An explosion 97 years ago today wrecked the North Side; shock waves continue to reverberate

The blast wave traveled at least 6,500 feet per second, significantly faster than the speed of sound, so it slammed into Joe Harris’ home on Doughton Way an instant before the walls of his workplace half a mile away crashed down on him.

Harris’ young wife, Bertha, with one son crawling around in diapers and another 7 months in the womb, certainly felt the sudden pressure change. In houses throughout Pittsburgh, windows jolted in their frames, pictures crashed to the floor, stacked china toppled. 

Wilma Bellan, too, must have felt the wave as it traveled the 2½ miles to her home on Spring Garden Avenue, where she cared for two young sons. She knew her husband, William, 31, was then down on Reedsdale Street, working with a crew to repair leaks in a towering gas tank that had cast shadows over the neighborhood for years.

Across the Ohio River, the blast wave hammered Downtown Pittsburgh. A weather forecaster sitting at his desk in the Oliver Building felt the structure sway “as if given a mighty push.” Windows exploded. From the upper floors of the Jenkins Arcade, the Wabash Building, the Arrott Building and dozens of others, shards of glass plummeted down, slicing into pedestrians below. A roar that accompanied the wave convinced some people that the world was coming to an end.

By then, black smoke blanketed several blocks of the North Side neighborhood of Manchester. Twisted chunks of steel, some weighing more than a ton, crashed down on houses, businesses and streets. On Reedsdale Street,  bloodied and dazed residents staggered out of their shattered homes and wondered, “What happened?”

• • •

In the fall of 1927, three gas storage tanks dominated Reedsdale Street, which runs parallel to the Ohio River, about 500 feet from the water’s edge. In century-old pictures of Pittsburgh, you can see the tanks rising in the background. They appear as skeletons of ironwork embracing steel containers that look like giant upside-down cups. The devices, known at the time as gasometers, were designed for efficiency, not beauty, and they stored gas used both in homes and industries.

The first of the tanks, built in 1898, was relatively small and drew little attention. But when a gas company proposed building a second tank later that same year, residents grew concerned. In this section of Manchester, houses and apartment buildings squeezed next to steel mills and factories. Residents were accustomed to the rumble and boom of industry. But this new tank was something else.

Newspapers said it would be the largest such tank in the world. When filled, it would rise 210 feet in the air, just a few dozen feet shorter than the Allegheny County Courthouse, and hold 5 million cubic feet of gas. Placing such a large tank of explosive gas in the midst of a densely packed neighborhood seemed like an extremely bad idea.

Don’t worry, gas company officials said. They assured residents and local officials they’d take every precaution to ensure the tank’s safety.

This promise held for nearly three decades. By then, the aging tank had developed a number of leaks and was in need of repairs, so Equitable Gas Co. emptied the tank over a period of weeks, then flushed it with steam to remove any remnants of gas. Air inside the tank was tested. Only trace amounts of gas remained. So at 8 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 14, 1927, William Bellan and a dozen other workers climbed the narrow, steep stairs to the tank’s upper reaches. They carried with them acetylene torches so they could weld sheets of metal over holes that had developed in the tank.

This is Bellan’s story: He had grown up in a Washington County coal town called Stockdale. His father, Mike Bellan, worked in the mines. Dampness and fumes ushered him to death from tuberculosis at age 55. That was in 1920. Within a few years of his father’s death, William married Wilma Pasterchack. The couple gave birth to a son, William, in 1923. Two years later a second son, Robert, came along. Shortly after, the couple packed up and moved from tiny Stockdale to Pittsburgh’s Spring Hill neighborhood.

A picture shot around 1926 shows a man believed to be Bellan standing among the gas tanks just off Reedsdale Street. He’s situated between the two largest – the tank built in the late 1800s and a newer, bigger tank that held 6 million cubic feet of gas. The third and smaller tank rises in the background.

Working on such towering structures in a city known for its industrial grandeur must have infused Bellan with a sense of pride and accomplishment. He would not waste his lungs in an underground mine and slowly wither like his father. And so on a cool November morning, Bellan clamored upward with his colleagues, the torches and small containers of gas clanking against metal rails. 

A worker standing outside the Pittsburgh Clay Pot factory, which was situated next to the tanks, glanced up and saw the men. They were silhouettes moving against the gray sky. 

• • •

At that moment, 8:43 a.m., Pittsburgh Fire Chief Richard L. Smith steered his automobile onto the Manchester Bridge, which offered him an excellent view of the neighborhood below. Smith watched, stunned, as the giant steel tank on Reedsdale shot skyward, riding a ball of flame. It rose hundreds of feet, remaining briefly intact before exploding with a roar “like a great fireworks bomb.” 

Robert Russell, a 32-year-old composing room worker at The Pittsburgh Press, was stuck in traffic at the intersection of North and Arch streets when his Plymouth seemed to leap into the air. The ground shook, then came the roar. Russell could see a cloud of black smoke laced with flames billowing out over Manchester. He put his vehicle into gear and rumbled toward the scene.

Nearing Reedsdale street, Russell saw people lying in the street. Were they wounded or dead? Others stood dazed and bloodied in the blown-out windows of their homes. Downed power lines snapped and threw sparks. Splintered pieces of house frames, bricks, portions of roofs and other debris clogged the street. The fronts of a few Reedsdale Street homes had collapsed, spilling plaster and floors and furniture. What remained of the structures resembled doll houses with rooms exposed, showing beds, showers, dresser drawers, pictures hanging at odd angles on walls. 

• • •

Joe Harris could not have known what happened. By the time his wife, Bertha, felt the blast wave, he’d been thrust into darkness and the ceiling above had crashed down on him. 

Harris worked in the four-story factory of the Pittsburgh Clay Pot Company with dozens of others from various backgrounds – some were Black migrants from the American South, some were immigrants from Eastern Europe, some were Pittsburgh born. They spent their days forming clay pots used in the production of glass, which was still big business in places such as Ford City. The factory’s eastern wall stood a few dozen yards from the aging gas tank.

Harris fell from the second floor to the basement, which was rapidly filling with water. Great, gushing waves poured down the steps. A worker named Joe Molinosky rushed to steps leading to the first floor. He fought against the oncoming water, then up to his knees. Once on the first floor he escaped through a window opening. Behind him, the building had collapsed into a massive pile of bricks. Inside, several workers remained trapped or buried. Among them was Harris.

William Bellan had no chance of survival. All men working on the tank died, their bodies mangled and, in some cases, torn apart by the force of the blast. Recovery workers later found a torso on the superstructure, a head in the debris below. Body parts turned up in Avalon, 5 miles north.

The county coroner counted 28 dead. Newspapers said all but one were workers. They discounted the important and necessary task undertaken by Mary Cangellier, a mother washing her family’s clothes in a home on Ridge Avenue. The explosion shattered a window and sent a shard of glass into her hip, severing an artery. Bleeding profusely, she staggered out onto Ridge Avenue and collapsed. A motorist drove her to a nearby hospital, where Mary died of blood loss and shock. She was survived by a husband and five children.

• • •

Shortly after the smoke cleared, investigators converged on the scene. A faulty valve had allowed gas to slowly seep into the tank that company officials assumed was empty, they said. Air inside the tank had been tested in the days prior to repair work but not on the morning of Nov. 14. By then, the mixture of gas and air inside the tank had reached a combustible level. A workman’s torch set it off.

As the tank flew apart, pieces of metal sliced through the two other tanks. Escaping gas ignited into a massive fireball that generated incredible heat but quickly burned itself out. Other steel chunks from the destroyed tank landed throughout the district. A piece the size of a bus slammed down on Wolfendale Street, in front of Herbick and Held Printing Co. Another chunk plowed through the roof of a home at 1101 Reedsdale St. and lodged in a hallway.

The blast pushed down an estimated 10 million gallons of water in the tank’s base, which rose more than 40 feet and acted like a seal to keep gas from escaping. The effect was similar to dropping a basketball into a pan of water – the liquid splashed out over the edges of the base, inundating the district, pouring across Reedsdale Street and flooding the basement workrooms of the Pittsburgh Clay Pot Co., where fallen debris had trapped workers. Several drowned.

• • •

Harris’ body was one of the first to arrive at the gloomy Allegheny County morgue, which by early afternoon was surrounded by so many anxious people wondering if their husbands or sons were on slabs inside that authorities assigned six officers to keep things under control. Harris’ remains were identified by his brother-in-law, saving Bertha from the gruesome task. 

Wilma Bellan did the job herself. She looked down at a broken human form and identified it as that of her husband. How badly he was damaged, only God knows, for the record is respectfully vague. “Body mangled due to explosion of gas tank,” the coroner’s report reads.

• • •

Pittsburgh quickly recovered from the disaster. With all of the bodies and body parts removed, workers began clearing the site. A picture of the Reedsdale Street location from May 1929 shows it to be cleared and ready for redevelopment. For decades industry and warehouses dominated this section. Then the North Side changed. A neighborhood gave way to a stadium and parking lots. That stadium gave way to another, newer stadium. A casino rose on the lot once dominated by gas tanks. Gamblers now feed money into slot machines on the ground where William Bellan and Joe Harris and so many others perished. 

• • •

“I realized he must have loved me.”

A mile north of the casino, in a two-story house tucked into Pennsylvania Street, Barbara Randall keeps a black-and-white picture showing Joe and Bertha Harris on their wedding day. She also displays images of the couple’s son, Joe Jr.

Bertha tells her family’s story: After her husband’s death, Bertha married a man named Lee Randall. The couple raised Bertha’s two sons, Joe Jr. (family members just called him Joe) and Robert, in the small house on Dounton Way. Randall supported the family by working at the J&L steel mill.

Barbara came along In 1944. Bertha and Lee waited a long time to bring another child into the world, perhaps because of the Great Depression or the World War. But the long wait meant Barbara was younger than her brothers by nearly two decades. “I was the baby, the brat, but not a nasty brat,” Randall recalled with a laugh. “I had everything. I was the spoiled child.”

By then, both of her brothers were out of the house. Robert had joined the Army, and Joe Jr. was on the road, working as a traveling musician. A versatile and talented jazz drummer, his career quickly reached dizzying heights. He’d join Dizzy Gillespie’s band and accompany legends of the jazz world – Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins. 

Search his name on YouTube and you’ll find a clip of him playing with Quincy Jones’ orchestra in Belgium in 1960. Joe Jr. sits on a riser, high above his band members. He’s cool and confident, his drumsticks a blur. Joe was then living in West Germany and performing in a number of different countries.

When Barbara graduated from Allegheny High School in 1962, Joe Jr. gifted her with a trip to Europe. She lived with him in West Germany for several months and traveled with him throughout the continent to places such as Milan, Copenhagen, Nice, St. Moritz.

Barbara smiles when she recalls a visit to the French Riviera. “You could walk down the street and see the ocean with the caps blowing in the wind, and all the clubs were going, you could just go right up the steps and into the club,” she said. “Everything was open. I just loved it.”

“We were on the beach with Quincy Jones [who was visiting to attend a film festival], and everybody was coming by. The sailors and everyone wanted autographs. They probably went home and said, ‘Who was Barbara Randall?’ Quincy Jones was with us there sitting on the sand on the beach. I was 18. Everything was new to me on the other side of the world.” 

The trip sounds like a teenager’s dream. In West Berlin, Barbara took dance and voice lessons and sang backup vocals in a jazz band while her brother played drums. She auditioned for a role in a movie. (She didn’t get the role; it went to Sammy Davis Jr.’s girlfriend).

Joe Jr. returned to the U.S. shortly after Barbara’s visit. He continued his music career in the states and often traveled. At home, he was the star of the Harris family. During visits, Joe Jr.’s aunts and uncles and grandparents prepared his favorite foods. In his later years, he and Barbara shared the two-story home on Pennsylvania Avenue. Joe Jr. lived upstairs; Barbara stayed downstairs. She would hear the thumping of his drumming in the attic.

Proud and strong willed, Joe Jr. could prove difficult to deal with and became somewhat eccentric. When he returned from Europe, he arranged for his two-seat convertible Volvo with red and white interior to be shipped to the U.S., but he considered gas here to be too expensive so he sold the vehicle and rode a bicycle or used a jitney to get around. Barbara would see him riding down the street with bags of groceries dangling from the handlebars.

His relationship with his sister grew complicated. The two rarely communicated. Once Barbara tried to serve him a Thanksgiving meal by placing a plate of food in front of his door. “I don’t need any of your food,” he snapped. Another time Barbara decided to place battery-powered candles in all of the front windows of the home. She knocked on Joe Jr.’s door and asked if he’d put candles in his front-facing windows. “Joe, this year I’d like our house to be all together,” Barbara recalled. “And he said, ‘I’m not putting that mess in my windows’ and slammed the door.”

Still, she speaks proudly of her brother. Two poster-sized renderings of Joe Jr. with several other jazz greats hang in her living room. She quickly pulls out photographs of her brother and shows them to a visitor. She wonders if his coldness had something to do with her brother’s experiences as a traveling Black musician in a time of often strict segregation. Her other brother, Robert Harris, a year younger than Joe Jr., was a giving and helpful man, Barbara said. She calls him Bobby. He would telephone her early in the morning, before she left for work, to warn her when the roads were bad. Then he’d call later in the afternoon to make sure she arrived home safely. Bobby died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1977.

The two treated her so differently. How can you make sense of it? Barbara shakes her head. Both brothers lost a father they never knew and lived childhoods marked by an economic calamity that devastated working people. Randall Lee was always there as a stepfather, a provider. He was a kind and quiet man who each week handed Bertha his steelworker paycheck. Betha handled the money and made sure all the bills were paid.

While trying to puzzle out the actions of her oldest brother, Barbara’s mind drifts back to 1962 and that dreamlike trip to Europe.

“Maybe he thought I was a disappointment for all he tried to do for me,” she said. “I didn’t go into show business like he wanted. I just lived my life. Maybe he wanted more for me.”

• • •

Around 4 a.m. on a January day in 2016, someone knocked on Barbara’s front door. Lights flashed through her windows. She looked out – it was a team of paramedics. They had received a 911 call from this location, they said. It must have been Joe Jr. 

They went upstairs and banged on his door with such force that Barbara was afraid they’d break it down. A weak voice responded, “Here I come.”

Paramedics loaded Joe Jr. into an ambulance and drove him away.

“They asked me if he’d been sick and I said, ‘I don’t know anything about my brother because he never shares anything with me at all,” Barbara said. He died a few days later at Allegheny General Hospital.

Earlier, Barbara had reached out to Joe Jr.’s daughter Mallou. Barbara had secretly written down the address after she saw a letter Mallou had written to her father. Barbara feared Joe Jr. would be upset if he knew she’d done so.

Barbara wrote to her niece and apologized for not reaching out and staying in touch. Mallou responded with a letter of her own. Barbara saw it when she got home from work one day. “Oh my God!” Barbara thought. She opened it immediately.

Mallou was by then an adult, and working as a musician in Sweden. Her letter included pictures of her children. She also wrote that her full name was Mallou Barbara Harris. She had always wondered about the middle name her father had given her. Now she knew. 

The news stunned Barbara. Her brother had thought of her while naming his daughter. 

 “I had to sit down when I read it,” Barbara said. “Tears came to my eyes. I realized he must have loved me.”

***

“Work and family came first.”

William Bellan’s death devastated his wife, Wilma. In addition to grieving, Wilma had to look out for her two young sons, Edward and Robert. How would she support them? Things got worse a few years later with the arrival the Great Depression. Wilma’s small family lived in stark poverty, said Wilma’s grandson and Robert’s son, Bob Bellan, 62, who lives in the North Hills.

“My father would often tell me how they grew up with barely the basics,” Bob Bellan wrote in an email detailing much of his family history.  “Shoes would be worn with waxed cardboard inserted in the soles to cover the holes.”

Wilma lacked money for meat so her sons’ school lunches sometimes consisted of “ketchup sandwiches.”  She and her sons moved out of the home on Spring Garden Avenue but remained in the neighborhood. Once they moved from the second floor to a third floor room of a multifamily residence so they could save $5 a month on rent. The catch: Plumbing did not extend to the third floor.

At one point, Wilma received a settlement for the death of her husband. It wasn’t much, Bob Bellan said, but some family members felt she had hit the jackpot and schemed to get some of the money. A relative with a farm approached Wilma with an offer: She and her boys could live on the farm and the relative would help raise the sons. So Wilma and Edward and Robert piled into a vehicle and traveled several miles to the farm – Bob believes it was in Ohio. Once on the farm, Wilma learned the helpful family member intended for her and her sons to live in a barn with the animals.

Wilma flew into a rage, screaming that she was not going to raise her children in a barn. She arranged for a ride back to Pittsburgh.

“My dad told me he could vividly recall sitting in the back of an open truck as they drove back to Pittsburgh in the middle of the night,” Bob Bellan wrote.

Such experiences hardened Wilma. She became wary and distrustful of others. And she was always a hard worker.

Census records show Wilma was employed as a food wrapper at a processing plant, perhaps the H.J. Heinz plant below Spring Garden. Later, she worked in a kitchen, preparing meals for employees at a Mobile Oil facility on the North Side. On her job application, she’d lied about her age, claiming she was younger than her years. She later fought with administrators forcing her into retirement.

This commitment to hard work, and a determination to put family obligations above all others, could make life difficult for her son Robert and grandson Bob. She expected them to act on the same values. Her strong-willed nature created more challenges, especially for Bob.

As a teenager, he was expected to help his grandmother with chores like cutting the grass and shoveling snow out of the driveway. If he was even a few moments late in arriving, Wilma would haul out the lawnmower and start cutting it herself.

“I cannot tell you the hell that would rain down on me if I had to tell my father that when I got to my grandmother’s house the grass had been cut or the driveway had been shoveled,” Bob wrote. “I swear, if I called to tell her I was on the way, she would immediately go outside to try to beat me to the task.”

Robert routinely drove his mother to a Shop’n Save store on Spring Garden Avenue so she could buy groceries. One Saturday Robert called Wilma and said he was running late. This didn’t sit well with Wilma.

“I vividly recall driving down Spring Garden Ave and seeing my grandmother, probably well into her 70s by this point, trudging down the street carrying her groceries,” Bob wrote. Robert stopped and offered her a ride. She refused. She and Robert had what Bob described as a “lively discussion” in the street.

“All we could do was drive to her house and wait for her.”

Wilma was frugal – she never bought anything she didn’t need. In the winter, she refused to turn up the heat in her home. Instead, she sought warmth by wrapping herself in worn clothing and sitting by a stove in the kitchen. “It is not that she did not have the means by this point to afford to heat the house,” Bob wrote. “I now look back and recognize that this was probably what she did in the years following my grandfather’s death. ”

She died at age 92 in 1996.

Robert Bellan embraced this same commitment to work during a 47-year career as a steamfitter. As a foreman, he worried over every aspect of a project. When a work problem vexed him, he’d visit the worksite on the weekend in an effort to visualize solutions. Bob often accompanied his father on these trips. The job took a toll on Robert. His wife, Maryanne, could gauge the difficulty of a work project by the level of thrashing in Robert’s sleep.

The stress level eased somewhat when Robert ceased being a foreman at age 70. He retired two years later. Maryanne died in 2010,  and son Bob became the father’s caretaker. By then, Robert had mellowed. Still, he exhibited some of his mother Wilma’s traits. Bob would stop by his father’s house to find him sitting in the cold and wearing worn out clothes. Turn up the heat, Bob would say. Robert grew impatient while waiting for his son to do yard work and make household repairs. One time Robert flooded his kitchen because he refused to wait for Bob to arrive to help with a sink repair.

Robert Bellan died in 2015. He was 89 years old.

For most of his life, Bob felt his father did not understand him. Work was always a priority with Robert. He expected the same of his son. This was especially difficult for Bob as a teenager. He wanted to hang out with friends. He’d get to his grandmother’s house to do chores later. And why did he have to spend every Saturday there?

Robert would have none of it. No debate, no negotiation.

As the years passed, Bob developed a more thorough understanding of his father. Robert Bellan had no frame of reference for his son’s life – a childhood with decent shoes to wear, a nice home, sandwiches with lunch meat every day. Instability and want filled Robert’s young life. Things and people you cared about could disappear. He learned to waste nothing, embrace hardship, and rely on a close family structure. That’s how you got through life, which would inevitably toss hardship in your lap. On top of all this, Robert never had the opportunity to learn to be a father. The North Side explosion – and a failure to keep workers safe – saw to that.

The burden, however, falls on the son. It’s a Bellan family tradition, only now it is accompanied by reflection and a yearning to connect the decades of crises that buffeted his family with the actions and attitudes of those who shaped his life. This is especially true with his father.

“It was me that failed to appreciate the life he had lived,” Bob wrote. “It was only much later in my life that the veil was lifted on the effects of that day in November 1927. I understood why we had difficulty communicating during those rough adolescent years. I understood why we had the same small kitchen table that barely sat two people, let alone three, all my life. Why would you spend money on a new table? It finally made perfect sense why a 10-year-old kid would be expected to spend  two weeks in the summer cutting the old aluminum windows into pieces for scrap instead of playing with his friends. I understood why, above all else, work and family came first.”