Demolition has begun on familiar building in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. The seven-story windowless concrete block, built in 1928, sports a huge fish formed from lights to advertise one of its prior owners, Wholey’s Wholesale Fish.
Historically known as the Federal Cold Storage Building, many Pittsburghers simply call it the “Wholey Building.” Once demolition is done, a developer will build a 21-story tower at the site.
Completed in 1930, the building played a key role in the wholesale produce business that defined much of the Strip District in the twentieth century. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing property in the Strip Historic District.
In the spring of 1945, Federal Cold Storage was one of several businesses paralyzed by striking workers. Food distribution in the Pittsburgh region ground to a halt when AFL warehouse workers went on strike over handling food bound for non-union markets.
Paul Lomeo, a McKeesport grocery story owner, found his produce shipments trapped inside Federal Cold Storage. Lomeo anxiously waited for the strike to end because the longer his produce languished inside the warehouse, the more likely it would spoil.
In the fall of 1945, Lomeo went to court to get an injunction that would allow him to retrieve his own produce from the Federal Cold Storage building. Lomeo had resisted joining the union despite pressure from union officials and McKeesport mob enforcers.
His story is eloquently told in the 2014 book by his grandson, former Monroeville Mayor James Lomeo: From the Ice to the Fire: A Sicilian Immigrant’s Death Struggle with Pittsburgh Politics, The Teamsters, and Mafia.
But you won’t find any of that story — the historically significant strike, the organized crime connections — in the historic preservation documents on file with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, not even the history produced to “mitigate” the impacts to the landmark property written in 2021 by architectural historian Angelique Bamberg: “A History of The Federal Cold Storage/Wholey’s Warehouse, 1501-1517 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”
What a shame. Once the building is turned to dust and the site is converted to new uses, it will be even harder to connect Pittsburgh’s labor and organized crime histories to the built environment — because the fabric is gone and historic preservationists have erased the stories.
UPDATE: This post was a place for me to work out some initial thoughts about building’s impending demolition. In December 2020, the Urban History Association published my article, “The Big Fish And A Big Building: A Historic Pittsburgh Building’s Obituary.”
© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein
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You can add to the historic record without constantly criticizing other historians. We are not your enemies. I am truly interested in your research, but your negativity is tiresome. Though we cannot always turn over every leaf, historic preservationists are not actively erasing history. Do you think your constant complaining is making a difference with preservation stakeholders in this city?
Jesse, you wrote in your comment, “Though we cannot always turn over every leaf, historic preservationists are not actively erasing history.” Fair enough, but shouldn’t historic preservationists at least strive to produce complete and accurate histories, especially as mitigation for a historic building that’s going to be demolished?
The Federal Cold Storage Building history that I cited in my post was missing a lot more than the important social and labor history attached to the building and summarized in the original post; it was missing some of the most fundamental information on which historic preservationists and historians rely. Information like who constructed the building; what the building cost; when it was constructed; and, who were the parties behind the corporate name. The report’s author couldn’t be bothered with any of that.
She wrote,
Had the author taken the time to look up the Federal Cold Storage Company’s corporate charter (filed in Allegheny County land records in Charter Book Vol. 64, p. 281), she might have gotten a lot more information about who the Pittsburgh principals were and their relationship to the Cleveland-based holding company.
A cursory surf through digitized historic newspapers would have revealed that the permit to construct the 7-story building was issued in July of 1930. It was issued to the Federal Cold Storage Company (a year before its corporate charter was approved) and the general contractor for the $2,500,000 project was the Blume-Sinek Company of Chicago (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 12, 1930). Construction was underway by late 1930 and it appears that the project met its October 1931 completion deadline.
The author did cite a few other cold storage warehouses doing business as “Federal Cold Storage.” One she noted, located in Vernon, California’s Central Manufacturing District, is very similar to the one constructed in Pittsburgh, including the seven-story height. Perhaps if the author had cast a wider research net beyond the historic preservation documents she cited to discuss the Pittsburgh building’s context she might have found a lot more about the architecture and engineering that made the Pittsburgh building part of a network of rail-connected cold storage warehouses. Yet another bit of economic and social history that would have been beneficial in such a “mitigation document” I presume was written to help people understand the building that is being demolished.
I’m really sorry that you felt that I was being overly critical in the original post. All things considered, e.g., the information contained in this reply, I think I was pretty generous.
The focus of my comments was not about the content of your or Angelique’s work products. It was about attitude. It is possible to build upon the work of one’s colleagues in a positive rather than a negative manner. Why not summarize your research presented in this blog in an amendment to the building’s HRSF form? Wouldn’t it be nice to have your findings archived with the state as part of the historical record for this building?
You wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have your findings archived with the state as part of the historical record for this building?”
Wasn’t the consultant already paid to obtain and report that information?