenue and the Sixth Street Bridge.
But when the city did get down to nine council members nearly 100 years ago, two of the first members were Edward Vose Babcock and P.J. McArdle. One would get a boulevard in the North Hills and other a roadway up Mount Washington.
I'm not entirely sure why I've shared all this, but I was once told readers like a columnist who's streetwise.
Correction/Clarification: (Published Aug. 5, 2009) The late Edward Vose Babcock's middle name was misspelled in this column as originally published Aug. 4, 2009.
First Published: August 4, 2009, 8:00 a.m.
