The French Moderns exhibit at the Frick Art Museum is closing this weekend. You can still get there if you hurry. As we mentioned the last time we visited, the show includes a few of the Academic painters against whom the “moderns” rebelled, and we begin with a couple of them.
Even though this is a small canvas, you know it’s Bouguereau from across the room.
Corot is a sort of bridge between traditional styles and Impressionism.
An old service station from the 1920s or 1939s, now converted to a café.
If you look closely, you can see that there is a seam right down the middle of the Isabella Street face of this building. It was put up in two stages: the left half in 1906, the right half after 1910.
Kerr & Snodgrass were wholesale wallpaper dealers—obviously very successful ones. They commissioned William J. Shaw of Bellevue to design this building, and it was announced in the Gazette for October 15, 1905, with a reproduction of Shaw’s rendering.1 (Note that the building grew a ninth floor by the time it was actually constructed; apparently Kerr & Snodgrass could hardly keep up with their own prosperity.) The rendering shows the front on Isabella Street and the side along Vulcan Way. According to the news story, this building was to be very similar to the one on the other side of Vulcan Way, which has since disappeared, replaced by a bigger building.
This building has prospered with the rise of the North Shore as a desirable address; it is now known as Four North Shore Center. Its next-door neighbor on Sandusky Street is the Andy Warhol Museum.
Kerr & Snodgrass were willing to spend more than usual for a mere warehouse: the two lower floors are stone, not brick, and festooned with fine carved decorations.
Utility companies that wanted to infect neighborhoods with their frightful new technologies learned to turn to architects to send a message of polite respectability. The Duquesne Light Company still uses this little substation off Craig Street.
Homestead Park was originally a suburb of Homestead in Mifflin Township; it later became the upper part of Munhall Borough. This school (now just called Park Elementary School) has been built in multiple stages. The largest part, built in 1928, was designed by Adam G. Wickerham of Homestead,1 who combined enough traditional decoration to please conservative tastes with some interestingly modern ideas, like the stark second-floor cutout above the Cambria Street entrance.
A blank wall is enlivened by a bit of decorative brickery that must have been fun to plan, perhaps with the aid of children’s blocks.
The Main Street end of the school is earlier; it is probably the “addition” designed by Ulysses J. Lincoln Peoples in 1919.2
There is also a modernist section of the school, probably built in the 1960s, that old Pa Pitt didn’t capture, because he was stopping very briefly on his way from here to there. Maybe next time.
This church, kept in good shape as the Pittsburgh Urban Christian School, has a complicated architectural history, and old Pa Pitt will not attempt to sort it all out. The cornerstone bears a date of 1915:
We have seen the name O. M. Topp associated with the church, but a 1931 biography of Arthur N. Steinmark lists this church among his accomplishments.1 In 1915 Steinmark was working for MacClure & Spahr, which makes it seem unlikely that he designed the 1915 portion. But the church is a complex of attached buildings, and Steinmark might have been responsible for some of it.
Update: Our correspondent David Schwing points to the page on Calvary Lutheran at Wilkinsburg Sacred Spaces, which tells us (quoting an anniversary book),
On December 15, 1929, “Calvary had a rededication service at the completion of a $35,000 building expansion and improvement program which added the tower, the Rose Window, the balcony and included the renovation of the Chancel.”
That $35,000 project is probably Steinmark’s work. Father Pitt believes, however, that only the top of the tower was part of the Steinmark project, because an old picture on that same page shows the rest of the tower as Pittsburgh black stone like the rest of the church, but the top as pristine white.
The top of the tower is probably a replacement for a doomed spire. (Update: See the update above. It is possible that a spire was planned and never built, as often happened with church towers.)
This smaller section appears to be the older sanctuary; old maps suggest that it is probably the 1900 church designed by Wilkinsburg’s own L. A. Raisig,2 given a new stone front to match the main building.
The Mexican War Streets are a dense rowhouse neighborhood, and as in most such neighborhoods, each block tended to have small businesses on the corners—especially neighborhood groceries and backstreet bars. The corner of Monterey Street and North Taylor Avenue had four such businesses, one on each corner. Only one of the storefronts is occupied as a business now, but the others retain most of the original features, and each building emphasized the corner location in its own way.
This one blunted its corner to make a corner entrance.
This one did the same, but without the expensive stone trim.
This one also has a corner entrance, but the rest of the building is rectangular, with the corner held up by a stout pole—a common arrangement in small corner storefronts.
And finally this one has its entrance in the North Taylor Avenue front, but with a display window facing Monterey Street.
Tasso Katselas designed this building, put up in 1965, and in old Pa Pitt’s eyes it is one of his most successful designs. It conveys its message perfectly: this is a place where the future is being made today. (We remember having heard that slogan somewhere: it might have been at the Pitt Information Sciences Department.) Yet it has enough variety, enough light and shade, and the right scale and setback to fit well with the older buildings on Bellefield Street.
Now known as the Cardello Building, this was one of several locations of the National Casket Company, a concern that, by combining the leading casket makers into one conglomerate, nearly cornered the market on death.
The lens on this old Ansco camera is a “normal” lens that sees the world about the way your eyes see it, so that acute angle is not a lens artifact. It really is an acute angle.
The building is actually a complex of connected buildings put up over the course of twenty years, from 1900 to 1920. The same architect was responsible for all of them: R. Maurice Trimble, who came from a family of contractors and fed work back to various Trimbles whenever he had a chance. (See the end of this article for the citations that mention Trimble as architect.)
We found multiple listings mentioning Trimble as architect of various parts of the National Casket Company building. Here are three of them.
Record & Guide, July 18, 1900, p. 463. “Maurice Trimble, Ferguson Buliding [sic], has made plans for a three-story brick warehouse to be erected on Chartiers street, Allegheny, for the National Casket & Coffin works. The owners are receiving bids for its construction.” Chartiers Street is now North Point Drive. By the time it was built, the warehouse had grown to four floors. The 1910 Sanborn map shows that this was the section between the five-storey section that faces Beaver Avenue and the five-storey section at the south end of the complex. Now known as the Cardello Building.
Record & Guide, December 17, 1902, p. 835. “R. M. Trimble, Ferguson Building has awarded to John H. Trimble & Bro., 2022 Chartiers avenue, Allegheny, the contract for the erection of a five story brick and stone warehouse and office building for the National Casket Company at Seventh street and Duquesne way.” This probably refers to the five-story section at the south end of the National Casket Company warehouse on Chartiers Street; the downtown address would be the offices of the company. Other listings confirm, however, that John H. Trimble & Brother were located at 2022 Chartiers Avenue, right next to the National Casket Company which is very convenient. We note Maurice Trimble’s habit of keeping the construction in the family if he could manage it.
“Casket Company to Build,” Post, August 31, 1920, p. 7. “The National Casket Company has given D. T. Riffle a contract for an addition to a building on Reedsdale street, Northside. R. M. Trimble is the architect.” This is the most recent section, filling out the building to Reedsdale (now part of Beaver Avenue).
Since Trimble was the architect of the first section of the warehouse and the most recent section, and since everything matches the one or the other in style, we can be fairly confident that he designed all the stages of construction, however many there were.
