It was November. The Steelers were hosting the Ravens on a Sunday night with a late start time, 8:30 pm. Across southwest Pennsylvania, small town streets fell quiet, so still that you could hear the relays of the traffic lights clicking softly to guide cars through the vacant intersections... if only out of habit.
In Canonsburg, headlights dusted the sidewalks of Central and Pike as a midsize sedan pulled along the curb, the driver cutting the lights and engine quickly.
A figure in a dark coat emerged from the car and silently shut the door. He moved directly to the corner and looked down the street, where a single car hissed along the asphalt like an echo of an earlier, busier hour. The figure paused as the car passed, he glanced at the clock across the street. It was three minutes past kickoff.
He took a deep breath, because he felt stupid, and because he couldn't think of any other way to get what he needed.
Producing a tape measure and a small tablet from his coat, he went to work.
When you start a thing like this, it's with the knowledge that it won't be accurate. And you figure you'll just be eyeballing everything and, really, who cares as long as it kind of looks okay. And then one day you discover that the only real route to things "looking okay" out that they be at least kind of accurate.
The real trouble began when the building's owner began refurbishing the interior. I was driving through town and saw the door propped open with construction equipment at the bottom of the stairs. Hours later, I saw it again.
Later, my wife and I were at the hardware store just down the block looking at things to plant in the flower bed. She could see that I was antsy and asked what was wrong. And I told her that on the way over here I notice the doors to the Morgan Building were open. Open! And then she rolled her eyes so hard that it showed up on seismographs as far away as Tennessee.
"Go. Just... go."
I bought a ten foot tape measure, got a legal pad and a pen from the car and ran up the street in a cloud of dork.
On my way out, I freaked the guy running the saw. He turned around and saw me coming down the stairs, a-measurin' and a-scribblin' and asked me who I was -- because construction guys generally catch a lot of grief from dudes in polo shirts with tape measures and pens. I didn't go into a lot of detail. I just said I used to live there and left, hoping my casualness would kind of settle the idea into his head that sometimes people just measure the dimensions of their old apartment buildings.
I was excited to drop real-world measurements into my clunky little building. was going to be exciting, kind of like getting a report card. It turned out to be EXACTLY like my experience of getting a report card. It was soul-crushing.
I had sort of forgotten that I had only really determined the size of the building by measuring it in Google Earth. The dimensions could be off by yards. But that didn't seem like a big concern back during the casual, "oh let's see what this will look like" genesis of the project, before it turned into something I constantly thought of and occasionally dreamed about. And that's what lead to my little Sunday night field trip, which wasn't as wholly effective as I'd hoped.
The exterior was too short and too wide. It was way out of whack. So, I scaled it to the best of my abilities until it was way out of whack in an entirely different but equally exciting way.
A couple of years ago, because my son was coming up on his senior year, we decided to invest in a decent camera to step up our photo/video game a bit. We picked one with a 40x optical zoom. It was just a matter of time until I wandered back to Central and Pike.
I took a lot of pictures like this before I had this sort of obvious realization:
The day I walked into the Pittsburgh Paints store was a shifter for me. By then, I'd acquired from Jim Herron photos of the store as it had appeared when it was Morgan and Grant Dry Goods.
In Canonsburg, headlights dusted the sidewalks of Central and Pike as a midsize sedan pulled along the curb, the driver cutting the lights and engine quickly.
A figure in a dark coat emerged from the car and silently shut the door. He moved directly to the corner and looked down the street, where a single car hissed along the asphalt like an echo of an earlier, busier hour. The figure paused as the car passed, he glanced at the clock across the street. It was three minutes past kickoff.
He took a deep breath, because he felt stupid, and because he couldn't think of any other way to get what he needed.
Producing a tape measure and a small tablet from his coat, he went to work.
* * *
When you start a thing like this, it's with the knowledge that it won't be accurate. And you figure you'll just be eyeballing everything and, really, who cares as long as it kind of looks okay. And then one day you discover that the only real route to things "looking okay" out that they be at least kind of accurate.
The real trouble began when the building's owner began refurbishing the interior. I was driving through town and saw the door propped open with construction equipment at the bottom of the stairs. Hours later, I saw it again.
Later, my wife and I were at the hardware store just down the block looking at things to plant in the flower bed. She could see that I was antsy and asked what was wrong. And I told her that on the way over here I notice the doors to the Morgan Building were open. Open! And then she rolled her eyes so hard that it showed up on seismographs as far away as Tennessee.
"Go. Just... go."
I bought a ten foot tape measure, got a legal pad and a pen from the car and ran up the street in a cloud of dork.
I was halfway up the first flight of stairs when I breathed in for the first time. Wow. Weird. I hadn't counted on the smell. I'd spent a lot of time in this place in my mind, but I hadn't been smelling it. It was cool and musty, despite the warmth of spring. You know how effectively a smell can put you squarely in a place and time. Well if you add into that the mythology I'd built around the place in my mind, what you get is an almost transcendental moment of at once very sharp and very diffuse clarity.
That, and I smelled sawdust.
A guy was cutting wood with a circular saw in the main lobby. His back was to me. I went up the next set of stairs.
I started measuring and taking notes on the measurements of the banisters and the stairs. I pulled out my phone and took photos. And bonus! There was a door open that had always been locked when I lived there. It went to the roof. I didn't, you know, go onto the roof, but I looked around this little area and included it on the model.
A guy was cutting wood with a circular saw in the main lobby. His back was to me. I went up the next set of stairs.
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| Score! |
I started measuring and taking notes on the measurements of the banisters and the stairs. I pulled out my phone and took photos. And bonus! There was a door open that had always been locked when I lived there. It went to the roof. I didn't, you know, go onto the roof, but I looked around this little area and included it on the model.
I took cellphone photos and measurements of everything I thought I'd need.
On my way out, I freaked the guy running the saw. He turned around and saw me coming down the stairs, a-measurin' and a-scribblin' and asked me who I was -- because construction guys generally catch a lot of grief from dudes in polo shirts with tape measures and pens. I didn't go into a lot of detail. I just said I used to live there and left, hoping my casualness would kind of settle the idea into his head that sometimes people just measure the dimensions of their old apartment buildings.
I was excited to drop real-world measurements into my clunky little building. was going to be exciting, kind of like getting a report card. It turned out to be EXACTLY like my experience of getting a report card. It was soul-crushing.
I had sort of forgotten that I had only really determined the size of the building by measuring it in Google Earth. The dimensions could be off by yards. But that didn't seem like a big concern back during the casual, "oh let's see what this will look like" genesis of the project, before it turned into something I constantly thought of and occasionally dreamed about. And that's what lead to my little Sunday night field trip, which wasn't as wholly effective as I'd hoped.
The exterior was too short and too wide. It was way out of whack. So, I scaled it to the best of my abilities until it was way out of whack in an entirely different but equally exciting way.
A couple of years ago, because my son was coming up on his senior year, we decided to invest in a decent camera to step up our photo/video game a bit. We picked one with a 40x optical zoom. It was just a matter of time until I wandered back to Central and Pike.
 |
| Oh yeah. |
I took a lot of pictures like this before I had this sort of obvious realization:
The bricks are all the same size.
Instead of creeping around the outside of the place with a tape measure, I could just count the bricks. Measure one brick, you've measured the whole building. In fact, you don't even have to convert brick numbers into measurements if you scale a custom brick texture to the thing and just push the edges around until they line up, It's Legos, you dimtwit... Legos.
And now all you have to do is delete everything you've ever buil-eeeehhhhh... that's the holdup. I kind of don't want to start over. I will, but I'll just have to be in a very specific mood.
In the meantime, still more people to meet.
The day I walked into the Pittsburgh Paints store was a shifter for me. By then, I'd acquired from Jim Herron photos of the store as it had appeared when it was Morgan and Grant Dry Goods.
The Grant - Morgan logo is a nice forerunner of the Canon-Mac logo.
Armed with some old photos and a printed illustration of the model, walked up to the counter and told the lady what I was up against. She was interested. And after she talked about ghosts for a while, she asked me if I wanted come to the back room to look around. And, yes. Yes, I really did.
What I should have done while I was back there is take measurements of these shelves, which I had modeled a year or so earlier from the photos, presumably with little accuracy. I could have gotten a clear location of the first floor's elevation and scaled every other object in the photo.
Also, I could have taken a few pictures of the little wooden structure that the woman had been told was once a dressing room.
I know. Right? This thing was a piece of original theater paraphernalia, and I didn't get a picture of it. And now, that space is a tattoo parlor, so it's probable that the back room area is not the kind of place you might invite a casual interloper. It's probably a private space reserved for people getting very private things things done to them, like having their foreskin pinstriped.
I think I was doubtful at the time that it was actually what she said it was. Because, well, why would it be down here?
I've had a change of heart about the supposed dressing room. Here's why.
There's a problem with the rear of the building. Well, there are a few... the first being that no one in the history of either the town of Canonsburg or the science of photography seem to be particularly interested in snapping a clear picture of it.
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| Thanks, guys. Great job. |
Most of the images you find are of the building before the expansion of the auditorium. The two doors at the top corners are (probably) exits from lodging rooms that are mentioned in articles that describe the building's completion. The stairways that lead to that central door behind the stage might suggest that the rooms were occupied by performers who would then descend an external staircase (in full costume or... carrying a tuba ...whatever) hopefully without either getting rained on or slipping and plummeting to their death. But that seems unlikely. Regardless, those stairs probably disappeared in 1902.
There is at least one photo of the back of the building as it appeared on the Big Night. It appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette Times, and it's the only one I've found that is contemporary to the 1911 configuration of the building. And if we examine it closely...
... we learn virtually nothing.
There is a little bit of hope, though. Most of the newspaper photographs were taken by either
Frank E. Bingaman or Theodore S. Munson. And there's this, from the Carnegie Library Of Pittsburgh website"
Frank Bingaman's collection of approximately 1,100 photographs were acquired by the Carnegie Library to help form the nucleus of their photographic repository, which opened in June 1960.That's promising. There might be some stuff that didn't make it to the papers, or better prints of things that did. And it means another trip to a library, which is kind of my favorite thing. Although you wouldn't think so, considering how long it's taken me to get there.
The other conundrum it the position of this window.
This window and it's symmetrical twin are too low to be appropriate to the stage, and they are too high to be useful to the store. Here's where it falls in the simulated stage area of my model, which should be fairly accurate because the angle of the photo lets us follow the line of windows, which ought to be two or three feet above the auditorium floor, directly to them.
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| Textures here are semi-transparent to show you the placement of world's least practical windows. |
The window on the left is beneath the area occupied by the audience, the one on the right is from the rightmost segment of the Central avenue side, where the stage was. Both are bricked over, but the one on the right is indented. Why are there two different techniques at work? Here's an older photo.
The windows beneath the stage were never windows. They were built exactly as they are. So, the store didn't extend all the way to the rear of the building.
Here's the other side of the wall behind them.
Compare the interior behind the other windows.
That's not definitive proof, but it's as compelling as anything I have. I feel close to unraveling this business about the back stairs. There's a professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio State named William Condee who has spent a lot of his free time measuring and cataloging the dimensions of opera houses and I feel like I'm on the cusp of having enough material to take him up on his offer of looking over my model (read his fascinating book, Coal and Culture for answer to the often unasked question of "why is there so little opera being performed in these opera houses?") Even if there a hundred variations of 2nd floor opera house dressing room arrangements, one of them will make the most sense.
Once solved, I can move on to the mystery of how the performing horses got to the second floor.
I don't suppose I'll never answer the question of why.
* * *
I'm a little embarrassed by the narrowness of my interest compared with the other people who busy themselves with local history. The opera house has been and continues to be such a source of deep and rich fascination for me that it's hard to imagine widening my focus even a little. It feels like the distilled essence of living and feeling -- constantly weighing the things that persist against the things that have slipped irretrievably away
Folding time like this bends the way I experience it. These things all exist for me simultaneously -- the building's construction, its inevitable bulldozing, its heralded premieres, its fiery union meetings, its cold and quiet three-blanket nights, its crisp, flushed-cheek open-windowed April afternoons like the one that gave us our daughter, the generations of kids on its rugged playground of stairs, the screaming agony of 1911's August, and the hopeful months when its throat was laid open and its dark, tragic heart was worked loose by teams of men bedimming its past -- shaping it into a place where people lived instead of a place where people died.
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