Columbia Hospital merged with Pittsburgh Hospital and East Suburban General in Monroeville to form Forbes Health System. The location in Wilkinsburg closed some years ago, but unlike some other large buildings in Wilkinsburg, this complex found new uses. The largest part is a nursing home, and several other businesses and services occupy smaller sections.
The original hospital buildings were designed by John Lewis Beatty, whom we have met before mostly as a designer of Protestant churches. They are faced with a very attractive cinnamon brick that is actually made up of randomly assorted but related shades.
If we walk around to the forgotten back alley behind the hospital, we discover the old abandoned emergency entrance. We can also see some more of the older buildings in the complex.
In 1956, the hospital announced a big new addition and planned to raise a million and a half to pay for it. The architects were Prack & Prack, longtime specialists in large industrial and institutional buildings.
The restoration of the New Granada, built as the Pythian Temple, is nearly complete. For decades there has always been a plan to restore the New Granada, and it has always fallen into the Slough of Despond, and the building has stood as a silent accusation, pointing a mocking finger at our failures as a community. But we have successes, too; and if this project was thirty or forty years in getting to this point, it did get to this point.
The New Granada was originally built in 1928 as the Pythian Temple, a lodge for the Knights of Pythias. The architect was Louis Bellinger, the only Black registered architect in Western Pennsylvania for his entire career. Above the first floor, the building is mostly unchanged from the way Bellinger drew it. The lodge did not survive the Depression; in 1937 the building was remodeled as a theater with a new Art Deco base by Alfred Marks of Marks & Kann. As the New Granada, it quickly became one of Pittsburgh’s top venues for jazz stars, and every great Black performer of the era stopped here.
For some reason prewar service stations fascinate old Pa Pitt, so he will continue to collect them even if no one else is interested. This one was probably built in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It is a sturdy little building with well-preserved details, and you could buy it right now.
We file this under “Homewood” because city planning maps do not recognize Brushton as a separate neighborhood.
Here is a building with personality, and we are happy to see it getting a restoration that respects its individual quirks. The building was sold in 1907 by Adelbert E. Dudgeon & Son;1 and since the Dudgeons were architects and builders, and the building shows obvious similarities to some of their other apartment buildings, we are justified in assuming that they designed and built it.
Note the new porch columns. The original columns might have been more correctly classical, but these are a big improvement over the spindly metal supports that preceded them, which were easily bent out of shape by drunken teenagers.
If you moved into one of these apartments in the front, you would have an excellent view of the utility cables. You would also be a short walk from the shops of downtown Wilkinsburg, where interesting things are happening, and from the Wilkinsburg station on the East Busway.
Built in 1904, this well-preserved old train station in Indiana, Pennsylvania, is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was built by the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway, which later became part of the Baltimore and Ohio.
A. E. Linkenheimer was the architect of this tiny school,1 which appears to have had two classrooms. Tiny as it was, he still made it into a splendid fantasy castle. It is now well preserved as a funeral home.
The city counts “Spring Hill–City View” as one neighborhood for planning purposes, but the street signs at major intersections do make the distinction, identifying the neighborhood as either “Spring Hill” or “City View.”
There is only one National Historic Landmark on the North Side, and this is it. Modest as it is, it would appear on many historians’ lists of the greatest American buildings of the nineteenth century. It is the other great work of Henry Hobson Richardson in Pittsburgh, after the Allegheny County Courthouse. One is sometimes tempted to say that it was ahead of its time (it was finished in 1886, when high Victorian style usually demanded a thick crust of ornamentation), but it would probably be better to say that it stands out of time. It is never stale, and yet it was never outrageously modern. It stands as an inspiration and a reproach to every other building.
It earns all those accolades from architects in spite of one serious engineering mistake. Those walls were not meant to lean outward the way they do. The weight of the huge roof pushed them out within a few years after the church was finished. The congregation called in Richardson’s old associates Longfellow, Alden & Harlow to see whether anything could be done, and their conclusion was that the structure was stable the way it was and should be left alone. A century and a third have proved them right.
These simple triangular dormers are the single feature of this church most often directly imitated; compare, for example, the ones on St. Paul’s Episcopal on the Hill (designed by Elise Mercur), or the ones on the First United Presbyterian Church of Etna (Father Pitt hasn’t figured out the architect of that one yet), or the ones on the Watson Memorial Presbyterian Church on Observatory Hill (designed by Allison & Allison)—all direct quotations from Richardson’s dormers here.
This front elevation is a 36-megapixel composite, so you can enlarge it and enjoy the details of the wonderfully varied brickwork that nevertheless seems natural and organic and avoids all suggestion of ostentation.
James W. Drum, who designed the old Indiana County Courthouse across the street, was the architect of this building, whose date of 1880 is prominently displayed in a disk at the top. A walking tour of Philadelphia Street published forty years ago mentions that the building “had Indiana’s first large display windows.” Back in 1986 it was a hardware store; since then the ground floor has been restored to look much more properly Victorian.
For forty years this school stood abandoned and rotting. The main building, put up in 1896, was designed by Ulysses J. Lincoln Peoples, who also designed an addition in 1904 for the rapidly growing neighborhood. An auditorium-gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland in 1931. The school closed in 1980, and then it just sat while the neighborhood crumbled around it.
Photo by Leepaxton at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
This is how the school looked in 2011, when the indefatigable Lee Paxton, who photographed nearly every Pittsburgh landmark for Wikipedia, stopped to snap its picture. But look at that same Larimer Avenue façade today:
Doesn’t that make you happy?
The restoration was done as part of the huge Cornerstone Village housing development, a mixed-housing community that has brought attractive new housing to long-neglected Larimer. All the beautiful details that Mr. Peoples, Mr. Rowland, and dozens of nameless craftsmen left for us have been scrupulously preserved, cleaned, and made to look almost new.
This is the Larimer Avenue end of the building, which has a grand entrance—but not the grandest entrance.
Around the corner on Winslow Street is the original main entrance to the 1896 building.
But even this is not the grandest entrance.
In 1904, an addition was built to the southeast of the main building. A new entrance was built linking the main building to the addition, and this is the grandest entrance.
When he was heading for Larimer, old Pa Pitt somehow walked out of the house without any long lenses. He will have to return soon to pick out those very amusing bracket heads, which he suspects were done by the same sculptor who did the whimsical decorations for the Western Theological Seminary. But the picture above is 20 megapixels, so if you enlarge it you will see a fair amount of detail. You will also see raindrops, because it was raining by the time Father Pitt got to the school, but he was not going to let mere weather deter him.
The child on the right is regrettably not the first or last to have lost his head when he went to school.
In 1931, an auditorium and gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland. By that time styles had changed considerably. Rowland stuck to the classical idiom, but chose the simpler Doric order rather than the more florid Ionic and Corinthian of the original school and addition, and flavored the front with a dash of Art Deco.
