When the Skinny Building, Downtown, was celebrated last week upon completion of its renovated facade, public officials and others commented on the mystery of its origins. John Schalcosky seized the challenge the way he goes after every history riddle he encounters.
The 33-year-old native of Ross turned up a deed, searched references to an obsolete street (Diamond, now part of Forbes) and found several clippings that revealed the story. Neighboring businesses complained about sidewalk peddler Lewis Hendel’s stinking fruits and vegetables, but after a court battle he won the right to build a three-story storage building on a 6-foot-wide parcel in 1926.
The Skinny Building, at 5 feet 2 inches wide, was called a “dollhouse skyscraper” when it was built at Diamond and Wood streets after a series of legal fights.
Mr. Schalcosky had been feeding his inner history nerd for years when last fall he founded “The Odd, Mysterious and Fascinating History of Pittsburgh” on Facebook and began posting his discoveries.
Thousands of people in the region and beyond are following the stories he sources from deeds, property records, news and institutional archives, registries, city directories, government records, libraries, archaeological data and the Library of Congress, to name a few.
“I research every day,” he said. “It’s all my spare time.” Mostly after 9 p.m., when his two young children have gone to bed.
He works as an insurance broker but was trained in film and soundtrack scoring at the University of California-Los Angeles. He remained in Hollywood after school to work in production.
“I started becoming more interested in the town of Hollywood than the industry,” he said. “By then it was a mix of old Hollywood and seedy. There were all these boarded buildings, and I talked my way into some in case they might be locations.
“One was the Copacabana. Another was the Ambassador Hotel, gutted. The Pacific Theatre was boarded up for years. I couldn’t believe people could walk by these places and not care about them.”
He began sharing the history of these buildings with “everyone I knew” to get them preserved.
After eight years, he said, “Hollywood got too expensive and I came home.”
Working a series of odd jobs, he began researching the history of Ross. He joined the township’s historical society, eventually serving as its president.
“I’ve always been interested in the strange and the oddball,” he said. “Whenever the anniversary of a big event comes around, I wonder if there were any Pittsburgh connections.”
He said he’s certain every big event in American history has at least one.
The 1937 crash of the Hindenburg is an example. Westmoreland County native Herb Morrison, who became the first news director for WTAE-TV, was famous for his distraught account of the burning zeppelin, crying, “Oh, the humanity … I can’t talk, ladies and gentlemen. I can hardly breathe. It’s terrible.”
Possibly the oddest and most fascinating bit of history Mr. Schalcosky has chronicled is that of a tribe of native people, the Allegewi, who were either mythical “giants” conquered by the Lenape or real people represented by bones unearthed by archaeologists.
“The story was that there was a battle and the Lenape [Delaware] drove the giants out,” Mr. Schalcosky said. “This got a little more credible when I found accounts of Carnegie Museum archaeologists finding giant [human] femur bones from the 1850s.”
Not every story he seeks is odd, mysterious or terribly fascinating. Some have derived from relatively simple research into the lives of regular people.
The Odd Pittsburgh website has footage of the Jack Rabbit roller coaster at Kennywood Park in the 1920s, outtakes from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and numerous historic photos of the city and news and sports events.
In the Library of Congress archives, he found one of the first sound videos, which was made in Pittsburgh at a 1929 news event celebrating improvements for boat traffic on the Ohio River at the Point.
“You could hear what Pittsburgh sounded like then,” he said, “but you couldn’t see the Point through the smoke. It was a week before the stock market crash.”
History lovers have been sharing their own mysteries with him and sometimes he goes to work on them. By comparison, the Skinny Building was easy pickings.
“I saw it on the news, and people were saying it had a mysterious origin and I thought, ‘Give me an hour.’ ”
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
First Published: May 25, 2015, 6:21 a.m.
