Architecture: Recalling Edgar Kaufmann's enduring legacy

Edgar J. Kaufmann led an outsized life.

Called the “Merchant Prince of Pittsburgh,” he was for 42 years the head of Kaufmann's Department Store — “The Big Store,” as they called it. It was so well-liked for its merchandise — and its merchandising standards — that many Pittsburghers today still say, “I loved that store.”

As Macy's prepares to shutter the Downtown store for good in a few weeks, it's worth remembering Kaufmann and his achievements.

In the retail business, Kaufmann was known nationally as a brilliant innovator and subtle promoter who advanced the store partly by turning it into something of a cultural institution. He organized a creditable mix of art, science and product-design exhibitions, built model houses on the roof of the store, ran essay contests for students and used the store to immediately celebrate things like Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic or the end of World War II.

He used the latest designs in his store and once created an Art Deco-style shopping paradise on the first floor, complete with 10 celebrated murals on the walls above.

He was a civic leader and a “founding father” of the first Pittsburgh Renaissance. He gave $1.5 million of his own money to jump-start construction of the Civic Arena and was the key sponsor of the Civic Light Opera.

On top of all that, he had built two of the most famous pieces of residential architecture of the 20th century.

We here in Pittsburgh all know of Fallingwater, the weekend “house on a waterfall” near Ohiopyle that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in the mid-1930s.

But, if you asked architectural historians to list the five or 10 most influential modern houses of that era, they would likely include a house Kaufmann and his wife, Liliane, had built in 1946 in Palm Springs, Calif., as a winter home.

That largely stone, metal and glass house is a mid-century classic by architect Richard Neutra. It has what are essentially sliding-glass walls that open the house to the desert breezes and is far more comfortable when experienced in person than it might seem in photos.

Two out of the 10 finest houses of their time designed for one man?

You probably have to go back to the original “merchant princes” — the Medicis — to find that!

This is genuinely to Kaufmann's credit. From a long history at the store of managing architects and artists, he knew how to give them freedom to create, without giving up his own measure of control.

Kaufmann's Department Store was founded at the corner of Smithfield Street and Forbes Avenue in 1877 by four brothers from Germany. They started with a small clothing store on the South Side. But once situated Downtown, the store grew continuously, eventually covering the entire block from Forbes to Fifth.

Edgar was the son of one of the founding brothers, but he didn't exactly inherit the store, though his surviving uncles ultimately agreed he should lead it. He gained control of it after he married Liliane Kaufmann — his first cousin, the daughter of another of the brothers. Because of various inheritance arrangements in the family, the shares of the two sides of the family sealed his effective control of the store.

(An interesting sidelight: Some disgruntled cousins went down Smithfield Street and founded their own department store called Kaufmann & Baer. They took many of Kaufmann's sales clerks with them and provided lively competition for a while. But they sold out in the 1920s, and the large building they built at Smithfield and Sixth became Gimbel's.)

Edgar and Liliane gave Kaufmann's its special flavor. In addition to Edgar's strong interest in art and design, he was an internationalist. As a young man he had gone to Germany to learn merchandising at a department store there. Back in Pittsburgh and running the store, he soon opened buyers' offices throughout Europe.

Liliane created the Vendome Shops on a top floor of the store — an exclusive precinct where the wealthier women in town could shop without having to go to New York for something new and stylish.

The store never just catered to the wealthy, though. The Kaufmann brothers early on posted interpreters at the store who could help immigrant millworkers do their shopping, creating thousands of new customers and endearing the store to later generations of the middle class.

Edgar, personally, was a suave sort of man and an impeccable dresser. He also was a ladies man and was embarrassed at one point when a spat with a mistress became public knowledge.

But none of that seriously hurt his stature in Pittsburgh. When Albert Einstein came to Pittsburgh in 1934 to speak to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Edgar and Liliane were his hosts. He stayed at their home in Fox Chapel.

That Fox Chapel home — called La Tourelle — was also a beautiful and well-known home. Built in 1924 and designed by Pittsburgh architect Benno Janssen, it was heavily publicized in architecture journals. But in style, it is a traditional Norman French manor house, and so never made the history books the way the two precedent-setting modern houses did.

Kaufmann continued to run the store, but in 1946 merged it with the May Department Store chain based in St. Louis. He died in Palm Springs in 1955 at the age of 69.

John Conti is a former news reporter who has written extensively over the years about architecture, planning and historic-preservation issues.