Downtown
Old Allegheny County Jail
Downtown jail, 1886–1995
Henry Hobson Richardson designed the Allegheny County Courthouse and the jail beside it as one building. The jail was in use by 1886. A covered stone bridge still crosses Ross Street from the courthouse to the jail. Prisoners were walked over it. People call it the Bridge of Sighs, after the enclosed bridge in Venice that led from the palace to the prison. The jail closed in 1995. The cells are there inside the family division of the Court of Common Pleas. Docents from Pittsburgh History & Landmarks open them on the first and third Monday of the month.
The escape was in the winter of 1902. John E. Biddle and Edward C. Biddle had been convicted in December 1901 of killing a shopkeeper on Mount Washington, and they were waiting to be hanged. The warden was Peter Soffel. His wife, Kate, visited prisoners as part of her work in the jail, and she spent her time with Ed. She brought the brothers saws, and a gun.
Before dawn on 30 January they cut through the bars. Jack pulled one guard over a railing onto the stone floor below. Ed shot a second guard. They put on the guards’ clothes, met Kate, and left by the warden’s side of the building. A trolley took them out toward Perrysville. They stole a horse and a sleigh and went north through the snow. On the afternoon of 31 January, on a road near Mount Chestnut in Butler County, Pittsburgh detectives caught them. Charles “Buck” McGovern was among the posse. Both brothers were fatally wounded. Kate was hit in the chest. The Pittsburgh papers and the New York Times carried the fight the next day, along with Jack’s statement that Kate had shot herself. The brothers died on 1 February. On the morning of 5 February they were buried in one grave at Calvary Cemetery in Hazelwood, and no stone was set. A marker was placed decades later, after the 1984 film Mrs. Soffel. Kate served her time at the Western Penitentiary and died of typhoid in 1909.
In the building now, people talk about a cold at the old gallows, and about a woman on the bridge.
Sources
