St. Joseph House of Hospitality is a program of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Please visit the Catholic Charities website at www.ccpgh.org



St. Joseph House of Hospitality

1635 Bedford Avenue

Pittsburgh PA 15219

Phone 412-471-0666






Friday, March 29, 2013

Lives and Times of St Joseph House of Hospitality: 1940's

Courtesy of Bryan Fuller, Volunteer Archivist      

     Last year, St Joseph House of Hospitality celebrated its 75th anniversary.  Concurrent with this celebration is an ongoing archive organization project.  The St. Joseph House of Hospitality Archive is located in an old operating room in the basement of 1635 Bedford Ave; and contains many items documenting the administrative tedium; and the little world and many lives of St. Joe's throughout its history.

             The archive project consists of organizing materials by type and subject,  filing them in a logical sequence and then creating an index to the whole thing.  The total number of items in the archive is unknown at this point, but the best estimate is 15,000 documents, and 2,500 photographs.  Documents include newspaper clippings, letters, newsletters, posters, pamphlets, books, Mass cards, visitor logs, food inventories, resident and personnel files, board meeting minutes etc., etc., etc.  Photographs are more difficult to arrange.  Anyone who has looked through collections of old family pictures will know the frustration of having no idea who is in the photo or when and where it was taken.  There are a lot more photographs from the 1970s - present and some of them have annotations on the back or were grouped by subject or year.  The more transient nature of life at St Joe's in the early days, and "no questions asked" policy meant that few names were known.

            Over the next few months photographs and historic documents from the archives will be posted here for the interest of friends and donors.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

            The original house was a butcher shop on Wylie Avenue, near where the Mellon Arena stood.  In March 1938, the house moved to an abandoned orphanage at 61 Tannehill Street.  Construction on this building was begun on 10 June 1866, and the wards of St Paul Orphans' Asylum moved in December of 1867.  In August 1901, St Paul’s Orphanage moved to a new facility in Idlewood in Crafton, which is about three miles west of the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.   According to census records the orphanage was home to 110 orphans when it first opened and 543 orphans by the time it moved.

 




 

            In 1916, the Ladies Catholic Benevolent Association St Rita's Home for Infants came to 61 Tannehill Street and the building was extensively renovated and modernized.  The mansard roof shown in the engraving above was taken down leaving three floors.  St Rita's was closed in 1935, and the building was idle until 1938, when St Joseph's House moved in.  St. Joseph's remained at 61 Tannehill Street until September of 1974, when it moved to its present location on Bedford Ave.  The building was then demolished.

            In the "Pittsburgh Catholic" (17 July 1987, p. 4) Fr. Rice wrote that "On one night in 1938 we accommodated 837 men who slept everywhere in the rooms, on the stairwells, in the cellar and who were afflicted by bedbugs, but were warm."  A fact sheet from 1950 says that in 1949 the house provided 184, 971 meals and 36,139 "nights of shelter."

Despite having stood for over 100 years this is the only known portrait image of 61 Tannehill St. 

 

This photo shows a bread line about 1940.  Msgr. Rice said that he was intimidated by the large structure, but many others were optimistic of its potential to serve the homeless and hungry.

 

Another image of a breadline from the 1940s.

 




 

This could be a volunteer helping to distribute bread to the line.

 

There was no fixed menu at the House of Hospitality.  Men line up for whatever is being served.

 

Father Rice carves a bird.  In 1941 the Pittsburgh post-Gazette reported that about 500 men celebrated Thanksgiving at the House of Hospitality.

 


 

 

St Joe’s has many old traditions.  Here is the earliest Easter appeal letter found in the archives.

 




 
Here is a look inside the House, in one of the rooms that kept men for the night.

 

Some of the photos posted above look similar to ones published in newspapers, and could have been taken by the paper photographers.