From mattresses to the moon: The story of a century-old building on Reedsdale Street

Last week, while walking along Reedsdale Street on the North Shore, we looked up and saw a handprint of the past embedded on an empty five-story building that dates back more than a century. In darkness, the ghostly outline of a long-gone two-story building on the west-facing wall of 1106 Reedsdale St. seemed like an eerie remnant of a conquered and dismantled kingdom.

Today, this part of Reedsdale reflects modern sensibilities and values. A block east rises Acrisure Stadium, where thousands gathered on Sunday to moan and weep as the Steelers fumbled through a loss to the Cardinals. A few months ago the place was packed with mostly young women singing along with Taylor Swift. One block west, the street glows with the lights of Rivers Casino. Trains from Pittsburgh’s elevated light rail slide along tracks that parallel this part of Reedsdale.

And between all this modernity lies the old building at 1106, standing empty and dark and bearing the scars of neighboring buildings ripped away decades ago. We wondered: What’s the story with this place?

So we checked, and here’s what we discovered: A century ago, the building was occupied by a firm called the Pittsburgh Iron Folding Bed Co., which manufactured and sold beds, springs and mattresses. The company was proud of its “Never-Sag, Vermin proof springs” (according to ads).

Pittsburgh Iron Folding Bed Co. was founded by a man named Abraham Josselson. Born in 1877 in Russia, Josselson came to the U.S. in 1888 and in 1903 established a company to build iron folding beds — they were in high demand at the time.

Josselson’s firm grew and by 1917 employed 50 people. Its traveling salesmen regularly ventured into West Virginia and Ohio, in addition to Pennsylvania. A 1922 article about the company noted that it had its own “motor delivery equipment, including many fine trucks of the latest models.”

Pittsburgh Iron Folding Bed then occupied the Reedsdale Street building, which, the article reads, was “large and equipped in the latest and most approved manner. Its area is 90 x 100 feet, comprising five stories and a basement, which gives a total floor space of about 60,000 square feet and is of fireproof construction.”

Yeah, well, maybe the building was fireproof, but the contents? Not so much. We found two newspaper articles detailing instances in which sparks from machinery ignited cotton and other materials used in the making of mattresses.

The first blaze broke out on a Tuesday morning, May 9, 1922. To relieve a buildup of smoke on the third floor, firemen broke out 10 large glass windows. Black plumes billowed from the openings. Their vision obscured, firemen began dropping cotton bales weighing as much as 600 pounds to the sidewalk below, narrowly missing other firefighters and police gathered along Brown Street.

Another fire erupted on the second floor in December 1937. By then a mattress company called Re-Ly-On Products occupied the building. That blazed forced 35 employees, mostly women, from the factory.

For a while in the 1950s, the building was home to a furniture business called Singer Upholstering and Singer Sewing Co. The firm’s logo included a large capital “S,” which looked remarkably similar to that used by the famous Singer sewing machine manufacturer.

So in 1953, the Singer sewing machine folks sued. Two years later a federal judge ordered the Pittsburgh furniture business to drop the name Singer and pay more than $7,700 in fines and fees. (Another judge later overturned that ruling on a technicality.) The year 1955 was a bad one for the Pittsburgh Singer company. An investigation by the Better Business Bureau discovered the firm had signed deals to reupholster furniture at a cost of between $350 and $400 only to substitute cheap new furniture sets that sold for about $100.

Nearly all of the buildings that lined Reedsdale Street at the time are now gone. For years the structure at 1106 Reedsdale stood empty. In 2020, a real estate company proposed renovating the building into a new condo development under the name Eleven06, but that didn’t happen.

And then this: Last month, the Pittsburgh aerospace company Astrobotic announced it had acquired the building. Astrobotic intends to renovate the property and occupy the top four floors; a portion of the first floor will be leased to the Keystone Space Collaborative.

Astrobotic has been in the news for more than just acquiring old buildings. Its lunar lander Peregrine is scheduled to launch later this month. If all goes according to plan, Peregrine will be the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo program.

That’s the poetry of Pittsburgh: A building that once provided work for experienced tick sewers, carpenters, packers, shipper’s assistants and, during World War II, “factory girls,” will soon be a place where workers set their sights on the cosmos.