Picture Pittsburgh in 1886, deeply into its smoketown, hell-with-the-lid-off phase. This is when Henry Phipps Jr. tells Allegheny City he’s ready to pony up $25,000 to build a conservatory where Western Penitentiary once stood.
How do the locals like that idea? All it takes is the announcement for two men’s choirs, a big band and about 2,000 people to assemble outside the Phipps mansion to serenade the guy.
Sue Morris, The Historical Dilettante, is telling this to a bunch of history buffs at the Frick Art & Historical Center on Friday morning. She has put us back in the Gilded Age, and that description was never meant as a compliment. Pittsburgh was booming but the mind-boggling money of the robber barons stood in such sharp contrast to the six-day-a-week toil that was the norm in the working-class neighborhoods.
Mr. Phipps’ donation was a game-changer, to use the modern vernacular, but not everyone was ready to play. The man who was then the second-largest shareholder in Carnegie Steel stipulated that his glasshouse — where The National Aviary is now — had to remain open free of charge seven days a week. Some preachers didn’t like that much.
Such a distraction would desecrate the Sabbath, some said. What would be next? Baseball games and taverns opening their doors?
OK, give the preachers credit for foresight. But were this conservatory not open on Sundays, when could a worker ever see the pretty flowers? Sure, it was Mr. Phipps and his fellow execs who kept the workers on the job six days a week in the first place, but Allegheny City took his money and kept the doors open as he wished. Crowds poured into the conservatory and, in 1889, Mr. Phipps kicked in some more money for an aquatic garden.
Pittsburgh and Allegheny City (now the North Side) had scores of millionaires by 1900, and a million bucks then is worth more than 25 times that in today’s dollars. The moneyed class fell all over itself building glass houses. H.J. Heinz, J.J. Vandergrift, George Westinghouse, A.W. Mellon and Henry Clay Frick all took great panes (sorry) to set them up, and local newspapers praised them for doing so much to change Pittsburgh’s image as a smoky, backwater town.
Private conservatories routinely opened to the public for spring and fall flower shows, and these were great places for a would-be swell to take a woman and pretend he cared about chrysanthemums. Some of these conservatories had alligators, and even a hard guy would want to see those.
In 1915, Mr. Frick, by then living in New York, decided to sell his flowers. The conservatory at Clayton was closed to the public. The age of grand private conservatories was winding down, but the Phipps Conservatory lives on. Its second incarnation opened in Oakland’s Schenley Park in 1893 and it’s open today for a $17.95 adult admission.
The task for the current generation of Pittsburghers is less about adding stuff than it is keeping stuff, or restoring what we once had. To that end, dozens of people assembled in and around a too-small tent Thursday morning for the groundbreaking of the Northeast Fountain in Allegheny Commons on the North Side. We were less than a 10-minute walk from where the first Phipps Conservatory opened more than 130 years ago.
The new fountain across from Allegheny General Hospital, largely financed by foundations, will mirror the original 19th-century design. It will have a 50-foot circular stone basin, a large Grecian vase in the center, a tall central jet and 16 smaller jets.
As rain, snow and finally a smattering of hail fell on a somehow smiling crowd, Patricia Rooney spoke of how she and others she named had been working toward this fountain for close to 20 years. She grew up in the neighborhood with her late husband, Dan Rooney, the Steelers owner.
Mayor Bill Peduto thanked her, and said the city wants all residents to be within a 10-minute walk of a park or other green space. Most of us blessedly are, and a walk in the park is still the definition of freedom — and free.
Some of that is the legacy of the robber barons. Whatever else they were, the City Beautiful movement they embraced gave the common folk a break from the tenements. We may not still be in the mood to serenade them, but we like that some of their green stuck to Pittsburgh.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: April 22, 2018, 11:30 a.m.
