Category: History, Mon Valley Miscellany, Shameless Horn-Tooting || By

(Note: Opinions expressed on Tube City Almanac are not those of the G.C. Murphy Co. Foundation, McKeesport Heritage Center or any other organization.)

Your primary editorial voice has been extremely busy this week readying displays for the lobby of downtown Pittsburgh's Market Square Place building.

The mixed-use condominium and retail complex was carved last year out of the old G.C. Murphy Co. store between Forbes and Fifth avenues, near Market Square. The store --- known as "Number 12" in the parlance of the McKeesport-based G.C. Murphy Co. --- was considered one of the largest and busiest five-and-10 stores in the world, along with F.W. Woolworth locations in New York and San Francisco.

The three displays will tell the story of the G.C. Murphy Co., the Pittsburgh store and the primarily female clerks who staffed Murphy counters.

Once the nation's fifth-largest variety store chain, the Murphy Co. was founded in McKeesport in 1906. In 1985, after attacks by corporate raiders, the company was taken over by Connecticut-based Ames Department Stores. The Downtown McKeesport headquarters, or "Home Office," closed in 1989, and the warehouse in Christy Park was closed four years later.

Store 12 opened in October 1930. It was sold by Ames, along with other Murphy variety stores, to a competitor, York, Pa.-based McCrory Corp., in 1989, and closed in 2001.

The displays are being provided by the non-profit charitable arm of the G.C. Murphy Co., the G.C. Murphy Co. Foundation, which was founded in 1952 and remains based in McKeesport. The Murphy archives are at the McKeesport Heritage Center in Renziehausen Park.

These images aren't the complete displays, which will have additional memorabilia attached to them. Click any image to enlarge.

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