Kaufmann's: The Family That Built Pittsburgh’s Famed Department Store

KAUFMANN’S

THE FAMILY THAT BUILT PITTSBURGH’S FAMED DEPARTMENT STORE

MARYLYNNE PITZ and LAURA MALT SCHNEIDERMAN

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2022, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4745-5

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4745-5

Cover art: Kaufmann’s Clock, courtesy Val Tourchin

Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8917-2 (electronic)

Contents

Preface

1: From Peddlers to Prosperity

2: A Gilded Age Lifestyle

3: The Rise of a Merchant Prince

4: Cracks in a Marriage

5: Profits and Golden Roses

6: The Prime of Edgar and Liliane

7: The Fellowship and Fallingwater

8: Mr. Kaufmann Goes to Washington

9: Kaufmann’s Wages War

10: Sweet Home California

11: Edgar Raises the Curtain

12: The Collapse of a Marriage

13: Kaufmann’s, the May Company, and Malls

14: Time-Honored Traditions

15: The Death of Downtown Department Stores

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

On December 8, 2009, historian Barbara Burstin came to the Squirrel Hill Historical Society to discuss her book Steel City Jews: A History of Pittsburgh and Its Jewish Community, 1840–1915. People packed the room inside Sixth Presbyterian Church. In her lecture, Dr. Burstin mentioned that Irene Kaufmann, the teenage daughter of one of the Kaufmann’s department store founders, whose name is prominently featured in the local Jewish Community Center just across the street, had died by suicide. A collective and loud gasp burst from the audience. She then added that Irene’s mother had also died by suicide after jumping out a hotel window in New York City. Audience members gave another collective gasp, as if they had been kicked in the stomach. The Kaufmanns may have played public roles in Pittsburgh, but clearly, local people knew surprisingly little about them.

The idea for this book was formed after that experience.

After Kaufmann’s downtown store closed, we, the authors of this book, collaborated on a four-part series in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, published December 13, 2015, about the Kaufmanns and their impact on Western Pennsylvania. The response was overwhelming. Emails, phone calls, and online comments poured in, and the piece generated forty thousand page views—more than the Steelers story that was published on the same day. We knew then that Pittsburghers, and perhaps even people outside of Pittsburgh, were eager to learn more about the Kaufmanns.

As we researched the family and its store, we realized that the Kaufmanns’ public triumphs had, with the passage of time, obscured their personal tragedies and imperfections. The drama of their lives was forgotten and only their famous home, Fallingwater, remained in the public consciousness. We wanted to bring the family and the store back to life, especially for readers who never had the pleasure of shopping at Kaufmann’s. We especially wanted to revive public interest in Edgar, a complex character who played a prominent role in Pittsburgh’s civic and cultural life, and his cousin-wife Liliane, whose business acumen and fashion sense made her his ideal business partner, but sadly neither proved to be the other’s ideal love. We believe this book paints a fair and full portrait of one of Pittsburgh’s greatest families of philanthropists and merchants.

1

From Peddlers to Prosperity

Jacob Kaufmann stepped off a ship at Castle Garden, New York, on June 10, 1868,¹ his belongings on his back. The nineteen-year-old farmer’s son was determined to start his own business rather than follow in his ancestors’ footsteps selling cattle and horses in Germany. He made his way, probably by train, west to Pittsburgh. There he joined an immigrant community of German Jews peddling small sewing items such as buttons, needles, and thread to the coal miners and mill workers of Western Pennsylvania. These German Jews were young adventurers who left southern German villages with their wooden trunks aboard a shaky vehicle headed toward America.²

Jacob had good reason to leave Germany, though his family had lived there since at least the 1600s. They had settled in Viernheim (Fern Home), a rural Rhine River Valley community of nearly 3,350 people near Mannheim in southwestern Germany. The family business had a monopoly on cattle dealing. Bad harvests in 1816 and 1817 fueled violent attacks called the Hep-Hep riots in 1819 against Viernheim’s Jews and in other German regions. Hard times prompted some peasants to blame Jews for their misery. Fresh attacks on Viernheim’s Jews occurred in 1822 and 1830. Rioters entered Jewish houses, destroyed furniture, and emptied feather beds into the streets.³ To keep them safe, the Kaufmanns buried their valuables under their dog house.⁴ In 1848, after a failed German revolution, Jews in the region and other parts of what would later become Germany were granted full and equal rights. But Viernheim’s mayor battled the new law and refused to grant citizenship to the local Jews. Eventually, he granted citizenship to twelve adult Jewish males, including all men in the Kaufmann family.⁵ Poor harvests and hard times continued. In 1852, ninety-six Jewish families—458 people—left the region. What good is a Fatherland and home if we starve? asked one of the emigrants.⁶ The Kaufmann family, however, stayed. The family included the father, Abraham, his wife, Sarah, three daughters, and six sons, including Jacob, Isaac, Morris, and Henry. Abraham was short of stature, slim, had very thick black hair till his death, brown eyes, dark skin, was strong-boned, and habitually bent forward. He was healthy, very enduring, hot-headed, and energetic, recalled Alfred Kaufmann, one of Jacob’s cousins.⁷ Even during an extremely hard winter, while Abraham and his family were driving cattle that sank into deep snowdrifts, he ordered: Business has to go on as usual, according to Alfred. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, "was very religious and wore a scheitel [a wig worn by observant Jewish women]. She was very good-hearted and beloved by everyone, according to Alfred.⁸ In a 1967 family history, he cited poor economic conditions, coupled with the slow progress in enforcing the political and social equality laws of 1862 for Jews," as the reasons for his family’s emigration to the United States in the l860s and l870s.⁹

1.1 The Kaufmann family tree. Chance Brinkman-Sull.

1.2 Jacob Kaufmann in an undated photo, showing the carnation he was known to wear in his jacket lapel. Kaufmann’s Department Store Photographs, MSP 371, Rauh Jewish Archives, Detre Library and Archives, Heinz History Center.

No description exists of Jacob in his youth, but an early, heavily retouched photo shows a square-faced young man with a walrus mustache. He is wearing a suit with notched lapels and a bow tie. Much later, at the height of his prosperity, he took to wearing suits with diamond-studded cuff links. His son Karl Kaufmann described him as a nice-looking man, heavy set, loved to have a carnation in his buttonhole. He went to a florist almost every day and had a carnation in the buttonhole of his coat. Loved to smoke cigars.¹⁰ Neither Jacob nor his brothers wore religious clothing, beards, or side curls, as observant Jews did. Jacob began his life in Pittsburgh boarding with a German tailor in what would later become the city’s South Side.¹¹

As Jacob made the journey to Pittsburgh, what he saw upon his arrival probably appalled his rural sensibilities. By 1868, smoke billowed from sixty-eight glass factories, fifty-two breweries, fifty-one refineries, forty-eight foundries, thirty-two iron mills, and nine steel mills.¹² Barges packed with coal floated southwest from Pittsburgh on the Ohio River to Cincinnati. In 1875, the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock rolled the first steel rail and the Bessemer process was first used to make steel. With the advent of steelmaking, pollution only worsened. Journalist James Parton saw the steel mills along the Monongahela River and heard the noise of hundreds of steam hammers. When the wind blew aside the smoke, he saw the whole black expanse . . . dimly lighted with dull wreaths of fire. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1868, he branded Pittsburgh as hell with the lid taken off.¹³ His article captured his contempt for the city’s industrial gloom:

There can never be any dandies here. He would be a very bold man indeed who should venture into the streets of Pittsburg with a pair of yellow kids upon his hands, nor would they be yellow more than ten minutes. All dainty and showy apparel is forbidden by the state of the atmosphere, and equally so is delicate upholstery within doors. Some very young girls, in flush times, when wages are high, venture forth with pink or blue ribbons in their bonnets, which may, in highly favorable circumstances, look clean and fresh for half a mile; but ladies of standing and experience never think of such extravagance, and wear only the colors that harmonize with the dingy livery of the place. These ladies pass their lives in an unending, ineffectual struggle with the omnipresent black. Everything is bought and arranged with reference to the ease with which its surface can be purified from the ever-falling soot. Lace curtains, carved furniture, light-colored carpets, white paint, marble, elaborate chandeliers, and every substance that either catches or shows this universal and all-penetrating product of the place, are avoided by sensible housekeepers. As to the men of Pittsburg, there is not an individual of them who appears to take the slightest interest in his clothes. If you wish to be in the height of the fashion there, you must be worth half a million, and wear a shabby suit of fustian.

Parton, however, had missed Pittsburgh’s lively cultural scene, vividly described by J. Ernest Wright in Pittsburgh Seventies. To Wright, the city was a place of music, theater, art, and books. Its interiors were dominated by slick horsehair furniture, deep carpeting, and dark wood. In one telling line, he suggested that Pittsburgh life in the 1870s had a light and color and sheen that glowed steadily through the film of industrial soot and scum.¹⁴ He also noted that men kept their doeskin trousers free of creases, for a crease in those days was held in universal distaste as a sign of the store shelf.¹⁵

Pittsburgh’s lack of beauty or taste didn’t deter opportunity seekers.¹⁶ Jacob Kaufmann was one of those seekers who became a peddler. By 1860, the United States had fifteen thousand to sixteen thousand peddlers, most of whom were Jewish.¹⁷ Half of the Jews in Pittsburgh in 1860 operated or worked in seventeen clothing houses.¹⁸ In Western Pennsylvania, many peddlers eventually left the road and opened successful clothing stores in towns like Braddock, Johnstown, and McKeesport. Some peddlers succeeded so brilliantly that their family names became synonymous with their businesses, including William Filene, Gerson Fox, Adam Gimbel, Isaac and Jacob Goldsmith, Simon Lazarus, Al Neiman and Herbert Marcus, Morris and William Rich, Alex and Philip Sanger, and Lazarus Straus.

Jacob’s peddling meant walking ten to twenty miles a day. He bought goods from wholesalers in Pittsburgh or McKeesport, then traveled a sixty-mile trail through the Youghiogheny River Valley and as far southeast as Connellsville, Pennsylvania.¹⁹ His wares provided an alternative to the company stores of mine patches and mill towns around Pittsburgh.²⁰ He trudged across the region’s hills and deep valleys, carrying a pack that likely included buttons, combs, lace, mirrors, pins, needles, ribbons, and thread.²¹ He endured damp, gray winters and hot, humid summers. At night, if a nearby Jewish family offered, he might eat at their table and sleep in their home. Failing that, he might have received shelter from his last customer of the day, or he might bed down in a ditch, field, or forest.²² If invited to eat at a customer’s home, some Jewish peddlers ignored the Jewish dietary laws, but usually they refused to eat anything except eggs, bread, fruit, and vegetables.²³ Peddlers customarily offered liberal credit, allowing homemakers on farms and in mining camps to buy on the installment plan.²⁴ Peddlers also moved into moneylending so their impoverished customers could pay for their purchases.²⁵

Eventually, Jacob acquired a horse-drawn wagon, which served as a mobile store and a place to rest. He relied on the Wholesalers’ Credit Association, a network of fellow Jews who extended credit and goods to sell, as well as hospitality and a place to observe the Sabbath. Each Sunday after the Saturday Sabbath, Jewish peddlers settled their accounts, restocked, and resumed work. In buying a wagon, Jacob was following a path upward: with no overhead and few expenses, unmarried pack peddlers could save money so they could transition from foot peddling to peddling by wagon to opening a store.²⁶

Together with his goods, Jacob carried a key principle from his father, who advised: Sell to others as you would buy for yourself. Good merchants make small profits and many sales. . . . Deal fairly and be patient and in time dishonest competitors will crowd your store with customers.²⁷ Peddling also forced Jacob to quickly learn his customers’ various cultures and languages.²⁸

A year after immigrating, in 1869, Jacob had saved enough money to send for his brother Isaac. Isaac had an earnest, narrow face, thick hair that he kept all his life, and a bushy mustache. He favored bow ties, and in later years he wore round spectacles. The brothers began peddling together. Two years later, in May 1871, they used almost all their money—$1,500—to open a tailor shop called J. Kaufmann and Brother. They rented space from J. Shafer²⁹ at 1916 Carson Street, the main commercial district of Birmingham, a municipality that Pittsburgh annexed as its South Side the following year. The shop measured a cramped seventeen by twenty-eight feet, give or take a foot.³⁰ I could have stuck the whole shop—lock, stock and barrel—into my present office, and used the remainder space for a bedroom, Isaac recalled decades later.³¹

1.3 An itinerant peddler leaves a farmhouse in Washington, Pennsylvania, in this nineteenth-century print. Courtesy of Marylynne Pitz.

The store joined at least six other merchant tailor shops, most on Carson Street, on the South Side as of 1871.³² Although more than forty clothing merchants congregated downtown, particularly around Wood Street and Liberty Avenue,³³ the Kaufmanns catered to workers at Jones & Laughlin Steel Company and their families.³⁴ Jones & Laughlin was just starting to move from iron production to steel and had already begun a massive expansion. Nearby coke works, an iron mill, a glass works, a lumber yard, and a rolling mill employed other potential customers.³⁵ One of Jacob’s nephews, Oliver Kaufmann, described those early beginnings on the South Side. The store on Carson Street sold men’s wear and yard goods, he said.³⁶ Women made their own clothing in those days, and yard goods was a big business. We also sold notions [small sewing supplies]. The men’s clothing were work clothes. The store was "dominated by a large cutting table surrounding [sic] by bolts of fabric. The shop carried a limited inventory of men’s and boys’ ready-to-wear.³⁷ The two brothers were so busy that they kept a small couch under the cutting table in case they had to spend the night in the shop. They placed their first newspaper advertisement headlined New Store, New Goods, New Prices at Jacob Kaufmann and Brother" on the front page of Birmingham’s Weekly Courier in May 1871.³⁸ That first year, the store had sales of $21,585.³⁹

1.4 Young Jacob and Isaac Kaufmann, probably circa 1871. Kaufmann’s Department Store Photographs, MSP 371, Rauh Jewish Archives, Detre Library and Archives, Heinz History Center.

In a newspaper advertisement fifty years later, Isaac reflected on the humble beginnings of the store. We couldn’t have picked out a worse stretch of years for a start, he wrote. The average family could afford but the barest necessities of life. A dollar was a big piece of silver—sufficient to feed and clothe and house a man, a wife, and children. Despite living in poverty, Isaac remembered how he and his brothers were millionaires in hope and confidence.⁴⁰ The year 1871 was a bad one to start a business because just two years later, the Panic of 1873 sent the nation’s economy into a steep depression that lasted five years—the worst financial crisis until the Great Depression of the 1930s.⁴¹ The panic began when two major banks that had invested heavily in railroad expansion failed. In 1877, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers from Pennsylvania to Missouri went on strike to protest three wage cuts in one year. The strike turned brutal, and Pittsburgh experienced the worst violence with an uprising that led to forty deaths. Rioters burned down the Strip District’s Union Depot, as well as some thirty-eight other buildings and more than fifteen hundred rail-cars. The economic downturn also slowed Jewish immigration to Pittsburgh. The outlook was grim, according to a local historian: How could the newcomer be expected to make a living in Pittsburgh then? The iron mills were down; unemployment great. The local Jewish community was experiencing ‘hard times.’⁴² The downturn led one German Jewish peddler to take his own life, leaving behind a wife and two children.⁴³ On the other hand, the Kaufmanns could not have picked a better time to start their business: In 1869, Thomas Mellon established T. Mellon and Sons, the banking powerhouse that would underwrite many of the significant industries that generated Pittsburgh’s industrial wealth. While Mellon Bank did not finance the Kaufmanns, it backed many industries whose employees shopped at the store.

After less than a year in business, Jacob and Isaac began the first of many expansions by moving to larger quarters, twenty by forty-five feet, at 1932 Carson Street.⁴⁴ They lived above the store.⁴⁵ In 1873, they brought their fourteen-year-old brother Morris from Germany.⁴⁶ As the youngest of the three brothers, he was assigned the responsibility of night watchman. He also had to empty buckets that collected water from a leaky roof. Every night, he would tie a string around his toe and let it drop through a second-floor window. If he overslept, one of his brothers tugged on the string to rouse him. In 1874 or 1875, the brothers opened a second store at Allegheny and Federal Streets in Allegheny City, now Pittsburgh’s North Side, and moved their South Side location downtown to 634 Market Street. Two years later, in 1876, the Kaufmanns brought over a fourth brother, Henry, age sixteen.⁴⁷ Like Isaac, he wore round spectacles, suits, and often a serious expression. During this time, the Kaufmann brothers brought other family members from Germany to Western Pennsylvania. Later, those relatives would compete with the Kaufmanns by establishing their own store.

While the brothers expanded their family in the United States, they also reaped the benefits of Pittsburgh’s growing population. Business began to boom, fueled by European immigration from the British Isles, Germany, and Lithuania, which pushed the city’s population from 49,221 in 1860 to 86,076 in 1870, a jump of nearly seventy-five percent. The city’s population jumped again in 1880 to 156,389. Pittsburgh’s immigrants hailed from Central and Eastern Europe. Each ethnic group brought a distinct culture and opened its own churches, where worship was often conducted in Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian or Ukrainian. Eastern European immigrants formed their own banks, ethnic clubs, and even singing societies, some of which still exist. To cater to this growing customer base, in 1879 the Kaufmann brothers moved their Market Street store to a prime downtown location at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street. They called their new business Kaufmann’s Cheapest Corner, stocking only men’s and boys’ clothing and furnishings,⁴⁸ meaning men’s suits, shirts, and neckties. The brothers now employed three salesmen, and they and the Kaufmanns took care of everything: all the office work, selling, wrapping, window displays, and delivery.⁴⁹ That same year, the brothers closed their South Side and North Side locations, probably to concentrate on their downtown headquarters at a time when people flocked downtown to shop. To recognize Morris and Henry, in 1880 they changed their name to J. Kaufmann and Brothers. Also that year, they rented the first floor of the adjoining building at their downtown location. Within a year, they were renting the second, third, and fourth floors,⁵⁰ and the number of salesmen gradually increased to seventy-five.

1.5 Kaufmann’s advertised its one-price policy, meaning that prices were marked on tags rather than forcing shoppers to haggle with clerks. Kaufmann’s Department Store Records, MSS 371, Rauh Jewish Archives, Detre Library and Archives, Heinz History Center.

As it changed locations, Kaufmann’s also revised some of its business practices, reflecting new trends in a burgeoning industry of department stores. By printing the cost of an item for sale on cards that accompanied merchandise,⁵¹ they could offer goods at consistent prices, an approach pioneered by New York retailer Alexander T. Stewart.⁵² Before, salesclerks had to assess, based on someone’s appearance, how much a customer could afford to pay for an item, then haggle with him or her over the cost. In an October 26, 1881, newspaper advertisement, Kaufmann’s touted the new pricing system: When we advertise a price, we charge no more.⁵³ During this profitable decade, the Kaufmanns had caught the wave of a new type of merchandising. According to one source, the phrase department store first appeared in print in The New York Times in 1888⁵⁴ about a store opening in Los Angeles. Another source claims it first appeared in 1887 in the Evening Wisconsin newspaper in an advertisement for a Milwaukee store.⁵⁵ In the 1880s, department stores sold clothing for men and boys. For women, they sold notions—ribbons, lace, needles, and thread—as well as fabric. Women made their own clothes because it was less expensive than buying them. Homemade dresses lasted longer because fabrics for sale at the time were of high quality. But department stores offered more than goods. These commercial venues provided entertainment and leisure for their customers, chiefly women, a place where they could spend hours meeting friends, browsing, and relaxing, perhaps buying nothing.⁵⁶

By the fall of 1882, Kaufmann’s had doubled in size and underwent remodeling, including a fine Passenger Elevator and Electric Lights,⁵⁷ plus a grand staircase and electric chandeliers. These innovations were made possible by a new technology, electricity. Strawbridge and Clothier in Philadelphia was the first department store to house a passenger elevator, pulled up and down by hand, in 1865. In 1881, Kaufmann’s elevators allowed customers better access to the building’s upper floors. A few stores preferred electric wooden escalators, which took up less space, carried more people, and cost less than elevators. Wanamaker’s flagship store was the first to use electric lights, followed by Macy’s in New York in 1878.⁵⁸ Because these lights cast an ugly blue-violet tone, altering the hues of fabrics, stores also relied on large windows to brighten their interiors. Shoppers had to take clothing to the windows to judge their true colors, and salesclerks could only murmur that a dress would look better when you get it home.⁵⁹ Despite these technological advances, salesclerks at Kaufmann’s and other department stores of the time did not have access to cash, so transactions relied on children called cashboys or cashgirls who ran money from the counters to cashiers with payment, then back again with change. Store interiors were noisy places, filled with shouts of Here, boy! Kaufmann’s advertised for cashboys as early as 1888, when it needed twenty-five in January and another fifty in May, and it started recruiting cashgirls in 1892.⁶⁰ To convey cash to cashiers, Kaufmann’s had a system of baskets and pulleys, and later, a pneumatic tube system with hand bellows to provide air pressure that would suction tubes from one spot in the store to another.⁶¹ The earliest mention of the store’s pneumatic tube system is from 1891, so it must have gradually replaced the cashboys and girls and baskets and pulleys.⁶²

In addition to interior upgrades, the exterior of Kaufmann’s, like other department stores of the era, grew in an improvised fashion, with additions in various styles constructed alongside the original buildings. Ever mindful of opportunities to expand and stay competitive, the brothers bought land in downtown Pittsburgh near street corners, speculating that development and streetcars would spring up there, and they were right. Department stores would be among those developments, and the advent of electric streetcars made downtown a shopping mecca. The city’s compact downtown is a small piece of real estate, just 0.64 square miles. For a time, department stores seemed to spring up in this concentrated area almost every few years. Joseph Horne opened the first downtown department store. He originally did business on Market Street in 1849, but in 1871, he moved to busy Penn Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets.⁶³ In 1893, he built his flagship upscale store at Penn Avenue and Stanwix Street. Kaufmann’s followed, moving downtown in 1874 or 1875.

1.6 The Christmas tree display goes up at Joseph Horne’s department store, downtown Pittsburgh, in 1979. Ross Catanza/Pittsburgh Press, Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Soon, more department stores opened downtown, making it the retail shopping destination, as in many American cities. Max Rosenbaum opened a shop in 1868 on Market Street as a wholesale and retail store. By 1880, he moved his retail business to Market Street and Liberty and then in 1915, opened a new store with two thousand employees at Sixth Street between Penn and Liberty Avenues.⁶⁴ A flurry of commercial activity accompanied the turn of the century. In 1904, McCreery and Company opened at Wood Street and Sixth Avenue.⁶⁵ In 1907, Russian Jewish immigrants Jacob Frank and Isaac Seder opened what would later be named Frank & Seder