Holiday Time Machine

By Helen Wilson, Vice-President, Squirrel Hill Historical Society

IN THE PAST, RESEARCHING LOCAL HISTORY WAS DIFFICULT AND TEDIOUS. It meant hours of sitting in libraries wading through old tomes and fussing with microfiche reels. Nowadays, a lot of information is readily available online, making searching much easier.

A case in point is looking into how Squirrel Hill celebrated winter holidays in the past. A great tool for finding out about the neighborhood’s holiday events is the Squirrel Hill News newspapers, which were published from around 1929 to 1979. The newspaper’s offices were in the Block Building, located where the Giant Eagle parking lot is now. A fire destroyed the building in 1956, taking with it the earliest issues of the newspapers, but someone who had saved most of the newspapers from 1935 to 1970 donated them to the Squirrel Hill Historical Society, which had them digitized and put on the University of Pittsburgh’s great Historic Pittsburgh website, historicpittsburgh.org. The newspapers can also be accessed through the SHHS’s website, squirrelhillhistory.org.

As expected, the December Squirrel Hill News newspapers are full of announcements of holiday events and religious observances, as well as advertisements to attract holiday shoppers. Many issues refer to situations in the world beyond Squirrel Hill; for example, some ads during World War II had a patriotic slant. Christian themes dominated the newspaper in December, with references to Hanukkah mentioned mostly in short announcements about events at local synagogues. Squirrel Hill was never more than 40 percent Jewish, but its renown as Pittsburgh’s Jewish neighborhood comes from the fact that when over 26,000 people live in Pittsburgh’s largest neighborhood, 40 percent IS significant.

A large number of stores and businesses on Forbes and Murray Avenues catered to the Jewish population, giving the Squirrel Hill business district its uniquely Jewish character. Yet, until the early 1960s, the ads in December, if they had holiday messages at all, were almost all Christmas themed, except for the ones that offered just plain “Season’s Greetings.” Until the 1960s, very few “Happy Hanukkahs” are seen. It appears that Christmas celebrations—and Christmas shopping—were so ubiquitous in December, and Hanukkah (Chanukah) celebrations only quietly observed in Jewish households and synagogues—it is to be expected that this would be reflected in the Squirrel Hill News. Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center, explains, “Because it is close to Christmas, and because there was a legitimate gift-giving component to the holiday, Chanukah started to stand opposite to Christmas in a way that hadn’t happened before.”

The newspapers harken back to when there were more religious institutions and social organizations in Squirrel Hill than there are today. Some that appear in the newspapers are gone. An article on the first page of the Squirrel Hill News, December 19, 1935, announced “Xmas Tree Exercises Saturday” would be held on the Asbury Church lawn. Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church was an imposing stone edifice at the corner of Forbes and Murray where the Squirrel Hill Carnegie Library is now. It was demolished in 1966. The “Xmas” celebration that year included “carols sung by the Sixth Presbyterian church choir, a solo by Miss Helen Bigge, carols sung by a chorus of 75 voices from Taylor Allderdice, selections by a sextet from that high school,” and an appearance by Santa Claus. The festivities included “two bus loads of the little inmates of the home for Crippled Children.”

The newspapers give some examples of Jewish participation in Squirrel Hill’s Christmas celebrations. One is a December 23, 1941, announcement for an “Eastern Star Supper Dance Christmas.” Squirrel Hill had an Order of the Eastern Star chapter, No. 442. The Eastern Star website describes the order as a “Masonic appendant body open to both men and women, established in 1850.” One item on the website says that in 1955, Squirrel Hill had the most initiations, with 35 new members. The Squirrel Hill chapter had Jewish members. In the Samuel and Selma Schwartz Papers and Photographs at the Rauh Jewish Archives, Selma Schwartz is mentioned as “an officer for the Squirrel Hill Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star and regularly played the organ at group events.” Eric Lidji said the Order of the Easter Star continued to appear in the Jewish Chronicle into the mid 1970s.

On the southern side of the neighborhood, the altruistic women’s Squirrel Hill Community Club purchased a small church building in 1935 at the tail end of Hazelwood Avenue near Saline Street. Among many other activities, a Christmas Cantata was presented there in 1941. The club was formed by women working for the Red Cross in World War I. After the war, the women transferred their energies toward bettering conditions in the community. Some local residents remember attending dances and Bible classes there as youths.

If you look hard enough in the old papers, you can even find hints of celebrations of other ethnic groups. An article in the February 15, 1940, issue, “Golden Gate Swings Open As Chinese Greet New Year,” describes a “scene of gaiety and fun at the Golden Gate Tea Room [1917 Murray] where three Chinese entertained a host of their Squirrel Hill friends. The proprietors…had open house with plenty of Chinese and American food and drinks. With decorations and paper caps, the scene… could have passed for a typical American New Year’s Eve celebration.”

A science fiction story I had read before computers came along was about a man who invented a device that allowed people to peer into the past. He thought it would make a great tool for historical research. Instead, he came home one day to find his wife sobbing as she viewed scenes of the son they had lost. In a way, the Squirrel Hill News newspapers are like that device. There are certainly some heartrending articles, but the newspapers also cover holiday celebrations, traffic problems, business issues, gambling scandals, crimes, school sports, you name it. Open this time machine and see for yourself!