For the people
Oliver Bath House must remain a working-class, community pool
It is nice that Preservation Pittsburgh thinks the Oliver Bath House is worthy of historic designation. On that, all reasonable people can agree. However, the clear distinction between the proposed protection of the external architecture and its historic purpose as a community pool for workingclass citizens leaves open the possibility that, failing critical repairs, the pool may be closed and the building sold.
I’ve been gratefully utilizing the Oliver Bath House pool for the past five years — on a good week doing two half-miles (88 lengths). The facility is in near-constant use. For some of the area’s poorer residents, it also provides a place to shower as it once did for generations of iron, glass and steel workers who sweated in the neighborhood’s furnaces, presses and machine shops. My family and I have enjoyed Pittsburgh’s outdoor pools in the summer (Reams and Banksville) for 40-plus years.
The pool’s roof and heating system need renovation. It would be great to have solar panels and a green roof. In 2015, the city failed to mark the centennial of the Oliver family’s gift of the pool for “the people.” Henry W. Oliver himself is largely ignored in the pantheon of Pittsburgh’s industrialists. Two legs supported Andrew Carnegie’s great steel colossus. The better-known appendage was the Connellsville Coke kingdom of Henry Clay Frick. The second pillar of the empire was the web of transport networks created by Mr. Oliver that brought ore from the great Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior efficiently to the blast furnaces of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Mr. Oliver heard Lincoln speak in Pittsburgh in 1861 and served as a volunteer with 10,000 other Pittsburghers digging a ring of forts and earthworks around the city when Confederate armies invaded Pennsylvania prior to the critical battle at Gettysburg. Later in 1863, he bought a small iron foundry at 10th and Muriel Street — next to the pool that serves as his legacy. He started with nuts and bolts, but soon manufactured a wide range of hardware and supplies for mine, mill and farm. At their peak, his South Side workshops included over 100 iron puddling furnaces, machine shops, and plate and bar mills that occupied most of the land between South 10th and South 15th Street, from Muriel Street to the railroad and the river.
The Mackintosh Hemphill Company, whose three lovely but badly deteriorating brick buildings flank the Oliver pool on Bingham Street, still included a part of the original Oliver holdings when I applied for a job there in the late 1970s. The manager said that the Garrison Foundry on the site made cannonballs for Perry’s Lake Erie fleet in the War of 1812. Later, on the board of the South Pittsburgh Economic Renewal Team, I urged Western Pennsylvania Historical Society director John Herbst to choose the company’s entire slice of property from Bingham Street to the train tracks plus the nearby 1850 public school building as the site for the Heinz History Center. Now the hotel and parking lots occupy most of the space along 10th Street leading to the Philip Murray Bridge.
Mr. Oliver’s reach and influence stretched much farther afield than Pittsburgh. His greatest achievement was the complex of connections between the vast Minnesota iron mines and the mills of Youngstown and Pittsburgh. He was the organizer of rail links to Lake Erie, docking facilities and steamship lines on four Great Lakes, plus barge companies with the locks and dams needed for commercial traffic on the rivers. His achievements were less theatrical but more diverse than Mr. Frick’s.
Mr. Oliver was one of the creators of Pittsburgh’s manufacturing supremacy that lasted a century. As a tribute to his South Side roots, he hired a famous American architect, Daniel Burnham, to build a community facility on the site where his vast business interests began. It would provide baths and, most importantly and uniquely, a pool — something that only the very wealthy could afford. Unfortunately, he died in 1904 before the work could begin; however, his wife and daughter hired local architects, MacClure & Spahr, to design a facility to honor Henry. Started in 1910, it was paid for completely by the Oliver family. In addition, an $100,000 endowment (equivalent to $2,342,000 in today’s money) was presented to the city so that the pool might remain “free for the use of the people forever.” It should.
A mayoral election looms. Where the candidates stand on the restoration and preservation of the Oliver pool is an issue worthy of public consideration.