One of my favorite online sites to peruse is the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Pitt archive. For extra fun finds, there’s also Newspapers.com. In exploring holiday-season history, one can discover the city’s spirit of a century or more ago through publications, documents, and photographs. For our own holiday publication, we thought it might be nice to share with our readers some of these delightful discoveries.
The images on these pages reveal how our area celebrated and announced the holidays in the early years of the last century. To reach back even further to start, there’s a telegraph greeting from Andrew Carnegie (in New York) wishing his Pittsburgh employees a merry Christmas—in 1890! The [Pittsburg] Sunday Press of December 18, 1910, exhibited a fine illustration of Santa checking his list for its “Christmas Number.” A very festive front page adorned the December 24, 1916, edition of the Pittsburg Press (when the spelling still omitted the H), with headlines such as “Glad Yule Season for Pittsburg” and the wartime “No Peace Till Foe Is Driven Out—France … Christmas on Border Cheerful.”
One of Kaufmann’s department store’s promotions of a century ago was a magazine called The Storagram, and we show here a copy of its holiday issue, December 1920, as well as a 1925 edition celebrating the New Year. By the late 1920s radio was king, and from the Pittsburgh (welcome back, H!) Press of December 24, 1928, we see a layout highlighting all the KDKA, WJAS, and WCAE radio programs for Christmas Eve—accompanied by photos of five broadcasting personalities (including Mayor Kline) to be “Heard in Holiday Programs.” Finally, we come across one of the fine covers for the main Pittsburgh magazine of the era (before Pittsburgh Monthly, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and of course The Strip!)—The Bulletin, with a bright red holiday cover for The Christmas Bulletin of 1926.
—Greg Suriano
