Old candy factory in Pittsburgh PA

Reymer Brothers Candy Factory, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania

Date added: February 22, 2023 Categories: Pennsylvania Industrial

Reymer Brothers Candy Company was a local leader in its field. By locating a factory/office on Forbes Avenue in the Uptown section of Pittsburgh, Reymer Brothers took part in a trend toward warehousing and light industry in this part of town as Pittsburgh sprawled rapidly toward the east.

Known since the late 19^th century as Uptown, this section of Pittsburgh grew along Forbes road, the only military route to the Monongahela-Allegheny confluence. Forbes Road passes along the bluff above the Monongahela River and was one of the corridors of Pittsburgh's development during the 19th-century expansion of the city. Maps of the period show three-bay brick houses and shops lining Forbes Road (later Avenue), Fifth Avenue and the cross streets of Uptown. Many of these smaller-scale buildings remain today, albeit often in dilapidated condition. Two late 19th-century institutions today dominate the Uptown/Bluff area: Duquesne University and Mercy Hospital. Though the area is convenient to downtown, it is also near the mills lining, the Monongahela and subject to their smoke and soot. At the same time, it is high enough in elevation to be out of the floodplain.

In the late nineteenth century, electric street railways opened Pittsburgh's more hospitable East End to residential development. Likewise, businesses expanding from downtown Pittsburgh displaced many of the original residential structures from the Uptown area. Uptown became the home of an increasing number of wholesale establishments, warehouses, and light manufacturing facilities. This era saw the construction of the Reymer Brothers candy factory.

The company itself began in 1846, when Phillip Reymer and R.J. Anderson opened a candy store, Reymer & Anderson, on Wood Street across from the St. Charles Hotel. The store sold imported boiled sweets, as dip-coated candy was known in the mid-19^th century. They never promoted themselves as Pittsburgh's first candy vendor or manufacturer, but they seem to have had no significant predecessor in the candy trade. After a short time, Anderson withdrew and Jacob and Harmar Reymer joined the company, which became Reymer & Brothers. Their product became popular in the United States, especially after being popularized by the London Exposition in 1851. The candy was found to be a practical and very popular item to send to Civil War Soldiers. Reymer capitalized on the Civil War business and continued to prosper through the late 19^th century. In 1876, the store moved to 124-6 and 128 Wood Street. By 1901 the Reymer brothers had died or been bought out of the business, but their names stayed with the expanding company as it became Reymer & Brothers, Inc. that year. At this time, the store also moved to 239 Fifth Avenue.

The 1906 factory on Forbes Street apparently replaced a smaller facility on Liberty Avenue at the edge of Pittsburgh's Strip District. The new location placed the Reymer Factory on a block shared with the Kaufmann's Department Store Warehouse, a four-story brick building of 1901 which may also be a Bickel design. Although Reymer's company records do not survive, placing the factory next to Kaufmann's Warehouse may not have been a coincidence; there is some evidence of a business connection between the two firms as Reymer's operated one of their tea rooms in Kaufmann's.

An assessment of Reymer brothers in 1908, two years after the construction of the factory, named it "one of the largest confectionery houses in the world," with retail trade "in all principal U.S. cities, Canada and Europe." They also claimed to sell candy through up to 5000 vendors throughout the Pittsburgh area. For manufacture, nuts were reportedly purchased by the boxcar load for incorporation into candy. While promotional claims have to be regarded skeptically where they cannot be verified by company records, there is little doubt that Reymer Brothers was among the largest candy companies in the region. Until the 1950s, the company maintained as many as half a dozen retail outlets in downtown Pittsburgh and nearby commercial centers. They had tea rooms in the Oliver Building, the Union Trust Building, the Iroquois Building and the Jenkins Arcade, in addition to the one in the Kaufmann's Store.

Reymer's best-known and longest-lived product is not a candy, but a non-carbonated, concentrated drink mix known as "Lemon Blend," usually sold as a fountain drink. The candy company purchased rights to the product in 1932 from its inventor, E. J. Keagy, a North Side druggist. By 1959, the fruit drink constituted 70 percent of the company's sales. If Lemon Blennd was the company's greatest success, their tea rooms may have been their greatest failure. Although these lavish enterprises were downtown fixtures for many years, they proved to be money losers, particularly during the Depression. In the 1930s, Reymer's lost hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly. Meanwhile, the D. L. Clark Company, their North Side competitor since 1887, was turning modest profits as their nickel candy bars continued to sell well. Other companies surpassed Reymer's as well. The Hardie Brothers Company, founded in 1901, moved within 15 years to a plant nearly four times the size of Reymer's. By emphasizing penny, 5, and 10-cent items as well as bulk goods, Hardie Brothers outsold Reymer's. Likewise, in 1919, the largest chocolate and cocoa factory west of the Alleghenies was claimed to be the Pennsylvania Chocolate Company on Centre Avenue, which had been organized in 1905. Nonetheless, with the quality of their products, innovations like the fruit and nut Easter egg and the style of their tea rooms, Reymer's maintained a unique high profile in the Pittsburgh candy industry.

Reymer's candy manufacturing days ended in 1959, apparently the victim of nationally advertised sweets. They were bought out by competitor Dimlings, who subsequently went out of business in 1969. Reymer's sold the rights for Lemon Blennd to the H. J. Heinz Company of Pittsburgh. Heinz in turn sold the manufacturing rights for the product to Byrnes & Kiefer Company of Pittsburgh, a wholesale bakery supply and food processing operation. Bynes & Kiefer still market the drink mix as "Reymer's Lemon Blennd."

The Reymer Brothers Candy Factory served as the location of manufacture for the company's candy and confections, but no detailed report of its day-to-day operations seem to have survived the company's going out of business and the various changes of ownership of the rights to produce Lemon Blennd. This is the case despite searches in local university libraries, public libraries, the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society, and the H. J. Heinz Company Archives. Accordingly, although some function-related idiosyncrasies are apparent in the building, changes in floor heights and occasional use of concrete flooring instead of wood, these cannot be definitively attributed to a particular aspect of candy manufacture. The industrial equipment was removed and with it most clues to the candy-making process. Since 1968 when the current owner purchased the building from Dimlings, it has been used as Warehouse and office space.

The Reymer Brothers Candy Factory is credited to Charles Bickel, one of Pittsburgh's most prolific practitioners of the era, in a published biography in History of Pittsburgh and Environs. Additionally, a partial set of undated plans for the Reymer's factory gives his name. Unlike many of his Ecole des Beaux Art-trained contemporaries, Bickel was educated in Germany. From there, he returned to Pittsburgh to enjoy a thirty-five-year career (1885-1920). He designed some 90 major works and averaged close to $3 million per year in the value of his built work. His obituary in the May 1921 American Institute of Architects Journal perhaps reflects the design orientation of the AIA or the times: "...Better known as an authority on structural engineering rather than architectural design, Mr. Bickel had a large and successful practice in his line of work." No treatise on Bickel's career exists.

Bickel's work included many commercial buildings in Revival styles, including Romanesque examples like the German National Bank (now Granite Building, 1890), Ewart Building, and South Side Market House (1893). Renaissance Revival work by Bickel includes the Kaufmann's Department Store (1898), multi-story buildings for 109-115 Wood Street (1906-7), and, at the corner of Wood Street and Second Avenue, now the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, 11 Wood Street (1902), and the Boggs Building on Federal Street in Pittsburgh's North Side (1912). Bickel also designed a number of municipal buildings, such as the Public Safety Building and various fire and police stations in his several years as city architect.

The prominence of the Richardsonian Romanesque Style in Bickel's work and in Pittsburgh generally relates directly to Henry Hobson Richardson's Allegheny County Courthouse of 1888. The popular and widely-heralded building established a trend toward Romanesque Revival architecture which lasted for several years in Pittsburgh and included many building types. As a commercial building, the Reymer Factory also relates to Richardson's Marshall Field Warehouse in Chicago of 1887 (now demolished), a well-published building in Richardson's Romanesque Style. Among Bickel's own works, the Reymer Factory bears resemblance to the lower seven floors of the nine-story Ewart Building; the seventh floor of the latter has the same tripartite bays in an arch as the top floor of the Reymer Factory.

Building Description

The former Reymer Brothers Candy Factory, constructed in 1906, occupies approximately one-quarter of a city block in the Uptown area, six blocks west of Pittsburgh's downtown. The building is part of a neighborhood dominated by Mercy Hospital across the Street and Duquesne University on "The Bluff" to the southwest. It is surrounded by remaining warehouses, some small storefronts and a variety of parking lots and buildings in a generally low-rise neighborhood. The Reymer Factory is six stories tall and is five bays by six bays, 108 by 124 feet, except at the inside rear (northwest) corner, where three bays are missing on the long side. Its narrow facade faces south onto Forbes Avenue. The building abuts Kaufmann's warehouse, a four-story, brick-faced concrete building of 1901 to the west. Together, the two buildings occupy the northern block of Forbes Avenue between Pride and Stevenson Streets. The Reymer Factory protrudes approximately fifteen feet closer to the street than the Kaufmann's Warehouse does, so the Reymer Factory has a one-bay facade facing west. The building is designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style with brick loadbearing walls, a heavy timber frame and wooden floors, although it has a few small sections of concrete flooring. It has regular intercolumnations supporting open floor spaces. Because it originally had no public functions, it lacked public lobby space in its first configuration. Accordingly, the historical fabric on the building interior includes only the unfinished surfaces of brick and timber, in addition to elevator and stair functions. The concrete stairwell and elevator shaft rise through the height of the building. The primary historical fabric is the building exterior which includes some minor changes of renovation, but largely retains its integrity.

The building's exterior is constructed of brick, with corbeled brick parapets and a flat roof. Raised a half story above ground level, the building's first-floor level is indicated by a stone belt course. The one-and-a-half-story entrance opening, one bay east of center on the south facade, has been restored. Windows of historically appropriate proportions have been installed, along with a classical surround of two narrow Doric pilasters on each side, surmounted by a frieze with dentils and metopes. On the remainder of the facade, windows are primarily tall and narrow double-hung 2/2 sash with stone sills. They are grouped in threes between shallow, flat vertical piers. First and fifth-story windows have transoms, while those on floors two through four do not. At the sixth story, one large arched window matches the width of the groups of three below, creating a series of arcuations at the top floor below the cornice. The windows on the south and east sides have been refurbished, while the window on the west facade have been replaced. Masonry is rusticated at the sixth-floor level, as if alternating courses of large-scale masonry and correspondingly large voussoirs, rather than brick, were protruding from the facade. The Reymer factory cornice consists of two alternating rows of dentils and corbels.

The two westernmost vertical rows of windows on the Forbes Avenue facade are blind-faced in with brick. At the narrow strip of the facade facing west, where the building protrudes further toward Forbes Avenue than the contiguous Kaufmann's Warehouse, the facade is pierced only by doors. A fire escape hangs from them. Along Pride Street, the middle vertical row of windows in the second bay from the north is blind, as are the northernmost two vertical rows. The north-to-south downward slope of Pride Street is also visible here.

The rear elevation faces a small alley and a neighboring building. Here the three "missing" bays of the floor plan are visible, two of them filled with a small mechanical shed of recent but indeterminate date. The Reymer factory has on its rear facade windows similar in type to the front, but less formal in placement.

On its interior, the Reymer Factory has a passenger/freight elevator in the southwest corner of the building. It also has a freight elevator and stairs in the northeast corner. These have ramifications on the otherwise regular facade, causing the windows to be offset half a story for the northeast stairs or blind for the southwest elevator. The Reymer Factory's main entrance and lobby are on the front (south) facade, one bay to the east of center. Space inside the Reymer factory is currently unpartitioned, except for the finished lobby space of the first floor and the elevator, restroom and stairway spaces. From the entrance, a staircase and wheelchair lift rise half a floor to the first-floor level, which is in a continuous space with them. Elsewhere, including the basement, floors are open and unfinished, punctuated only by regular intercolumnations. Floor heights vary in this building, from 13 feet in the basement, second third and fourth floors to 17 feet at the highest point of the sixth, which slopes slightly. The first and fifth floors are 16 feet high. On the fifth and sixth floor, the southernmost bays of each floor, as well as occasional bays deeper into the space have concrete rather than wood floors. However, they have no other architectural or remaining hardware differences from other sections of wooden flooring in the building.

Between 1987 and 1992, the building owner conducted a rehabilitation under the federal historic preservation Investment Tax Credit Program. This project included the addition of a wheelchair-accessible interior lobby, the conversion of an open freight elevator to a closed passenger elevator, and an upgrade of mechanical systems. Although a minor restoration of the main entry uncovered some original architectural features, the building exterior otherwise remains in good original condition, uncleaned, with its original windows intact on the facades facing the street. The building's change of use from factory to warehouse in 1959 resulted in the removal of industrial equipment and a few non-structural partitions, but no change in structure or architectural treatments. Accordingly, the Reymer Brothers' Candy Factory has a high level of building integrity and maintains its historic appearance.