The Mercantile Club
Cemetery database offline
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Certificate from Baum's Poker Players Union, a possibly tongue-in-cheek organization representing card players at Concordia Club, Westmoreland Country Club, the Mercantile Club, the Gusky orphanage, and the Jewish Home for the Aged, 1924.
—from Hugo Baum Papers, 2017.0146
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The Mercantile Club was founded in late 1922 by a group of local Jewish merchants who were frustrated about the exclusivity of the Concordia Club.
In the early 1920s, the Concordia Club reached a membership quota and instated a waiting list for new members. Some people on the list decided the city could support a second Jewish club. They found a way to work quickly by making use of the unused charter for an older group called the Vulcan Club.
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The Vulcan Club had been founded around 1905 by young Jewish men in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City.
It moved around a lot. It initially leased an 18-room house on Neville Street in Oakland. In early 1907, it leased a large house at 5630 Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill. The following year, it moved into a rented 16-room house at the corner of Penn Avenue and Roup Street, in the East End neighborhood now called Friendship.
The Club housed many social events over the next few years, including weddings. But it gradually lost momentum, and by 1913 it had disappeared from local newspapers.
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Pittsburgh Gazette, March 24, 1907 |
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At a meeting at the Hotel Schenley in December 1922, Charles Friedberg, Louis Hoechstetter, Abe Lewis, William Levy, Ben Helfer, Ben Cohen and L. Michaels formed a plan for a club. They acquired the Vulcan Club charter and raised $100,000 to purchase the 24-room Morris Kaufmann mansion on Beacon Street, just down from the Squirrel Hill entrance to Schenley Park.
The Mercantile Club opened its membership to "any Jewish person of good character." Within a month, they had 75 members toward a quota of 200.
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An advertisement for the Mercantile Club.
—from Jewish Criterion, May 11, 1928
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The availability of the estate of the late Morris Kaufmann reflects a transition in Squirrel Hill history.
You might assume that the Jewish merchant group bought the property directly from the Kaufmanns—the leading Jewish merchant family in Pittsburgh. But the Mercantile Club actually bought the property from a man named George F. Woodsmith, who had purchased it from the Kaufmann estate a few years earlier.
In the 1910s and 1920s, the early families of Squirrel Hill began leaving for the suburbs. They sold their estates to developers, who subdivided the properties to create hundreds of single-family units still found throughout the neighborhood today.
Only a few of the big Squirrel Hill estates remain today. Among them is the older wing of Temple Sinai, which was originally the Worthington estate.
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As mentioned last week, the Mercantile Club attempted a merger with Thornburg County Club in the late 1920s, but it struggled in the early years of the Great Depression and soon disappeared. The clubhouse was demolished at some point in the 1930s, and the land was sold in 1939 to a local contractor named M. A. Paul, who planned to subdivide it into 19 single-family lots.
All this year, the Rauh Jewish Archives is highlighting stories of Jewish club life in Western Pennsylvania. If you would like to donate records of a local Jewish club, or just chat about clubs, contact the archive or call 412-454-6406.
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Cemetery Database offline |
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The Western Pennsylvania Jewish Cemetery Project is still on the fritz. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank everyone for their patience.
The technical problems with the website has prompted many researchers to call with their questions. It has been fun to talk with researchers one-on-one and to learn about their families. In some cases, these conversations have led to the discovery of useful connections with other records in the archive.
It has been a useful reminder: online tools are an incredible resource, but they are just the beginning of any research initiative. There is often more information to be found by visiting the archives to look through collections.
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[IMAGE: Marian Schreiber and employees at the Schreiber Trucking Company, c.1943—from Schreiber Family Papers and Photographs, MSS 846.]
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The Rauh Jewish Archives was founded on November 1, 1988 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the documentary history of Jews and Jewish communities of Western Pennsylvania. You can help the RJHPA continue its work by making a donation that will directly support the work being done in Western Pa. |
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Plan a Visit
Senator John Heinz History Center
1212 Smallman Street
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15222
412-454-6000
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A proud affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the Senator John Heinz History Center is the largest history museum in Pennsylvania and presents American history with a Western Pennsylvania connection.
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