USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 29
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By causing Pontoosuc Lake to be more attractive to the casual visitor, as well as to the summer resident on its shores, the Boat Club has been a protective factor of prime importance, for it has served to discourage the more or less tawdry places of entertainment which have threatened at times to disfigure the lake's natural beauties. Amid these beauties, the site of the clubhouse was admirably chosen; and the policy of the organization has been so developed as to afford to its numerous members privileges beyond those usually afforded by clubs formed solely for boating. Frank E. Peirson was the first president, and his successors have been H. Neill Wilson, Henry A. Francis, Frank W. Brandow, and Charles H. Talbot.
The Pittsfield Bicycle Club, the descendant of the Berkshire County Wheelmen, and organized in 1892 during the vogue of the bicycle, maintained enjoyable clubrooms on North Street in 1915. Another flourishing association of young men, the Shire City Club, occupied quarters in the building of the Berkshire Life Insurance Company after 1912.
Founded in 1869, the Monday Evening Club survives as the dean of Pittsfield's literary societies, meeting for the reading of papers and informal discussion. Among the twenty-one original members were John Todd, Gen. William Francis Bartlett, Henry L. Dawes, and Thomas F. Plunkett. Although the mem- bership continued to be somewhat rigorously restricted, the Monday Evening Club not only quickened the community's intellectual life, but also tended quietly to preserve a spirit of civic patriotism, and contributed toward establishing that out- spoken, appreciative acquaintance with one another which char- acterized Pittsfield's leading men in the days of the smaller town. The Wednesday Morning Club, a large and valuable association of Pittsfield women, began its course in 1879. The president since its formation has been Miss Anna L. Dawes; and invita- tions to lecture before it have been accepted by many of the country's notables.
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The Pittsfield Argus of March twenty-seventh, 1828, con- tained the following advertisement: "The Young Gentlemen of Pittsfield who are desirous of forming themselves into a Thes- pian Association are requested to meet at the town house on the evening of the third of April next". It is unlikely that publie theatrical performances resulted. If they did, we may be fairly sure that they were not presented in the town house. Pittsfield's earliest theater was doubtless the "long room" or the "assembly room" in one of the taverns. Strolling players began to give dramatie entertainments of a sort in western New England soon after 1800; and John Bernard, the vivacious author and eome- dian who assumed the management of a Boston theater in 1806, made an excursion with a company of three or four aetors in the summer of 1808 from Boston to Saratoga, gratifying the villagers in his path with a taste of his quality. It is not impossible that he tarried a night in Pittsfield, although his reminiscenees do not record the visit.
After the dissolution in 1817 of the Union Church, its meeting house on South Street was purchased by Lemuel Pomeroy and leased by him for divers purposes, saered and profane. Stage entertainments were given there oeeasionally; and it is of record that there Rev. John Todd was moved to great and righteous wrath one evening in 1844, when he entered the hall to eonduet a prayer meeting and found the platform adorned by the seenery and wardrobe of "The Reformed Drunkard", a drama in course of production for the rest of the week by a traveling company. West's Hall, on the third floor of the bloek at the corner of North Street and Park Square, succeeded the South Street "lecture room" in 1850 as the town's resort for musical and theatrical di- version, and Burbank's Hall on the west side of lower North Street was similarly utilized. Adjoining the Burbank House on West Street, a second Burbank's Hall was dedicated on January nineteenth, 1871. This hall was provided with a permanent stage and seenery, and its seating capacity was about 1,000. The entertainments presented there were diversified in character, ranging in one season from a performance by a company of Indian seouts to readings by Harriet Beecher Stowe and a concert by Mme. Rudersdorff, the brilliant and eecentrie mother of Richard
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Mansfield. In none of these halls was the equipment for dra- matic production better than primitive.
The Academy of Music, built by Cebra Quackenbush on the east side of North Street a few rods south of the railroad, was dedicated December sixteenth, 1872. Its grandiose title was representative of a period in Massachusetts when the word "theater" was not savory, and when a theater was deemed to be less objectionable under the name of a museum, a melodeon, or an opera house. Mr. Quackenbush's brick block contained six stores on the street level. Above them were the stage and audi- torium. The designer was Louis Weissbein of Boston, who planned the court house, the jail, and the Berkshire Life Insur- ance Company's building, and who fastened the mansard roof upon local architecture with a pertinacious clutch. The corri- dors and lobbies of the Academy of Music were lavishly spacious, although the number of corners turned by the broad stairways was somewhat disquieting. Nevertheless, in provision for the comfort of its patrons, in completion of stage equipment, and in lighting and decoration, the theater was not excelled by any es- tablishment of the kind outside the larger American cities at the time of its erection. The seating capacity was announced to be 1,200.
The opening performance was that of the play "Leah, the Forsaken", presented by a company which remained for a week and was led by Maude St. Leone, otherwise not now discoverably known to fame. On that occasion, she read a rhymed dedica- tory address from the pen of Joseph E. A. Smith, concluding:
"Lapped in soft luxuries, 'neath its gilded dome, Through the bright portals of its stage shall come To you the changeful drama's glittering train,
The Houri's dance, the Songstress' thrilling strain."
The "Houri's dance" was at once sufficiently in evidence, for no fewer than nine performances of "The Black Crook" edified the patrons of the theater during the Academy's first season.
The Academy of Music was seldom financially profitable to its owner or lessees, and the "soft luxuries", with which its laureate had endowed it, softened in time beyond the point of perceptibility. Nevertheless, the Academy contributed in gen-
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crous measure to the wholesome enjoyment of thic life of the town. During the first fifteen years or so of its existence, almost every actor of eminence in the country played there at least once, with the curious exception of Edwin Booth-curious because Mr. Booth was a good friend of Berkshire and a not infrequent visitor in a Pittsfield household. Of the theater in its earlier years, the community was with reason proud. Practical testimony of this was given when a gale blew in the north wall of the Academy, in 1877. A subscription paper was circulated for the benefit of the proprietors, and local amateur actors arranged a benefit enter- tainment, for which Col. Walter Cutting, John M. Ready, and others presented themselves in "Betsey Baker" and "Paddy, the Piper".
It is as the scene of the elaborate balls of the volunteer fire companies, of public meetings, political rallies, high school gradu- ations, that the Academy of Music is most closely, perhaps, in- tertwined with Pittsfield's memories; and in 1891 the Academy was the scene of the most important event in Pittsfield's civic history in the past forty years-the formal dissolution of the ancient town government.
The final dramatic production on the Academy's stage was made on December twelfth, 1903. The name of the picce then presented, "The Struggle for Liberty", was not without a certain appropriateness, for the veteran theater had been for several months engaged vigorously in a struggle of its own. New ground floor playhouses had been recently opened on Summer Street and South Street. The municipal authorities and the Academy's proprietor had annually been at variance over the safeguarding of the theater's patrons in case of fire; its license had been suspended in 1902, while alterations were in progress; and although these alterations were duly effected, general con- fidence in the safety of the auditorium was not completely re- stored. In 1904 the stage and its appurtenances were removed and the floor of the auditorium was leveled. The Academy was then reopened as a public hall and a theater for the display of moving pictures, entitled "The World in Motion". For a short period, beginning in 1905, the armory of Company F, the local company of state militia, was there established. The disastrous
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fire which destroyed the building in January, 1912, has been des- cribed elsewhere.
Pittsfield's first ground floor theater was built in 1898 by George Burbank on the south side of Summer Street, a short distance from North Street, and was at first called "The Casino". The floor of the auditorium was not pitched and the Casino was therefore usable otherwise than as a theater; but theatrical per- formances of merit were occasionally given there until 1902. The stage was then dismantled and the Casino became the head- quarters of the fraternal order of Eagles. In 1906 the hall was refitted as a theater, with a sloping floor, a permanent stage, and suitable scenic equipment, and under the name of "The Em- pire" began a well-conducted career as a vaudeville house, where- in entertainments were offered every night. This policy of the Empire was altered early in the spring of 1912, when the manage- ment of the theater organized a permanent stock company of actors and produced a different play each week; and this was the first trial of a dramatic experiment of that sort in the city. In 1913 this enterprise was abandoned, the theater changed hands, and, having been rechristened "The Grand", experienced a variety of vicissitudes. In 1915 it was a moving picture es- tablishment.
The erection of the Colonial Theater on South Street was not accomplished by Pittsfield capital. The investors were John Sullivan and his brothers of North Adams, and the architect was Joseph McA. Vance of Pittsfield. The audience assembled there on September twenty-eighth, 1903, to witness the dedicatory performance-"Robin Hood", by a famous operatic company called "The Bostonians"-was able to congratulate the com- munity upon the possession of a handsome, comfortable, and modernly equipped playhouse. The Colonial was conducted by its first owners for eight years, and an endeavor was made to obtain the best theatrical attractions available for smaller cities; but by no means so large a proportion of the leaders of the con- temporary American stage was seen at the Colonial during its earlier days as was seen at the Academy of Music twenty or thirty years before. Pittsfield, of course, was only one of hundreds of towns and cities thus to be deprived. The reason
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was mainly, perhaps, the enormous commercial and numerical expansion of theaters in the great metropolitan centers.
In December, 1911, the Messrs. Sullivan sold the Colonial to the Pittsfield Theater Company, a corporation of which the capital stock was held by about fifty local shareholders. These owners had no radical ideas concerning the conduct of a theater; but a circular letter, addressed by the executive committee to hundreds of prominent actors and dramatic critics and asking for their advice, aroused widely published comment; and soon the company's directorate, to its surprise and perhaps to its dis- may, found itself credited with an ambition to establish a mu- nicipal theater, and in general to elevate the American drama.
The Colonial, having been decorated anew and supplied with new stage equipment, was reopened on May twenty-eighth, 1912. Thereafter a resident dramatic company, directed by William Parke, occupied its stage practically every night until the summer of 1913. The plays, changed each week, included some of the comedies of Shakespeare and Sheridan, and some of those of such modern authors as Pinero and Bernard Shaw. Local interest in acted drama was greatly stimulated. But the undertaking, despite artistic supervision, laborious effort, and the co-operation of many citizens, did not support itself. Mr. Parke withdrew, and the summer season of 1913 was completed by a stock company under another management.
Stock companies were seen at the Colonial also during the summers of 1914 and 1915, while in the intervening winter the theater was devoted to moving pictures and traveling organiza- tions. In the early autumn of the latter year, the Colonial was sold to the Goldstein Brothers Amusement Company, of Spring- field, Massachusetts, by the Pittsfield Theater Company, upon whose boards of directors had served William H. Eaton, Charles W. Wilson, Luke J. Minahan, Daniel England, Charles W. Power, Edward Boltwood, Joseph McA. Vance, F. W. Dutton, Edward A. Jones, and Franklin Weston.
The tenancies of the Colonial's stage by the different stock companies of actors who occupied it, beginning in 1912, were productive not only of generally adequate and often excellent theatrical entertainment at reasonable prices. Another effect
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is believed to have been to form a sort of concept in the popular mind of the possibilities, at least, of a theater for the acted drama which might constitute a rational share of the ordi- nary social life of the community. This is not, of course, to say that the brief control of the Colonial by a local corporation pro- vided such a theater or anything very closely approaching one. It is likely, however, that many Pittsfield people, whose mental attitude toward all theaters had become one of indifference or suspicion, began between 1912 and 1915 to regard the activities of a playhouse with an interest more friendly, appreciative, and discriminating.
The Majestic Theater was built on the east side of North Street by the Messrs. Sullivan, who had erected the Colonial, and it was opened November twenty-third, 1910. The architect was Joseph McA. Vance of Pittsfield. On the opening night a play called "The Deserters" was presented by a company of which Helen Ware was the leader; but the Majestic has since been devoted to vaudeville entertainment and moving pictures. A similar policy was followed by the Union Square Theater, built on Union Street by John F. Cooney of Pittsfield and opened in 1912. The vogue of moving pictures, indeed, was as popular during this period in Pittsfield as everywhere in the country; and, besides those which have been named, several other moving picture establishments on North Street and on Tyler Street were patronized.
It is quite apparent that for several years following 1876 the quality of Pittsfield's hotel accommodation was not satisfactory to the townspeople, but several attempts to organize a local cor- poration to build a new hotel resulted in nothing but a tangle of discussion. The principal hotels in town were the American House, the Burbank Hotel on West Street near the railroad sta- tion, and the Berkshire House on Summer Street. Of these buildings, all of which were wooden, the oldest was the American House. The American House had been purchased in 1865 by Cebra Quackenbush and personally conducted by him until 1876. Mr. Quackenbush in that year removed his residence from Pitts- field and rented the hotel to various landlords, including George H. Gale, A. A. Jones, N. H. Peakes, William St. Lawrence, and
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finally in 1889 to the present successful lessees, Arthur W. Plumb and George W. Clark, the house having been enlarged in 1888. The wooden portion on North Street was replaced in 1899 by the New American House of today, a substantial structure of brick, which was remodeled by Mr. Quackenbush in 1911 and so im- proved in equipment as to be adequate to the demands of modern hotel-keeping.
Cebra Quackenbush was born at Hoosick, New York, in 1838 and died on February sixteenth, 1914. His association with Pittsfield was useful to it, for he was a man of a pushing, service- able sort, and when he built the Academy of Music and the New American House he added to the public advantages of town and city. After leaving Pittsfield in 1876, he assumed the manage- ment for a long period of Stanwix Hall, a hotel in Albany. It appeared, however, that he retained his sentimental, as well as his proprietary, interest in his Pittsfield enterprises, and he con- tinued to be a familiar and popular figure locally, although no longer a resident.
The Burbank Hotel on the south side of West Street, near the railroad, was opened in 1871 and razed in 1911. Until his death, in 1887, the hotel was conducted by its builder and owner, Abraham Burbank, with the assistance of his sons, of whom Roland E. Burbank was the acting manager. The latter so served after his father's death, as did also T. L. Doyle, Ellsworth Bowers, W. P. F. Meserve, and John Quaid. The last proprietor and landlord of the Burbank Hotel was Henry Hay, who under- took the management of the hotel in 1904 and finally closed its doors in 1910. The house in its halcyon days was familiar to the traveler by rail, both because of its convenient location and be- cause of the faithful and unforgettable voice which for many years directed his attention across the way from the station plat- form.
The Berkshire House on the south side of Summer Street, and not to be confused with the historic hotel of the same name which stood until 1868 on the corner of North and West Streets, was originally the dwelling house of Parker L. Hall, whose estate Abraham Burbank purchased in 1860. Subsequently he en- larged the dwelling and opened it as the Berkshire House.
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Some of its landlords, after 1876, were H. S. Munson, W. W. Perry, R. Mckinney, and John Butterworth. The building was demolished preparatory to the erection by George Burbank in 1898 of the Casino, now the Grand Theater, and of the New Burbank House, which in 1902 became the Norwood Hotel. The Berkshire House and its successors were hotels of which the policies were based on a schedule of moderate prices. There has seldom been any dearth of these in Pittsfield, but an attempt to inventory them would be a staggering task. The most con- spicuous example, perhaps, has been the present Kenney Hotel, opened on the west side of upper North Street in 1905, and which was a development from a modest restaurant called the Arlington.
The desirability to the town of a hotel adapted specially to the accommodation of summer visitors was emphasized con- stantly for several years after 1876 by those interested in Pitts- field's welfare. Both the American House and the Burbank Hotel were conducted primarily to meet the needs of another sort of patronage, nor were the pleasant boarding houses at Springside of Mrs. Tetley and on South Street of Mrs. Viner and of Mrs. Backus quite adequate to the demand. The school buildings at Maplewood, in some seasons utilized for this pur- pose, had fallen into a state of dreary disrepair, from which their owners seemed unable or unwilling to extricate them.
It was under these circumstances, in 1887, that Arthur W. Plumb of Stockbridge became lessee of the Maplewood buildings, and, in 1889, purchased the property from Oberlin College. Mr. Plumb's skilled and zealous efforts soon supplied the town with that sort of a summer hotel which Pittsfield had so long and detri- mentally lacked. By degrees the veteran school buildings were in effect reconstructed; capacious additions were made to them. Their graceful environment was protected and improved. Soon the city possessed the advantage of a uniquely attractive resort for summer guests, which in 1915 is still under the same careful and progressive management.
The Hotel Wendell, opened at the corner of South and West Streets in the autumn of 1898, was the most pretentious hotel which Pittsfield had seen up to that time, and was, indeed, more
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pretentious than the size and character of the city then apparent- ly warranted. It was built and originally owned by Samuel W. Bowerman, a son of the distinguished local lawyer bearing the same name, and its architect was H. Neill Wilson of Pittsfield. The first management, that of a corporation called John P. Doyle and Company, in which Mr. Bowerman was heavily con- cerned, endured for about six months, and culminated in financial disaster. In 1899 Messrs. Plumb and Clark of the American House rented the Wendell and undertook its direction, the New American House being in that year in course of construction. The firm of Hamilton and Cunningham assumed the lease of the Wendell in 1900, and, the latter partner soon thereafter retiring, Mr. Hamilton conducted the hotel until 1905, when the tenancy of Luke J. Minahan commenced. Under that meritorious man- agement, the Wendell was actively successful, and in 1910 the hotel and a large amount of adjacent real estate were purchased by the Wendell Hotel Company, a corporation of which the stock was in Mr. Minahan's control and which conducted the hotel after his untimely death.
Luke J. Minahan was a resident of Pittsfield for only eight years, but even in that brief period his peculiarly restless, opti- mistic energy found many opportunities to stimulate the general activity of the city and to cause its name to become known more widely and favorably. He was born in Troy, New York, in 1870 and he died at Pittsfield, April seventeenth, 1913. He had quick, broad vision, brisk determination, large ideas, cheerful courage. His enthusiasms were showy and to the staidly minded often amusing, but they were none the less genuine, while his warm kindliness of heart made for him countless friends; and the success that he achieved with the Wendell, to which he devoted his energies without respite, contributed substantially to the prosperity of Pittsfield.
CHAPTER XXIII
PROMINENT CITIZENS
I T has been found advisable to include biographical mention of certain influential citizens in previous chapters. The ob- ject of this chapter is to present brief biographies of other notable Pittsfield men, who died between 1891 and 1916.
A record of the public services of John C. West belongs to the annals of the town prior to 1876, although he lived to see the rural village of his youth become a city. He was born in Wash- ington, Massachusetts, in 1811. His father was Abel West, who was, from 1817 to 1871, a farmer on West Street. John Chapman West, in 1839, opened a general store on the corner of North Street and Park Place, and continued in the business of merchant there for many years. He died in Pittsfield, November eighth, 1893. Mr. West was a factor of importance in the organi- zation and early management of the Pittsfield National Bank, as well as of the Berkshire Mutual Fire Insurance Company, and was always actively concerned in the affairs of the First Church. Be- fore the eyes of the community, however, he was chiefly con- spicuous in the character of a selectman. He was, indeed, almost a fixture in that office, holding it for twenty-two years and being for nineteen years chairman of the board, until he declined re- nomination in 1875. Thus he came to be a sort of incarnation of the town government; and, in theatrical phrase, he looked the part, for he was a full-figured man of both authoritative and benignant presence. The attention which he gave to town af- fairs was daily and particular, nor did he neglect, upon needful occasions, to check public disorder with his own formidable arm.
George N. Dutton was a prominent and respected North Street merchant, and after 1875 the treasurer and manager of the Pittsfield Tack Company. He was born in 1828 at Newbury- port, Massachusetts, and died at Pittsfield, August eighteenth,
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1891. Mr. Dutton was one of the pioneer Republicans in Pitts- field in the ante-bellum days, and represented the town in the state legislature. From 1863 until his death he was an especially zealous and devoted deacon of the First Church.
Born in Stockport, New York, in 1824, David A. Clary came to Pittsfield to work as an apprentice in the machine shop of Gordon Mckay, and in 1855 became a partner in the concern, associated with Almiron D. Francis. Mr. Clary retired from active business in 1872. He was a quiet, conservative man of excellent judgment, and his advice was valuable to several financial institutions, conspicuously to the Pittsfield National Bank, as well as to public and private enterprises. He was a member of the city's first board of aldermen, and he died in office, April second, 1891.
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