User Rating: / 3
PoorBest 

Monday, 20 December 2010 12:06

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

Mitchell Schwartz and Elaine Stone closed last week on four of the five industrial buildings on North Avenue in Allegheny West where for 80 years the Hipwell Co. rolled out 2 million flashlights a year. The building went dark and silent a few years ago.

Mitchell and Elaine were left with tons of detritis, including hundreds of boxes of flashlight parts. In the photo, Mitchell is holding a handful of little lights from a box Elaine is holding. An artist, she hopes to incorporate some of these artifacts in her work.

The street level of three of the buildings will be the new home of SMARTSolution Technologies, the  company Mitchell founded in the mid-90s. It has outgrown its space in the Knoxville neighborhood. The company provides audio-visual tecnology and equipment to businesses, schools and non-profits.

On Saturday morning, they gave me a tour. We walked up ramps and through door cuts in thick brick walls from one building to the next, each room littered with stuff left, including a variety of hard chairs and swivel stools.

The place is as solid as a fortress -- brick walls and wood floors and windows on all sides.

A renovation of the factory will result in 11 apartments and about eight condos, including the Stone-Schwartz family residence, with indoor parking.

In 2002, I took a tour of the plant when the flashlights were still made there and wrote a column about it. Hipwell was the only flashlight manufacturer still making metal flashlights at that point.

During that tour, George C. Parks, the company’s then-president, told me the Hipwell family came to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia in the 1880s and established a stamping plant on the North Side in 1887. They made grilles for early automobiles, parts for the first telephone and the very first Lionel train. In the ‘20s, they invented the single-cell battery, and, with some of the earliest patents on the flashlight, they began making metal flashlights.

This video shows scenes from the factory floor.

The stretch now is lonely and grimy. I have walked it fantasizing about artist lofts or studios. Mitchell said the fifth building, which the couple will close on in January, may be artist studios.

Now the neighborhood has new owners investing in almost an entire block of buildings. I’ll be following their progress, hoping to report on lamps in windows, sidewalks lined with well-chosen street trees and maybe a new use for the historic city stables building across the street.

Comments (2)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

...
written by regis, December 21, 2010 - 01:55 PM

Way cool. I still have a few of those flashlights. If I recall, I bought them at the (also defunct) Ralph's Discount on fifth avenue.

• 
• +0
• 
• 

...
written by dn_jones, December 22, 2010 - 09:45 AM

i still have my two from hipwell and both batteries have lasted now for 10 years!

• 
• +0
• 
•