About Listening to our Susannas

Then Susanna cried out with a loud voice, and the two elders shouted against her. ...And when the elders told their tale..the assembly believed them, because they were elders of the people and judges... -Daniel 13

Paolo Veronese, Susanna and the Elders, 1585-88

My mother chose to name me Susan because back then, it was a pretty, popular name. Saddled with the given name of Agnes, she wanted something less old-fashioned for her daughter. There was a saint attached to the name, too, which gave it that all-important Catholic legitimacy.

Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610

I clearly recall the corner where I curled up with a dense, old, red faux-leather bound Lives of Saints. I’d borrowed it from my devout grandmother so I could read about Susanna, the putative saint my name honored. I was excited to finally learn about the woman who shared my name, who served as my patron, who was protecting me from the world's evils.

I was 6.

Well, you can imagine. I didn't understand most of what I read. I came away with an icky sense that the Biblical Susanna had done something shameful and got punished for it. I had questions, but no one to answer them, so I was left with a lingering sense of embarrassment about the whole thing. I even briefly tried to obscure the saintly connection by spelling my name Susann when I was in junior high (yeah, that was also as edgy as I got).

Flemish school, 17th century

Eventually this all became far less important. I became a psychotherapist in part because I had lots of unanswered questions about, well, lots of things. I was stupidly young to be doing the work, but I was conscientious and earnest and had spectacular mentors. From them, I learned to routinely ask questions of patients about their experiences with abuse and assault.

Routinely. That sounds weird, but in the late 80s and 90s when I was working, asking these questions wasn't as common as it is (I hope) today.

And because I asked them questions no one else had ever raised, so, so, so many people told me things they'd never told anyone.

Rafał Hadziewicz, 19th century

Young I might have been but I was, at least, well-trained enough to be of some help on these journeys from victim to survivor. I quickly learned that the struggle to make such a journey was every bit as shattering whether it began a day after the assault or a lifetime later. I parsed symptoms of depression and PTSD. Words like “sequelae” -- which most people heard for the first time in Dr. Ford's testimony -- became part of my daily vocabulary. And personally, I was able to put into context histories of predation in my own extended family and generalize my understanding about the legacies of such experiences.

If you’re reading this thinking I’m writing my #metoo, nope, that’s not what this is. I’ve personally endured nothing more than the routine catcalls and fending-off of boorish advances (Yes, routine. All part of being a woman). I was incredibly lucky.

That’s all it was, luck.

Il Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto Betti detto), fresco, 1492-94

Because any woman, every woman, could be Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Her story was listened to and she was extended certain courtesies because she was white and well-educated. What she had to say mattered in a heightened political climate. Survivor stories are elevated now because they fit the prevailing narrative. Usually that's not the case.

Certainly those courtesies, those privileges, are not extended to everyone who has such a story. Maybe you disagree, or maybe you think you don’t know anyone who’s had such experiences. You’re dead wrong about that. Everyone has their stories. You just haven’t been told them.

You're not entitled to them. Some people will never tell their stories.

But if they choose to speak, shut up and listen.

Anthony van Dyck, 1621-22

I’m writing this to amplify those stories. To say: listen. Make sure they are presently safe, of course, but then be quiet. That’s all. Shut up and listen. Don't ask for details. Don't try to fix. Listen.

I haven’t returned to my former profession since my first child was born. I wasn’t burned out, but I knew my limits, and knew I couldn’t be the type of parent I wanted to be and the type of therapist I wanted to be at the same time. Parenthood won.

And besides, I’d long since come to understand what really happened to Susanna.

She told her story.

She was lucky. At the end of the day, she was listened to, and believed.

But it came at cost. Because once you tell your story, you have to ask yourself: now, what? And that’s the question we’re facing as a nation: what do we do with our Susanna’s story? With our Susannas? We’re at a disadvantage here. We have no Daniel to guide us.

Gerrit van Honthorst, early 17th century

The Book of Daniel is silent about how Susanna navigated through her days once she transitioned from victimhood to being a survivor. But experience taught me this: Susanna’s life would be forever defined by what other people thought did and didn’t happen.

Defined particularly by what the old men said had happened.

Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, 1751

I have heard countless painful stories. Mostly from women, but some from men. I made a place deep inside where I laid them gently to rest. It is a safe inner room, protected by silver tears that have dried hard into knives to protect against future pain, so I could raise my daughter with the necessary anxiety to live in a predatory world, and raise my son to respect and protect.

I don’t want there to be new stories.

But of course, there will be.

Susanna surely was with Dr. Ford, with all who tell their tales. And I couldn’t have asked for a better patron saint.

If only we could know what happens next in our story. 

Sebastiano Ricci, 1725

Rollin' on the River: Pittsburgh Shanty Boat Life

Allegheny River houseboat, 1905
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

Many people only ever set foot on boats for recreational purposes, so they imagine houseboat life to be a floating idyll of pleasure and uninterrupted delight.

That was probably the case for Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age floating swells. For example, Mrs. Daniel A. Stewart of Ridge Avenue in Allegheny City was described by a local paper in 1895 as the first Pittsburgher to have adopted seasonal houseboat living, which was then “…so much the style for outing seasons in England that we have to take cognizance of them in this country if we would be at all up to the latest.” Mind you, Mrs. Stewart wasn’t floating on the Mon, Allegheny or Ohio in her little “bijou concern.” William E. Leard of Sewickley was the first recognized houseboat resident on the Ohio in 1897, trolling its waters during the summer months in a $10,000 stern wheeler that could fit 10 people comfortably.

"Mr. Leard's Handsome Houseboat"  Photo with typo from article in Pittsburg Daily Post, 8 August 1897

Mr. Leard was probably quite proud of the "handsome houseboat" that allowed him to drift in style on the rivers. He wouldn't have been alone on the waters, for there were plenty of other Pittsburghers who called the rivers home year-round. But for the vast majority of his floating neighbors, living on the water was a matter of necessity, not style. No $10,000 water crafts for those folks: they lived in what were then called "shanty boats" or "jo-boats".

If you come down to the river, bet you gonna find some people who live

Throughout the 1800s and well into the 1940s, people could be found living on houseboats along waterways in and between this nation's industrial cities.

One acquired one's floating dwelling by any means available. There were houseboats for sale, and even sometimes listed in the want ads. But the enterprising river citizen was as likely to scavenge, commandeer and spruce up an abandoned barge as he was to lay out cash for a “new” vessel.

Ad in Pittsburgh Press, 16 July 1895

While houseboating life might seem the stuff of a Twain novel set on the Mississippi, Pittsburgh's three rivers were home to countless shanty boats which captured other authorial imaginations. A children’s adventure book written in 1891, The Jo-Boat Boys, described an Irish family making do in their floating home on the Mon. The family home was situated between the Smithfield and Point bridges:

Maybe you never happened to see a house from the back window of which you could go fishing, or where the bucket had only to be dropped down from the porch and water hauled up to wash or scrub with, and where the front yard never needed sweeping, and no expense was needed for a cellar-wall….Mrs. Brigid Muldooney washes for a living….She tried renting for a while, but the rent had a provoking way of coming due at the beginning of each month, whether there was anything in the treasury to pay it with or not; so she concluded to save money and the wear and tear on a washtub and clothesline to move into a shanty-boat. She and the boys found one in a cove in the river below the island, that had been upset and carried away with the driftwood. It was high and dry, and a little nailing and caulking soon made it good as new, and the boys towed it back from its suburban site to more citified surroundings and tied it up…The bottom of the boat was just a small flat or scow, on top of which had been built a flat-roofed shanty. There was one room, with a porch, “stem” and “stern.” In this six-by-nine room the Muldooney family of five crowded….

Houseboat along Ohio River in Rochester, PA, 1940
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Hinged shelves dropped down to make beds, which propped up by sticks did double-duty as tables for the fictional Muldooney family on the Mon. A couple of crates served as chairs. Fiction this might have been, but it was based on reality.

Pittsburgh houseboat, location unidentified, 1912
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

Described thusly in a newspaper article in 1923: “…many of Pittsburgh’s houseboat residents are reputable folk, including veteran rivermen with a deep affection for the river.” Not every shanty boater was a fine upstanding citizen, however. Others lived like this:

...a haphazard existence by utilizing other people’s property in building houseboats to sell. Lumber piles and unguarded scrap piles are their hunting ground, and from these they might carry away boards, pieces of lead, rope, or anything that might come in handy in the construction of a houseboat. Sometimes these questionable shipwrights might turn out two or three houseboats in a summer….selling them for whatever they can get.

Houseboats on the Allegheny River near where Three Rivers Stadium was later built
The Allegheny Story by William M. Rimmel

Haphazard river existences outnumbered "reputable folk" in literature of the day, which romanticized shanty boat life as exotic and outside prevailing social norms. A 1911 short story published in Collier's weekly magazine placed its bank-embezzling protagonist on the lam on a jo-boat acquired in Pittsburgh. This excerpt paints a vivid picture of life along Pittsburgh's shanty boat shores:

Illustration from "Nemesis in Good Humor"
Collier's, Vol. 48, 1911

Copron Colphete entered Pittsburgh and emerged on the far side, a little sooty, but jaunty and smiling... At the Monongahela wharf, he upended the suit case...took out a second-hand briar wood, tucked some long-cut into it, and began to smoke.

The river looked good. It was boiling under an unexpected September rise. On the far side, a coal fleet was nudging out into the current, bound for New Orleans. Some dirty little gasoline launches were tearing up the glassy surface, and there was a pile driver being nosed upstream. Downstream a ways were some very beautiful gasoline launches moored in artificial harbor by a floating clubhouse, and upstream were some little house-boats, but he did not call them house-boats. He knew what they were in fact; they were shanty boats.

Shanty boats! It is a magic term. Of ten thousand absconding bank cashiers, only one had ever dreamed of shanty boats -- and that one now gazed fondly at the consummation of his dreams. There they were, some reddish brown, some blackish white, some bluish gray, and some just plain tar-paper shacks on driftwood scows... With fond gaze he viewed the Pittsburgh shanty boat town, which no humorous, poetic absconding bank cashier had ever seen before.

After a time, he sauntered up to the floating village, and again sat down on his suit case, close at hand...

"Say, you wanter buy a shanty bo't?" a voice rumbled at his elbow.

"Why, I ain't so overly anxious!" Colphete answered, though his heart thumped with exultation.

"That red shanty there's mine--pine bottom, hemlock stringers, oak carlins, an' matched spruce sidin' -- tight an' sound. Hit's a good bo't! I'd sell hit for a hundred!"

"Them bow-lines is rotten." Copron nodded judiciously.

"She's got a new stove'n cupboard, and them's the best oars on a shanty boat in the Ohier river!"

"Um-m. I'll give ye seventy for hit."

"Now, say, old feller, I cayn't sell hit for no seventy! You gin me eighty for hit--"

"No! I'll split the difference, though -- seventy-five?"

"Well, all right--you see, I gotter job for the winter. I 'lowed to winter down in Memphis."

As they bargained, they looked at cabin and hold, bow and stern, cupboard and iron bed. The owner sold it all to the buyer, and when Colphete had the boat in possession, he cast off and floated out into the river, down past Pittsburgh Point, into the Ohio and away.

There you have it, hard bargaining on the Monongahela wharf with a 1911 approximation of a Yinzer accent. (Spoiler: Even with a name like Copron Colphete, our hero makes out all right in the end).

In real life, there were shanty boat shenanigans a'plenty. As this 1907 newspaper article illustrates, one could keep a "disorderly house" whether it rested on land or water:

Pittsburgh Press, 23 September 1907

Hard living was generally the rule in jo-boat neighborhoods, which were frequently mentioned in connection with the exploits of downtrodden souls and the criminal element. You had your whiskey-thieving family hide-out:

Pittsburgh Daily Post, 29 March 1880

And squabbles over boat ownership that usually didn't end well:

Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, 9 April 1883

Impoverished women and children on the rivers barely managed to survive:

Pittsburgh Daily Post, 24 March 1884

Christmas Eve despair, Pittsburgh Daily Post, 25 December 1884

And passions were inflamed over love and politics, on water as on land. In the first instance referenced below, a bride was held for court after a drunken stabbing spree at her own wedding "over the question of relationship." She managed to give her new husband an eight inch slash across his abdomen, and "amputated a thumb from a young man named Simon." In the second story below, politics became lethal in the Allegheny "Boat Town" neighborhood when two men violently disagreed about the presidential prospects of Governor Grover Cleveland of New York. That Cleveland won the election was likely of cold comfort to the family of the dead jo-boat resident.

Pittsburgh Press, 9 July 1892

Pittsburgh Weekly Post, 8 November 1884

Workin' for the man ev'ry night and day

The relationship between the cities of Allegheny and Pittsburgh and their floating residents was always uneasy, with periodic eviction decrees issued by the city fathers. Some of the region’s jo-boat dwellers moored their structures permanently on stilts above the water, while others tied to trees along the shore or docks if such existed. Either way, regardless of their mobility, most of the houseboat population lived tax-free. This status, combined with fearsome jo-boater shenanigans, bothered the fine, upstanding, landlubber residents of Allegheny and Pittsburgh.

In February 1890, Allegheny Mayor Richard Turner Pearson voiced support for proposed legislation restricting unlicensed houseboats. This drew rebukes from his river constituents, given voice by an intrepid Daily Post reporter who visited jo-boats docked along "the Smoky Island river town district" seeking some man-on-the-river reactions. One jo-boater took the moral high ground against what he described as unreasonable persecution by the Mayor:

I do not believe the city limits extend to the middle of the river. The United States government has jurisdiction to the low water mark, and I don't believe the mayor can remove the law-abiding inhabitants of the jo-boats who pay their taxes and live honestly. There are doubtless some along-shore people who are dishonest, yet for that reason alone Mayor Pearson has no right to call the jo-boats "schools of vice" and try to root out the innocent with the guilty. When a thief is caught on his resident street, the chief executive of Allegheny doesn't call it the home of wickedness. This movement of his is a bid for notoriety. If some of us people chose to take a little boodle to the right persons I don't think we would be molested. But I will never do that. I will wander around the country homeless before I bribe anyone for the privilege of having a home.

Another Smoky Island jo-boater was less eloquent but every bit as defiant in the face of potential eviction: " Don't give up the ship is our motto....and we will live up to it. We are very willing to part with the rascals among us, but we won't yield our homes and riversides without a struggle."

A third eloquently spelled out economic pressures faced by Allegheny's shanty boat residents:  

From the Point Bridge down to Lindsay & McCutcheon's mill the men occupying the boats are nearly all laborers in the steel works and earn an average $1.35 per day. The rent of a house is from $15 to $16 per month, and that would amount to at least one half of their wages. That would leave a man with only $4 per week with which to support his family.. I am in favor of licensing the owners of the shanty boats... All the honest people are willing to pay a fair price for the privileges granted to them. If a man is not all right he should not be granted a license. There may be boats where people have speak-easies and allow gambling, but the police know them and the authorities should not grant them a license... There is another thing. Many of us are now trying to get homes of our own, but will never be able to do so if we are driven from our boats. We have no great love for the boats, and only occupy them as a matter of necessity and economy.

Protests notwithstanding, on 14 February 1890 Mayor Pearson's Valentine's gift to his city was a law prohibiting Allegheny River shanty boats. 

But the jo-boaters got the last laugh. This was futile legislation, as newspapers reported six months later:

During Mayor Pearson's administration frequent complaints were made about the shanty boats moored on the Allegheny....and Mayor Pearson started a crusade against them. He succeeded in having an ordinance passed compelling all shanty boats to remove from their respective locations within the city limits. A number of arrests followed of those who refused to obey the order, while many others left for different quarters. With the close of Mayor Pearson's term of office the crusade against the shanty boats came to an end....there seems to be as many shanty boats as formerly, and the complaints coming from them are as numerous and as loud as they were before.

Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, 24 July 1895

A few years later across the river in Pittsburgh, Director of Public Works Edward Bigelow fired the final salvo in his months-long war with Pittsburgh’s houseboat residents. Bigelow declared that on 1 August 1895, they were to be evicted from Monongahela River shores once and for all. The Pittsburgh jo-boaters paid the city $1 per month for their wharfage privileges, but that income apparently didn’t offset their nuisance quotient.

The Commercial Gazette estimated that nearly 1000 people made their homes on riverboats stretching from the Smithfield Street Bridge to the edge of the Southside city limits.

While the fictionalized Jo-Boat Boys family was Irish, the newspaper asserted that most Mon houseboat residents were “Poles (who) made their living in the mills” and who scavenged coal and wood for fuel. They took in boarders and their children attended “the Polish school on South Fifteenth Street.”

One of the Mon houseboaters, described as “the only American of the lot,” commented on his floating neighbors:

They are a very decent lot of people; mind their own business, dress well, live well and have plenty of money, as they are all thrifty workmen. At first it galled me to be compelled to live among them, because I had been taught that Poles were hardly human… The Poles catch drift wood and build about their boats. The boats originally cost from $25 to $200, but when once they get them stranded they build around them until they cover considerable ground.

Southside raw sewage entered the Monongahela River at Eighth Street. Folks in 1895 knew that “sewers contaminate water, befoul the air and spread death and disease” and the newspaper marveled at the resilience of Mon River dwellers:

But sewers do not hurt Poles, as they are as healthy as can be. They live over a sewer, wash in the water that runs therefrom and drink the filth that flows nearby in the river. The stench, to a nose not acclimated, is as effective as knockout drops, chloroform or a blow from a sledge-hammer, yet these Europeans had a wedding last Sunday night in a shanty over the sewer and danced and feasted as merrily as if they had been in the garden of Eden.

Bigelow was true to his word: the wholesale eviction of Mon jo-boats occurred on 1 August 1895. City police presided over the dismantling of various semi-permanent structures, although it was slow going. The riverfront was chaotic as residents made their homes "seaworthy" again, caulking them in preparation for loosing their moorings in search of ties outside the city limits.

Excerpts from Pittsburgh Press, 2 August 1895

But while the cities of Allegheny and Pittsburgh periodically emptied their shanty boat neighborhoods, folks kept coming back to the rivers to live.

Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river

Romantic fictionalized notions of living on the water notwithstanding, this was no easy life. Pumping river water to wash clothing, cooking on a coal stove, carrying drinking water, and making sure no one fell overboard were tasks that kept river dwellers busy. Warming a wooden boat locked in by ice and snow wasn't easy.

Allegheny River houseboats near Aspinwall, February 1907
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

Floods on the river were dangerous.

Houseboat washed up on shore at River Avenue and Vine Street intersection after 1936 flood, March 1936
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

A 1909 Gazette Times profile of the region's "aqueous domiciles" provided details for those curious about life on Pittsburgh's rivers. 

Social lines are strictly drawn in Jo-Boat Land and members of one class do not mix with members of an inferior one...A few of the inhabitants of Jo-Boat Land are people of color. The women living in the houseboats become as expert as the men and boys in rowing skiffs and yaws. They may be seen pulling up the Allegheny and returning with a skiff of coal bought from a float for 50 cents. The same amount of coal purchased on land would cost $2.50.    

Half page article from Pittsburgh Gazette Times, 14 November 1909

One of the residents profiled, Mrs. Virginia Gabell, had lived on a houseboat situated near the shore of today's Heinz Field for 28 years. She had plenty to say about life on "the raging main of the local deep":

"There's no finer place in Pittsburgh, and if those folks out in the East End only knew what good air they were missing, I jest bet they would like to live down here, too... Folks as talk of the horrible thing of livin' on the river don't know what they are talkin' about," she added, as five dogs and three cats came in to inspect the strange visitor talking with their mistress...

Houseboat dog to the left, Allegheny River, 1906
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

The dogs and cats having arranged themselves solemnly around the room, Mrs. Gabell went on to explain why she had chosen the river instead of the land for her home. "Twenty-eight years ago," she said, "I was dreadfully troubled with rheumatism, and the doctor told me to go and live on the water. There was good, pure air there. Don't you believe that folks get rheumatism or colds being on the river. It ain't so. Why, I haven't had a pain or rheumatism since I came here. If the weather is cold we keep lots of fire--we got three stoves--and our house is as comfortable as any one on land. The air here is a tonic.... Just look at how open everything is and what a sweep the wind gets!"

And Mrs. Gabell drew aside a curtain from one of the windows of her home and revealed a magnificent view of sun-burnished water almost a mile wide, and the towering, gigantic heights of Mt. Washington in the background.

"....I come from a good family and ain't like some of the trash that gets into houseboats and gives us a  bad name. My husband was...in the regular Army and I get a pension of $25 a month... My father was a Methodist minister, so you can see I have been well raised."

Her house is built like all the rest: is one-story and oblong to conform to the shape of the hull. Doors in the center of the rooms make for passage continuous from end to end of the interior. To the landlubber, not used to houseboat life, the boat revealed an unexpected amount of living space. In fact, the rooms were as large as those in an ordinary small house. They measured about 15 feet square. The front or prow of the houseboat embraced quite a porch with a roof. The first room upon entering was the kitchen; then a combined sitting and dining room and a couple of bed rooms. They were all neatly and comfortably furnished, an antique piece of work being a low-legged chair upholstered in haircloth and brocade, which Mrs. Gabell said was given her by her grandmother. Against the wall of the dining and sitting room was a handsome sideboard on which glass and china were placed and there were rocking chairs and other easy seats in abundance. The rooms were papered and on the walls were pictures of all kinds. Taken all in all, it was a very cozy and attractive home.The outside was of plain weather-boarding, painted pink, and gave scant evidence of the comfort and taste to be found in the interior.

People continued to live along the rivers throughout the Great Depression and into the WWII era, but the lifestyle gradually fell out of favor.

Houseboats along the Ninth Street Bridge, 1935Walter J. Teskey Photograph Collection, Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

Houseboats on the Allegheny River, 1941
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

According to Pittsburgh newspaperman William M. Rimmel, shanty boat Pittsburgh river life made a brief resurgence in the post World War II era. With a demand for housing that local supplies couldn't meet and the desire to own homes that forced renters out of existing stock, houseboat living seemed like a viable alternative floated by necessity. Rimmel wrote:

"Back to the Rivers and Free Rent," was the cry.  The boat builders and others started raising the prices of houseboats and building material. That didn't stop the rush for the river life. And before long the three rivers were dotted with houseboats of every class and description... Old river men just shook their heads and said, "It's just like the craze of years ago. Soon they'll grow tired of the river and seek houses in the city." Their predictions came true. And gradually the houseboat dwellers began leaving the river... It wasn't long before the riverbanks were littered with old houseboats, debris of all sorts, junk-filled barges and old boat hulls.

The era of publicly-subsidized housing (for all its inadequacies) helped make life on the river less of an economic necessity. While some live-aboard river houseboats can still be found at local marina slips, today year-round, modern river living would be far beyond the economic reach of 19th century jo-boaters. For them, today's houseboats would be the equivalent of yachts.

If you have a Pittsburgh area shanty boat story to share, please do so in comments below, or message me historicaldilettante@gmail.com.

Quo Vadis? Giuseppe Moretti's Movable Pittsburgh Monuments

I keep thinking about that Giuseppe Moretti sculpture that was removed from Oakland amidst public hullabaloo and a recommendation of the city's Art Commission.

You know, this one.

Birmingham Public Library, 617.1.120, Collection Archives Department, Giuseppi Moretti, Papers, 1888-1981; Collection No. 617

Wait, you thought I meant this one?

You're forgiven for the mistake, given that Giuseppe Moretti's 118 year old Stephen Foster memorial has finally been uncermoniously hauled away on the back of a flat-bed truck. No, it isn't on its way to becoming a traveling public art installation (Although the PPG's Christopher Huffaker wondered if this could maybe become a thing with other statues. And, you know, I think there's merit to that idea).

After decades of sporadic protests, and one year of intense debate, Moretti's Foster was removed to a temporary Public Works storage facility. As of this writing its next display place is still unknown.

Moretti's seen it all before from the Great Beyond. His art gets around. Even the Foster piece originally began its days as a public sculpture in Highland Park, relocated to a prominent spot in Oakland after repeated vandalism at its more isolated location.


Giuseppe Moretti, Pittsburgh's Sculptor

Pittsburg Press, 11 September 1900 at the time of the Foster memorial dedication

Born in 1857 in Siena Italy, Giuseppe Moretti was our go-to civic sculptor during Pittsburgh's City Beautiful period. His works graced many pre-WWI era public spaces. In addition to the Stephen Foster memorial, the list of Moretti monuments is long -- and mostly East End-ish. Moretti created the Highland and Stanton entrances to Highland Park (I wrote about his Horse Tamers in detail HERE) and the four panthers on either end of the Panther Hollow Bridge. At Schenley Park, his legacy includes a likeness of the 'Father of Pittsburgh's Parks' Edward Manning Bigelow, and a statue of goddess of health Hygeia for a WWI physician memorial.

Formerly in Oakland, the twin bronze Sphinxes that stood sentinel outside the late lamented Syria Mosque were relocated to Harmar Township by the Shriners when that facility met the wrecking ball.

Apparently long gone is a 10,000 pound Carrara marble drinking fountain that Moretti created for Highland Park in 1902 called Echo. It sat atop the lower Bunker Hill steps across from St. Clair, and consisted of a granite base "....surmounted by the recumbent figure of a child with its head resting in a listening attitude upon an enormous sea shell, from the interior of which the water rushes forth."

Moretti's 'Echo' drinking fountain, Highland Park, c. 1922
Pittsburgh City Photographers Collection
Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

Moretti also crafted elaborate honor roll tablets for East Liberty Presbyterian, Shadyside Presbyterian, and Oakland's First Unitarian churches; safety trophies for Carnegie Steel plants; and various honorary tablets commissioned for local fraternities, cemeteries, and schools.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 21 January 1923

He even created a medallion for the SS Pittsburgh of the White Star line. It looks intensely cool and would occupy pride of place in my family room if someone wants to dredge it out of the Gulf of Athens for me:

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 15 May 1923

Moretti also completed pieces elsewhere in the United States. His most famous work, a colossal cast iron statue of Vulcan, towers above Birmingham Alabama to this day. But impressive on a smaller scale--and closer to Pittsburgh--is his heroic 10-foot-tall Soldiers Memorial in Bellevue’s Bayne Park.

Flush with income from his many commissions, Moretti built a home and atelier in 1916 for $30,000 at 4029 Bigelow Bvd on a triangular lot at the corner of Centre Avenue. Much altered, the building still houses works of marble and granite on a far smaller scale as the headquarters for The Tile Collection.

Birmingham Public Library, 617.23e, Collection Archives Department, Giuseppi Moretti, Papers, 1888-1981; Collection No. 617

When constructed by the Schenley Farms Company, it was described as a cream-colored brick and white Alabama marble building crowned with two gilded figures. The figures are indistinct in this photo, but they look like nudes wrestling with a globe. Moretti would occupy this building for only a few years before leaving Pittsburgh in 1924 for cleaner air, better light, and his favored Sylacauga marble deposits in Alabama.

Quo Vadis

According to Pittsburgh newspapers, Moretti began work on a sculpture in 1914 based upon characters in Henry Sienkiewicz's 1895 novel Quo Vadis (that's Latin for "Where are you going?"). It's hard to imagine when reading its heavy prose today, but this novel won a Nobel prize in literature.

Set during Nero's reign, the book chronicled the love of Lygia, a young Christian woman, and a Roman patrician named Marcus Vinicius. You'd maybe guess that the plot takes dramatic turns, and you'd be right about that, but no spoilers from me about how it all ends.

Wildly popular in its day, Sienkiewicz's novel inspired Moretti to take chisel in hand and begin carving at some Italian marble to create his own Quo Vadis, a piece he intended to be his masterwork.
 

Detail, Birmingham Public Library, 617.1.120, Collection Archives Department, Giuseppi Moretti, Papers, 1888-1981; Collection No. 617

Moretti planned to display his Quo Vadis at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition (aka the World's Fair) held in San Francisco in 1915. But Moretti was a busy guy, and apparently commission after commission won out over completing Lygia, the bull and Giant Ursus. The piece languished rough and unfinished in his Pittsburgh atelier. Moretti presented the city with Quo Vadis when he left Pittsburgh in 1924, and it was on view at Phipps Conservatory for roughly ten years. Around the time of Moretti's death in 1935 "....it was just plain 'grotesque' to Superintendent of Parks Ralph E. Griswold, who had it taken out of Phipps Conservatory...and relegated to storage space."

And so Moretti's Quo Vadis "gathered dust in storage for ten years at Schenley Park," kept crated "in the storage yards back of the stables" before resurfacing in 1944 with controversy cloaking its three figures. The five ton piece returned to the public eye when a suburban couple, Mr. and Mrs. I. L. Peters, offered to move it at their expense so it could grace "....their Spanish type home on Pine Creek Hill, Perry Highway" in Wexford.

As detailed in the Post-Gazette, '"I think it's a work of art" said Mrs. Peters, a former art teacher at Colfax school, "and so does my husband, an art supervisor. Besides, I read the book Quo Vadis."' Cultural appropriation was not a concern in 1944, for the Post-Gazette further noted that "The statue is a bull, and bull-fighting is Spanish, so the statue ought to be just the thing, said Mrs. Peters."  

The Press described Mrs. Peters as someone who was "....supposed to know as much about what it takes to make a pagan sculptured group as the City Art Commission."


Isaac Lee and Margaret Hunter Peters lived in North Highland Manor, one of the earliest housing developments in the Wexford-McCandless area.  Mr. Peters was at one point an art instructor at South High, and Mrs Peters worked for the Pittsburgh Board of Education.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12 September 1944

That Art Commission responded to the Peters request by evaluating Quo Vadis and declaring it to be of negligible artistic value, unfit for public display and "....obviously inferior in quality of design and workmanship." Accordingly, Pittsburgh's Art Commission passed a resolution to allow the Peters to do with Quo Vadis as they wished, so long as the city didn't have to pay for it. The committee's decision to rid the city of the piece was made on the motion of member Norwood MacGilvery, described as "of the art faculty of Carnegie Tech, and one of the leading artists of the city." He and commission chair/local architect Charles M. Stotz were described as never having heard of Giuseppe Moretti.

The local papers had a lot of fun with the sculpture, its subject matter, serious investigative journalism into the exact cattle species portrayed, and recording various opinions.

Indeed, it seems everyone had an opinion about its artistic merits. For instance, City Council President Thomas E. Kilgallen:

....turned art critic long enough to warn folks that if they want to throw the bull "it better not be this one because it's not so pretty. I went out to see the bull, which stood on a hillside behind the stables with bushes growing around it. Everyone knows a politician has no aesthetic side, but to me this bull was an uncouth, abhorrent hunk o' stone. If no Pittsburgher wants it....let those Wexford people have it.

Joseph Bailey Ellis, Carnegie Tech professor of sculpture, damned it with faint praise:

I saw the bull before they put it out of sight. It looked to me like it had been carved from imported Italian Carrara marble.  But the man who carved it didn't have enough artistic background to reach first base. He carved ably enough with his hands, but he didn't use his head.

The Mayor's PR secretary was said to have interpreted the Art Commission's assessment "....as a round-about way of saying it was 'vulgar.'"

Pittsburgh City Council wanted to sell the piece. But that's when Mayor Cornelius D. Scully stepped in.

Giuseppe & Dorothea Moretti, Geneva Mercer
Birmingham Public Library, 616.4.70b

It's all fun and games until someone tattles to the widow. Once contacted, Mrs. Moretti and former Moretti students and assistants Geneva Mercer and Mrs. Karl J. Doll begged to differ with the assessments printed in the local papers. They were "horrified" that Moretti's piece "should be incompetently and arbitrarily condemned as unartistic" given his international reputation as a sculptor. Mrs. Doll claimed the piece had been offered to her family but they had no room for it. She decried the unsophisticated public rush to judgement, which she claimed was particularly unfair given that Quo Vadis was an unfinished, rough piece:

....Mrs. Doll suffers shock and chagrin. "How could one be expected to judge something that is not finished?"

Geneva Mercer, occasionally described as a Moretti "adopted daughter", was a sculptor in her own right and former assistant to Giuseppe Moretti. She stated:

The group is a handsome arrangement of beauty in lines and masses. It is designed for outdoor display, with grass, trees, and shrubbery. It is called unfinished, but for such a display I do not see the necessity of finishing the group. So far as I know, it has never offended anyone.

Meanwhile, a citizen's group had formed and vowed to raise funds to keep the sculpture in the city, far away from the greedy grasp of pilfering suburbanites in their North Hills Spanish villas. They declared they would even mortgage their property if necessary "....to give the art a proper setting."

The Mayor, wary of arbitrarily deciding the fate of a gift by a noted artist, decided to leave the fate of Quo Vadis to Mrs Moretti. He even made a few chivalric statements to the effect that public ridicule needed to stop. But even he couldn't resist weighing in with an opinion about art, dragging on a former prize-winning Carnegie International painting by artist Peter Blume:

Mrs. Moretti is a lovely woman well up in years...and I am not going to plague her any longer by such publicity about a statue that certainly is better art than 'South of Scranton.' She has been deeply hurt by the way the figure has been ridiculed and I want to put a stop to it.

His Honor had spoken, and accordingly there was no more press ridicule of the situation (the press being a more obedient and complicit creature back then).

Mrs. Moretti let it be known that she would like Quo Vadis to go back on public display, but that didn't happen. In March 1946, the Pittsburgh Press reported that the work was still languishing

....in its traditional home in the refuse dump. It hasn't been moved despite a city-wide argument two years ago. If anything, it has sunk a little deeper into the refuse and cordwood...Councilmen, once the controversy started, wanted to forget all about it. Apparently they succeeded--nothing further was heard of plans to sell it to the highest bidder or restore it as a tribute to the sculptor's widow in Boston.

The work was decidedly the worse for the wear by this point. The Bull was hornless and tailless and "looked more like a cow."  The Giant Ursus had lost an arm, and Lygia "....to put it mildly, is bruised and battered." The new Parks director claimed he was going to have the work appraised and possibly repaired.

I've yet to find any mention about the ultimate fate of the sculpture. I live in Wexford, too, and I'm pretty sure it's not in anyone's Spanish villa out here.

In 1951 an Academy Award-nominated motion picture starring Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr and Peter Ustinov was released based on Sienkiewicz's novel. You'd think that might have stirred local artistic memories, or at least civic consciences and consciousness. Alas, in the absence of other information, we have to assume that Quo Vadis may have met its ultimate fate on the dust heaps of art history.

In the 1920s, what appears to have been at least a partial copy of the Moretti piece showed up at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota in Florida. However, Mrs Moretti adamantly denied that her husband had a hand in its creation.


Quo Vadis, ubi iisti?

Of course, it's tempting to draw comparisons between the assumed fate of Moretti's Quo Vadis and the recent fate of his Foster memorial.

Plenty has been said in Pittsburgh (and beyond) over the years about the appropriateness of publicly displaying the Foster memorial, with various degrees of discernment applied. (Everyone has opinions and eliminatory orifices, and sometimes the contents of both bear a startling resemblance).

I recognize that history does not equal commemoration, but I also know that how we choose to commemorate frames history. Commemoration is contemporary, subject to contextual interpretation and prevailing zeitgeist. As a community, Pittsburgh has dedicated ample scholarship and a literal place to honor and recognize Foster's importance. The Moretti statue was created in 1900 with the best of intentions, funded by private donations, and well-loved in its day. But it was also a monument described then as portraying Foster "catching inspiration for his melodies from the fingers of an old darkey reclining at his feet strumming negro airs upon an old banjo."

Vandalized Foster statue, Highland Park, April 1937
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection,
Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

The Moretti Foster piece immortalized the writing of the song 'Old Uncle Ned' (lyrics can be found HERE). Today we recognize that the portrayal of Foster's companion Old Ned or Old Black Joe (he's gone by both descriptors over the years) is a bronze representation of what Spike Lee termed a "Magical Negro." In 2018 such tropes shouldn't still resonate; to make sure they don't, informed action needs to be taken and education supported.

That's why when public opinions hit the fan about Moretti's Foster, I was fully on board believing we could do better than continue to prominently display a commemoration that caused pain. I also believed we could continue to simultaneously recognize Foster's contributions, celebrate Black music, and find a better home for this statue that would contextualize its historical framing for future understanding.

Times change, tastes change, understanding changes. Quo Vadis was originally a work of historical fiction with an underlying pro-Christian message. Moretti's portrayal of a pivotal scene from that story would have resonated for those who knew the plot, but thirty years on that message was lost in a sensational portrayal that was devoid of context. Moretti's homage had lost its meaning, much as the meaning of his homage to Foster changed with the passage of time and enlightened understanding. I do hope there is a kinder fate ahead for the Foster statue, for it deserves an appropriate home.