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E. M. Butz House, Manchester

Edward M. Butz was a prominent and successful architect of the late 1800s whose reach extended far beyond Pittsburgh. (One notable still-standing public building designed by Butz is the Wicomico County Courthouse in Salisbury, Maryland.) Many years later, in 1936, Maurice Trimble remembered that “Mr. Butz was a veritable human dynamo; he designed among other buildings, the Western Penitentiary, the Uniontown Court House and Jail and many of those snappy Victorian Gothic houses, some of which were cleverly done.”

One of those snappy Victorian houses was this one. Mr. Butz designed it and lived in it with his family in the late 1870s. The house had an unfortunate renovation in the middle 1900s, with small horizontal windows installed on the second floor in place of the original tall windows; but the current owners have used paint to mask the mismatched brickwork and integrate the original features of the house as much as possible.

Today the ground floor is home to a fancy cocktail bar called “The Lion.”

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

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September 4, 2026
Penn Water Company Building, Wilkinsburg
J. H. Giesy was the architect of this little utility-company palace, built in 1916.¹

The relief in the shield is so shallow that it has eroded to near invisibility. It looks to old Pa Pitt like an allegorical figure pouring out water, but he is happy to be corrected by someone with a better eye or more accurate information.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

We have more pictures of the Penn Water Company from a year ago, before the doorway got its coat of fluorescent aqua.
1. American Contractor, October 16, 1915, p. 58. “Office Bldg.: 2 sty. & bas. 50×100. $20M. Wilkinsburg, Pa. Archt. J. H. Giesey, Mellon Bank bldg., Pittsburgh. Owner Penn Water Co., Oliver bldg., Wilkinsburg. Bids in; will soon let contr. Brk.” ↩︎
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September 3, 2026
Fern Hollow Bridge, Frick Park

To demonstrate his faith in our infrastructure, old Pa Pitt stands directly under the Fern Hollow Bridge and looks up.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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September 3, 2026
South Side Market House

The South Side Market House was built in the heart of old Birmingham in 1893. The architect was Charles Bickel.

Originally the building was much more elaborate:

The South Side Market in 1914 by the Pittsburgh City Photographer, from Historic Pittsburgh, where you can see the full-size original.

However, in 1915, a fire gutted the building, leaving only the outer walls standing.

The full-size original is at Historic Pittsburgh.

Mr. Bickel was still alive at the time, but the reconstruction was designed by the city’s own talented Stanley Roush.

Drawing of the rebuilt market house by the architect, Stanley Roush. You can see the full-size original at Historic Pittsburgh; Mr. Roush’s signature is at lower left.

This bovine cartouche commemorates the death and resurrection of the South Side Market.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

The fire was not the end of the building’s adventures. In 1950, public markets having become obsolete in Pittsburgh, the building was remodeled as a recreation center under the supervision of Button & McLean, who left the exterior almost unchanged from Roush’s 1915 design.

It was refurbished again in 2012 as a “Healthy Active Living Center” for senior citizens. Father Pitt does not yet know who supervised that remodeling, but he would be delighted to hear from anyone who has information.

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September 2, 2026
Marching Toward Enlightenment

The complete third-floor mural sequence in one large composite image.

John White Alexander gave us one of the great mural sequences in America in the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Institute. The Crowning of Labor, also known as The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, is the part of the sequence that gets the most attention. But it was all meant to lead upward to a climax on the third floor.

The Carnegie Museum of Art site has an informative page on the Grand Staircase and its murals, with of course an obligatory paragraph to tell you that because they are old they are evil. The figures on the third floor were meant to represent crowds of ordinary people marching toward enlightenment—to be represented in Carnegie’s Noble Quartet of Art, Science, Music, and Literature. But the artist died before he could paint Enlightenment, so that, like the rest of humanity, these people will never reach it.

Here are all the murals in the sequence individually.

When the murals were restored a few years ago, one square was left unrestored in this mural to show us how a century of Pittsburgh atmosphere had affected the paintings.

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September 1, 2026
Kuhn Building, East Liberty

An excellent example of a practical restoration of a commercial building. The windows and doors are modern stock materials, but well chosen to fit with the existing walls. The upper floors are home to a company called Yinzcam that manages the digital presence for sports organizations,

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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September 1, 2026
Dismantling the Polar World

It was one of the oddest things in the Carnegie, and few people ever made it that far after an afternoon of gawking at dinosaurs: a whole gallery on the third floor, the Wyckoff Hall of Arctic Life, dedicated to the “Polar World.” Now, after decades of informing visitors one or two at a time, the exhibit is finally being taken down. But it is being taken down slowly and carefully; and since the hall is also the only route in and out of the Alcoa Hall of American Indians—an exhibit even more invisible to most museum visitors, but one well worth your time—the few visitors who make it to the third floor have a chance to see what happens when a longstanding exhibit vanishes.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The space will be used for a greatly expanded Egyptian gallery, which will doubtless be more popular. But it will not be as odd. Every museum that can afford one has a good Egyptian gallery; few museums below the Arctic Circle had a gallery of Polar Life.

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August 31, 2026
FBI Building, South Side

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Pittsburgh field office, officially the Martha Dixon Building, looks like a Hollywood producer’s idea of a building FBI agents would work in. It is an outstanding example of the style old Pa Pitt calls neoneoclassical, in which the symmetry and forms of classical architecture are stripped of all ornaments like carved capitals or sculptured pediments that would shock the sensibilities of moderns. “To glamorize the four-story, 160,000 sq ft (15000 m²) structure, precast concrete components were used on the façade of the building.” So says an article in PCI Journal for November–December 2002, and Father Pitt would like to mark it as the first time he has seen the word “glamorize” applied to anything having to do with precast concrete. The result is a building that is designed to offend no one’s taste, and if you think that is easy you should try it some time. The architects were DRS Architects of Pittsburgh, who have also done offices for the DEA as well as some prominent buildings for local universities.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

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August 31, 2026
Second Presbyterian Church, Wilkinsburg
Later known as the Mulberry Presbyterian Church. O. M. Topp and Charles W. Hutchison, “țhe well-known Pittsburg architect,” were the architects of this church, built in 1911.¹

In spite of his self-declared notability, Charles W. Hutchison has not left much of a visible architectural legacy: after some searching, old Pa Pitt found only two projects definitely attributable to him, of which this is one. It was probably his own church: he lived in Wilkinsburg. His moment of greatest fame came the year after this church was built, when his honeymoon trip was interrupted by the wreck of the Titanic: he and his bride were passengers on the Carpathia, the ship that picked up Titanic survivors. He sold his story, with a well-made diagram of the scene of the rescue, to the Press, which put him on the front page as “the well-known Pittsburg architect.”

Pittsburg Press, April 21, 1912, p. 1.

Olaf M. Topp, on the other hand, was a very successful architect with a long career ahead of him and much experience behind him. Half the prewar Lutheran churches in the Pittsburgh area were designed by Topp, in addition to a few for other denominations; and in secular buildings his greatest work was the still-lamented Jenkins Arcade.

A while ago this church was taken over by an organization with ambitious plans to turn it into a Center for Civic Arts. The plans seem to have run hard up against economic reality, however, and when old Pa Pitt visited recently the building was up for sale again.
1. “Cornerstone Laying Among Church Events,” Press, August 27, 1911. “The church was designed by O. M. Topp and Charles M. Hutchison.” The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation plaque has the architect as “F. Hoffman & Company,” but that was the contractor. ↩︎
August 30, 2026
St. Paul’s Cathedral, Oakland
These are far from the first pictures of this cathedral that old Pa Pitt has published, and they certainly will not be the last. A cathedral is too big a deal to take in all at once.

The west front (liturgically speaking¹) is a towering Gothic fantasy whose scale is hard to convey in a photograph. Here the human figures on the steps give us some context.

The main doors turn on the mightiest hinges in Pittsburgh.

This would be a magnificent main front for any church; here it is just the façade of the south transept.

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

The south-transept entrance.

We have many more pictures of St. Paul’s from many years of passing by with a camera.
1. In describing church architecture, the altar is always considered “east,” which makes the entrance opposite the altar “west,” and so on, regardless of what your lying compass says. ↩︎
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August 30, 2026

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