Few have noticed it, fewer know its name, and fewer still would know of its outsized significance.
It's called the Skinny Building, also the Hendel Building, this straw-thin structure at the corner of Forbes Avenue and Wood Street in our Downtown, and that might actually qualify as an undersell, considering that, at 80 feet long and just 5 feet, 2 inches wide, it's the narrowest commercial structure ... in the whole world.
No, really. There's some other whatever in Vancouver, British Columbia, that makes the same claim, but that place, while it's 4 feet, 11 inches wide at street level, expands to a relatively luxurious 6 feet wide on the floors above because of bay windows that jut out. So that claim's got as much chance of being sustained as their Canucks have of ever claiming a Stanley Cup.
At our one, true Skinny Building, the street-level windows were open and offering vending -- T-shirts, caps, other merch -- until just a few months ago, when the entire thing was shut down for a massive renovation. The top two floors ... eh, I'll get to those in a bit.
This went up way back in 1926 and, by all accounts, it went up out of a mix of entrepreneurial spirit and pure spite.
Louis Hendel, a Jewish immigrant and grocer in the old Diamond Market building that's now Market Square, bought the small, strange sliver of land -- formed when the previously wider parcel was chomped up by a widening of Diamond Street (now Forbes) in front of it -- to use it for open-air sales of fruit, cigars and lunch fare. He was doing well enough that people would fill the sidewalks and even spill out onto Diamond Street. That'd soon concern the city enough that officials took him to court and ordered him to keep the sidewalk clear.
So our man Mr. Hendel, sick of several months of the legal stuff, came up with the crazy concept of erecting a building on that small, strange sliver. And by doing so, he'd dodge any and all sidewalk regulations since ... he'd now be in a building.
One newspaper headline described the dispute with this absolute gem of journalism ...
BUILDING THREE STORIES HIGH,
SIX FEET WIDE PLANNED HERE
Diamond Street Fruit Man Would Outwit City
After some more haggling, the permit was granted, and the rest was history.
And oh, man, was it history. Because beyond the unique distinction of the building's physical body, those second and third floors soon became The Lincoln restaurant and, momentously, the only sit-down establishment in all of Downtown that welcomed Black diners. The Pittsburgh Courier, the longtime newspaper beacon of the local Black community that's published to this day, called Mr. Hendel a “prominent friend” in a 1928 editorial.
Here's how it looked in that era:
PITTSBURGH MAGAZINE
The Skinny Building in the 1930s.
Funny, but so much of that scene's so similar now. Only it seems so much more apparent how and why the Skinny Building came to life in seeing this version just above. Mr. Hendel was selling goods on the sidewalk to the left of the Roberts Building, and he was too productive for his own good, so he found another way to help himself and, along the way, be a fine human.
Very soon, my friends, the Skinny Building will be back. PNC, which has its global headquarters directly across the street, has bought pretty much that entire block of Wood, and the Skinny Building and Roberts Building are the first two getting massive renovation work. PNC paid $1.3 million for the Skinny Building last year, and I've been told it's spending as much as $12 million to do all the work that's needed to make it right. That includes connecting the Roberts Building to other adjacent structures on the block.
But not the Skinny Building. Because that wouldn't preserve its integrity or meaning. The Skinny Building will resume having street-level vending, befitting Mr. Hendel's original aspiration, but the top two floors will be reserved for displays of artwork related to its past.
People ask why I love my neighborhood, as if having been born and brought up in this Golden Triangle isn't enough of an explanation. This is why. There's a good story every which way one turns. And I can't love anything more than a good story.
For more on Mr. Hendel, I recommend this Pittsburgh Magazine piece from a year ago.
