These tall and narrow houses on Goettmann Street cling to the edge of Troy Hill, with spectacular views across the Allegheny.
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A Gateway Center Abstraction
Sony Alpha 3000. The glimmering stainless-steel face of Three Gateway Center, with a corner of the Hilton (now Wyndham Grand).
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Stump and Bracket Fungus
More Resinous Polypores (Ischnoderma resinosum), if old Pa Pitt is not mistaken—but he is easily mistaken, and invites corrections from the mycologically informed. They were found in the Kane Woods Nature Area in Scott Township.
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Stephen Foster Memorial, Oakland
Charles Z. Klauder designed all the buildings on the irregular trapezoid on which the Cathedral of Learning stands. Of the three, this is the one that gets the least attention, and therefore old Pa Pitt was able to have it all to himself for the entire time he spent wandering through it and taking pictures.
The cornerstone was laid in 1935, as it tells us in its own distinctly Deco Gothic way.
The Stephen Foster Memorial is home to two theaters. The larger, the Charity Randall Theatre, is right across the lobby from the main entrance. The Henry Heymann Theatre is down in the basement. It is dogma among theatrical types that “theater” must be given the English spelling, or the proscenium arch will fall on their heads.
Shakespeare and four of his most famous characters in stained glass.
Beethoven and a few lesser composers.
A bright passage illuminated by sunny southeastern windows leads from the lobby to the Stephen Foster Museum.
Along the way we pass Stephen Foster’s own portable melodeon, a little reed organ “used for serenading in Pittsburgh,” as the museum tag says. We have seen this little melodeon before: it is represented in stained glass in the great Stephen Foster window at the Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum.
The stained glass in the mausoleum was by Willet of Philadelphia, and because the style is similar, and because Charles Z. Klauder was a Philadelphian, we strongly suspect (but would be delighted to be corrected) that the Willet studio did the stained glass for the Stephen Foster Memorial as well. Stained-glass vignettes in the windows along the hallway represent Foster songs (and there are several more stained-glass windows in the museum, which old Pa Pitt didn’t photograph this time).
Old Dog Tray.
Nelly Bly.
Mr. Stephen Foster himself.
Gentle Annie.
Old Uncle Ned.
The Stephen Foster Museum is in a domed room that is certainly one of Pittsburgh’s remarkable interior spaces. We pause for a moment to look up at the ceiling.
It has been Father Pitt’s contention that Americans don’t look up, and therefore architects feel entitled to ignore the ceiling. But Mr. Klauder did not make use of that privilege. This is a ceiling worth looking up at.
The museum feels timeless. If it were not for a few recent posters pointing out the interesting fact that some people are offended by blackface minstrels these days, you would hardly know you were in the twenty-first century.
Stephen Foster’s own piano, a Dubois & Stodart square grand. He must have bought it used, since the firm of Dubois & Stodart came to an end in 1834, when young Master Foster was eight years old.
A full-size melodeon donated by the McComb family, said to have been played by Stephen Foster when he was a guest at their house. At any rate, it may stand in for the countless melodeons Mr. Foster must have played as he visited friends and admirers, who must inevitably have asked him for a song or two. Melodeons and reed organs were much cheaper than pianos, and therefore likely to be found in any home from lower middle class on up.
We leave the museum by the same hallway and come back out into the lobby.
Wandering the grounds, we come across the Newton Apple Tree, a direct descendant of the tree that bonked Isaac Newton on the head, thus causing gravity.
From the outside, we can see that medieval baptisteries were the model for the room that holds the museum.
Sony Alpha 3000.
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City-County Building and Grant Building
Early-morning views of the City-County Building and the Grant Building, both designed by Henry Hornbostel, from northward on Grant Street.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Swan Acres
“National attention will probably be focused on Swan Acres, for it is the first community in the country in which homes are exclusively of modern design,” said a puffing two-page feature in the Press for August 23, 1936.
The drawing above, which we have little trouble recognizing as the house in our photograph, was published with the feature to show what the houses would look like. Harry Pople of Beck, Pople & Beck, the builders and planners, explained that “many a well-proportioned modern-style home looks out of place when surrounded by homes of a traditional architectural style. Builders of modern style homes in Swan Acres will be protected against such encroachment. None but modern style homes will be permitted.”
Another drawing shows the house that would be built next door to the first one. The designer was Quentin S. Beck, a young student of architecture who was not technically a registered architect. (In fact, he would not be registered until 1951.) Young Beck had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Penn State in 1933, and the next year formed a partnership with his Uncle Wilbur in the building firm Beck & Beck. Soon after, Harry E. Pople, a banker, was brought in, and with his experience in land development and his ability to arrange mortgages for buyers, Beck, Pople & Beck were ready for an ambitious project. By 1937, the firm had brought in old-time architect H. C. Clepper to be the official named architect for Swan Acres. But these striking houses were young Quentin Beck’s designs.1
Not long ago, a tour group from the Art Deco Society of New York visited Swan Acres by special invitation of two of the residents, a pair of artists who live in the best-preserved house in the plan. And by special invitation of the Art Deco Society, old Pa Pitt came along for the tour, having been their guide to the Allegheny County Airport earlier the same morning. By special permission of the owners, then, we can show our readers some of one of these extraordinary International Style houses.
As we enter, we find ourselves in a center hall with a stairway partly illuminated by glass-block windows that bring in light from the living room.
Here we see why the living room has light to spare. The original steel casement windows have been closely duplicated with modern windows in the same size and shape—except that, as we see in the drawing above, the panes to the right were originally glass block.
Corner windows were, as Father Pitt has often remarked, a badge of modernism in the 1930s, and they had some practical advantages. For example…
In the kitchen, the corner windows bring in light from two directions while still leaving much more space for wall-mounted cabinets than in a traditional kitchen this size.
When we come up the stairs, we are in a brightly lit hallway.
The bedrooms also have corner windows, of course, and outdoor terraces for the bedrooms are also a common feature of many modernistic houses like this.
In this house, the bathrooms have kept some of their original fixtures.
This view of the back of the house shows us the blunted corners and corner windows, along with an outdoor patio with bedroom terrace above.
The house originally had an integral garage, which has been converted into another room (with matching windows).
Only four houses designed by Beck were built at Swan Acres. The Becks got tired of Harry Pople and left the firm in 1937. Two more substantial modernist houses were built—one designed by New York architect Harrie T. Lindeberg, and one by Pittsburgher Joseph W. Hoover. In addition, a few modest cube-shaped houses with unimaginative modernistic details were built before World War II, and these were probably the work of H. C. Clepper.
Sony Alpha 3000. Only three of the original Swan Acres houses have survived in anything like their original condition. Most owners lost patience with the flat roofs and solved their leaking problems with peaked roofs, and various other alterations typical of suburban Pittsburgh have been made. After the war, the empty lots filled in with prosaic ranch houses, split-levels, and Colonials; the “modern only” rule had been repealed, or reinterpreted to allow practically anything.
As for young Quentin Beck, he went on to a career after the war designing many of those prosaic ranch houses and split-levels that line our winding suburban streets. He also designed a few substantial apartment buildings in a modernist style, though they do not seem to old Pa Pitt to be outstanding of their type. The postwar boom demanded a get-it-done attitude from an architect who expected to make a living, and the artistic side was beaten out of Quentin Beck. In the 1960s, he spent much of his public life promoting a visionary pneumatic-tube transit system that would whisk Pittsburghers to San Francisco in five hours.
Beck’s last major project was the Lebanon House apartment high-rise at the northern end of Uptown Mount Lebanon. It was still under construction in 1967 when Beck walked into his garage, closed the door, and turned on his car engine.
- Most of our information about the genesis and short life of Beck, Pople & Beck comes from “Swan Acres, ‘the nation’s first Modern subdivision,’
Revisited and Reassessed,” by Albert M. Tannler, in the PHLF News for April, 2011. The research into Quentin Beck’s later life and career was shared with us by David Schwing. ↩︎
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- Most of our information about the genesis and short life of Beck, Pople & Beck comes from “Swan Acres, ‘the nation’s first Modern subdivision,’
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Bus Coming Toward You
Because old Pa Pitt keeps a collection of Buses Coming Toward You, here is a 61A on Forbes Avenue. Below, three buses: the 61A and a similar bus behind it, along with a school bus parked in the bike lane.
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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Fort Pitt Blockhouse
The oldest building in the city, and the only Colonial-era building as well,1 the Fort Pitt Blockhouse survived by becoming part of a private house in what was then the poor section of town.
Russell Smith made this painting, detailed down to the laundry, in 1832. (The Blockhouse was actually built for Fort Pitt.)
The Blockhouse in 1910, from Greater Pittsburg. The blockhouse remained a residence for most of the 1800s, until at last Mary Schenley donated it to the Daughters of the American Revolution.2 They fenced and landscaped its little lot and made it an island of tidy Colonial architecture in an otherwise tumbledown neighborhood. The date stone we saw above had been kept in City Hall, but was returned to the building when the DAR restored it.
Only after the Second World War was the Blockhouse given its current green and pleasant surroundings. But it remains a tiny island of private ownership in Point State Park: the Daughters of the American Revolution are still responsible for it.
Sony Alpha 3000; Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. - The Old Stone Tavern in the West End has sometimes been claimed as older, but the claims seem to have been based on a mistake. ↩︎
- This is a correction. The article had originally said, “until the Daughters of the American Revolution finally bought and restored it,” but it was actually a gift of Mary Schenley, as recorded on a plat map from the early 1900s: “Daughters of the American Revolution / OLD BLOCK HOUSE / Presented by Mary E. Schenley.” Thanks to David Schwing for pointing out the correction. ↩︎
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Church of the Assumption, Bellevue
Leo McMullen of Comès, Perry & McMullen was the architect of the grandest church in his hometown of Bellevue. We have seen this church in detail before, including the front, the interior, the carvings of Adam and Eve at the entrance, the gargoyles, the curious grotesque brackets, and the stained glass. But a cathedral-sized church like this always has more to show us, and the changing season brings us the added delight of fall color.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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