Joe Wood, the famous wooden baseball player statue which stood resolutely before myriad tobacconists and saloons in old Rochester had a cousin: a jocular, rotund likeness of Samuel Pickwick from The Pickwick Papers written by Charles Dickens.

The statue of Pickwick stood out front of a tobacconist on East Main Street, with his hand full of wooden cigars.

The classic literary character of Charles Dicken’s Pickwick Papers was rendered in much the way illustrators of the original editions portrayed him: bald, rotund, in a waistcoat and pocketwatch with spectacles upon his nose:

The Pickwick statue first appeared before the tobacco shop of Abram E. Wollf, a prominent citizen and a wealthy one.

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Elias Wollf

Abram E. Wollf was a son of Elias Wollf, one of the earliest Jewish settlers in Rochester. Elias Wollf was a clothier; for a time he went into business with Julius Bachman as the firm of Wollf & Bachman.

Wollf was a clothing manufacturer and dealer; he engaged in this industry as a partner with Julius Bachman.

Wolf & Bachman was on the corner of East Main Street and Liberty Street; the Pickwick Cigar Store would operate in the lower level.

Elias Wollf’s home was at No. 29 St. Paul Street, a parcel between St. Paul and North Water Streets.

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The Orphean Building

To learn more about the building Wollf & Bachman were in, we must rewind to 1823. Frederick Starr, a cabinet-maker, had come to Rochester the previous year and began a cabinet manufacturing shop. In 1823, he constructed a building on the corner of East Main Street and Liberty Street.

This building burned to ruins in 1849, from a fire reportedly set by an employee of Starr’s factory who was losing his mind from typhoid. On top of that, the responding firefighters were reportedly “drunken” and “disorderly”, exhibiting “improper conduct”; due to their poor efforts, the building was a total loss.

Starr would build a five-story brick building on the same spot, with the intent of building piano fortes. Starr would go on to become Rochester’s premier manufacturer of pianos and other cabinet-style instruments; he would call his building the Orphean Building after Orpheus, the mythic Ancient Greek musician.

Roughly around 1863, Frederick Starr sold the Orphean building to Owen Gaffney, who owned the neighboring block to the east, at the northwest corner of St. Paul and East Main streets. Gaffney would sell the building off the following year to Wollf & Bachmann, the previously-introduced clothing retailer comprised of Elias Wollf and Julius Bachman.

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Abram E. Wollf

While Elias Wollf was running the clothing operation on the upper floors, his son Abram was running the cigar shop and sampling room on the ground floor.

During Wollf’s proprietorship of the cigar store, the Pickwick statue would be placed by the door.

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Pickwick Appears

It is apparent from the papers that Pickwick appeared by door of Wollf’s cigar shop in 1871. An advertisement for Pickwick Cigars, a ten-cent cigar brand sold by Wollf, this figure became a prominent reference point for the cigar shop, which soon became known in general speech as the “Pickwick Cigar Shop”.

Not content with a single literary reference, the above article compares the Dickensian figure to Sir John Falstaff, a repeat character in William Shakespeare‘s plays.

On December 12th, 1871, the Pickwick statue was blown over in a heavy wind, and was heavily damaged.

However, the fall was not so fatal as the Times-Union made it out to be. The Pickwick statue was apparently put to rights and set back up at its former post.

Oddly, the spectacles worn by the Pickwick statue were of real glass; during a windstorm in April of 1875, the statue was nearly toppled by gusts, and the glass from the spectacles blown out and shattered on the sidewalk:

This suggests that the spectacles were a wire-and-glass addition to the wooden statue, and that explains the absence of such spectacles in specimens from later times, such as the one in Buffalo I’ll introduce in a moment.

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The Kerngood Bros.

In 1872, the “Pickwick” Cigar Store, No. 49 East Main Street, was put up for sale by Wollf, who was leaving behind retail tobacco sales to pursue a wholesale business instead.

The cigar store would be purchased by brothers Moses and Jacob Kerngood, who had been working in the clothing industry under the Garson family.

In 1875, the brothers Kerngood moved from Rome Street to No. 16 Pleasant Street:

Kerngood was the recipient of an odd and macabre keepsake from William Frederick Cody, more popularly known as “Buffalo Bill”. The storied soldier had fought with a Cheyenne chief named Heova’ehe [Yellow Hair] during a skirmish referred to as The Battle of Warbonnet Creek on July 17, 1876. Buffalo Bill, in defiance of the usual norm of sending the fallen chief’s war bonnet back to the tribe, kept the sacred relic. He kept a number of Heova’ehe’s possessions and his trophy scalp, to which Buffalo Bill added Heova’ehe’s own scalp.

It was this complete kit which Moses Kerngood received only ten days later, so speedy that the unfortunate chief’s scalp was still not dried, yet was “sprinkled with some chemical to preserve it”. Kerngood quickly put these items on display in the Pickwick Cigar Store. They remained there until at latest October, when Buffalo Bill would return to his stage show, there involving the scalp in a dramatic retelling of his skirmish with Heova’ehe.

As many seemed to doubt the authenticity of these items, a letter written by Buffalo Bill himself was cited as proof of legitimacy:

Kerngood was often sharing oddities of which he was in receipt. Moses’ brother John Kerngood, who lived in Denver, sent Moses a package of “antelope steaks”, most likely pronghorn, which Moses happily shared with the visiting public:

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Garson & Goldberg

In 1879, the cigar store becomes the property of Garson & Goldberg:

However, this does not seem to have lasted very long; by the end of November that year, No. 49 East Main Street would become the storefront of jewelers Geffell & Lowenguth.

Naturally, as a watchmaker and jeweler, they probably had very little need of a Samuel Pickwick sculpture proffering cigars. So this was probably the end of the line for our whilom wooden friend. No note is made as to his fate.

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Pickwick Examples

Other cigar store Pickwicks existed, with slight differences between them. An example from the Buffalo History Museum is shown below. It lacks spectacles, although those could have gone missing. In the figure’s right hand, a bundle of cigars, as seen also in the 1873 Kerngood’s advertisement.

This wooden Pickwick had stood out front of the cigar store of Frederick Riehl and Sons, at No. 166 Seneca Street in Buffalo, NY.

The similarities between the Buffalo Pickwick and our Rochester Pickwick are striking. Though I know probably numerous Pickwick sculptures were made by the cigar company to advertise their ten-cent cigar, I haven’t actually found a photograph of another anywhere else. So while I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to find they were cousins,

Below, a painting by Louis Plogsted, an artist who painted numerous artifacts of the past during the 1930s. The painting is of a Pickwick figure much like the ones we’ve discussed. It, too, is missing spectacles, but as the piece was painted in 1938, those may have gone missing by that point.

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Gibbons & Stone

In 1883, musical instrument dealers Gibbons & Stone moved from No. 86 State Street into No. 45 East Main Street.

In 1884, the address would change; instead of Nos. 45-57 East Main Street, the Orphean Building would become Nos. 110-116 East Main Street.

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Sibley Sale

In 1895, the old Orphean block was sold to the Sibley estate, who had been eyeing it for many years. The Sibley estate owned the adjacent building to the east, but had been unable to purchase the remainder of the block until this point.

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End Orphean Era

Apologies for that heading.

The McFarlin Clothing Company moved from No. 40 St. Paul Street into the Orphean building at Nos. 110-112 East Main Street in 1897, opening on March 1st of that year.

In 1906, the McFarlin Clothing Co. undertook a major renovation of the exterior of the building, marking the first major alteration of the Orphean Building’s exterior since its construction. In the below article, Frederick Starr’s son Dr. Charles Starr claims its construction as 1823; however, that seems to discount the complete destruction by fire of Starr’s shop in 1849, and the construction of the Orphean Building on its ruins. Indeed, there seems to be a lot of back-and-forth on the record about whether the building is, indeed, the same building. I think it is likely that it is not, and that the Orphean Building was built to replace Starr’s original building in 1849-1850.

Regardless, it’s remarkable; at the time, downtown Rochester was putting on a fresh face, and the complete renovation of this stalwart resident of the streetscape represented a major break with the past.

If I may be permitted to interrupt this list… it’s confusing. Very confusing. Perhaps I’m drastically misreading or I’m stupid, but I don’t think Dr. Charles Starr has a clear chronology of what happened at his father’s block. First off, he lists off Wollf & Bachman as one of the tenants following Wollf & Bachman, which is, er, strange. Dr. Starr also states that Hubbard & Torrance was a tenant of the building. However, I found an advertisement for Hubbard & Torrance in the 1853 directory, and it is clearly at the Orphean Building, No. 45 East Main Street:

It is plain to see that the building is the same as that portrayed in the 1859 directory, when it was definitely still the property of Starr:

Furthermore, if you examine the 1859 ad, there’s the name of Blodgett & Company over the center door. This was listed by Dr. Charles Starr as the next tenant after Hubbard & Torrance, which suggests to me that both were tenants of the Orphean Building during the 1850s, prior to its sale to Owen Gaffney, which took place 1863. With that discrepancy pointed out, I return you to Dr. Charles Starr’s dubiously accurate assessment of his father’s career:

If accurate, the building had been the site of the first stone sidewalk in Rochester, a marble block incised with the words “F. Starr, Furniture”.

A photograph excerpted from a 1907 advertisement shows the McFarlin Clothing Company as it appeared that year, after the completion of its 1906 renovations. A new façade appears to have been placed on the first three floors facing East Main Street, while the familiar top floors of the old Orphean building remain fairly untouched:

The below is an ad from the 1912 “History of the Jews of Rochester”, showing the same picture but with higher clarity:

The below photograph from 1919 shows the building as it appeared after the McFarlin Clothing Co. completed yet more renovations:

These renovations appear to have reached the very top floors; it also removed the bullnose corner on Liberty Street, opting instead for facing entirely on East Main.

Come 1925, a new building was erected for the McFarlin Clothing Co. at Nos. 191-195 East Main Street, near the corner of Stone Street. The E. W. Edwards & Co. department store purchased the former McFarlin building at Liberty Street.

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1927 Edwards Expansion

In 1927, the Edwards company undertook a major rebuilding of the old McFarlin building, bringing the height up to correspond with that of its next-door neighbor, the old Burke building.

Both buildings, Burke and McFarlin, were razed as part of the Genesee Crossroads urban renewal project in 1966.

Unfortunately, due to the literal hundreds of buildings targeted for demolition by urban renewal and transport expansion programs, the destruction of these old buildings between St. Paul and Liberty drew little special notice from the papers. At least as far as I was able to discover, no dramatic shots of demolition were published during the process of September, 1966. These venerable buildings simply vanished into the ether, to be replaced with a temporarily-empty lot on one of the most expensive plots of realty in the city.

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Holiday Inn

The Holiday Inn Downtown was built on the site of the razed buildings in 1970.

Later becoming the Four Points by Sheraton, then the Clarion Riverside Hotel, and the Radisson Riverside Hotel, the Holiday Inn hotel building still stands fifty-five years later. A bit of a bugbear building, the enormous structure seemingly constantly requires renovations and is difficult to keep full of patrons. Nonetheless, the prominent hotel remains on the spot where once the giants of Rochester clothiers had their stately stone edifices, and before that the pioneer piano-makers of the 19th century.

Nothing remains of those old buildings, razed to the ground and built over with glorious 1970 modernity. There is no doorway for the statue of Mr. Pickwick to stand, proffering his handful of chubby cheroots. There is no tobacconist, no music rooms, no fine suits, and so on. The stories of long ago have vanished from the spot, but they echo in the archives of the papers, the pictures in our scanned directories.

Once again, as I’ve probably belabored ad nauseum on these pages, to investigate the contents of our libraries is to gain the seeming ability to travel time. Check out all the resources your local library offers both online and in-person; check out the local history and genealogy department at the Central Library. There are so many maps, directories, books and ephemera which will give you a deeper glimpse into the stories of Rochester’s past. Or, just keep on following Gonechester!

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