The Atlas Theatre opened in 1915 as the Perrysville but was almost immediately put up for sale and renamed the Atlas. It was remodeled with Art Deco front in 1938. The last movie it showed, in 1953, was Bonzo Goes to College. Apparently that killed it. After that, it was a retail store for a while, but it has been many years since anything inhabited this building.
Some houses on Heberton Street in a variety of styles, from Shingle Style to Pennsylvania Farmhouse Revival.
Allegheny High School, now the Allegheny Traditional Academy, has a complicated architectural history involving two notable architects at three very different times.
The original 1893 Allegheny High School on this site was designed by Frederick Osterling in his most florid Richardsonian Romanesque manner. This building no longer exists, but the photograph above gives us a good notion of the impression it made. The huge entrance arch is particularly striking, and particularly Osterling; compare it with the Third Avenue entrance of the Times Building, also by Osterling.
In 1904, the school needed a major addition. Again Osterling was called on, but by this time Richardsonian Romanesque had passed out of fashion, and Osterling’s own tastes had changed. The Allegheny High School Annex still stands, and Osterling pulled off a remarkable feat: he made a building in modified Georgian style that matched current classical tastes while still being a good fit with, and echoing the lines of, the original Romanesque school.
The carved ornaments on the original school were executed by Achille Giammartini, and we would guess that he was brought back for the work on the Annex as well.
A war memorial on the front of the Annex. Twenty-two names are inscribed. Everyone who went to Allegheny High in those years knew someone who was killed in the Great War.
By the 1930s, the school was too small again. The original school was torn down, and Marion Steen, house architect for Pittsburgh Public Schools (and son of the Pittsburgh titan James T. Steen) designed a new Art Deco palace nothing like the remaining Annex. The two buildings do not clash, however, because there are very few vantage points from which we can see both at once.
The auditorium has three exits, each one with one of the three traditional masks of Greek drama above it: Comedy, Meh, and Tragedy.
Large city parks often have picnic shelters, but it is not common for the shelters to be so elaborate. This one was built in 1902–1903, during the reign of Edward Manning Bigelow, the father of Pittsburgh’s system of boulevards and parks. The architect was young Harry Summers Estep, who would soon earn his place as a prominent architect with the McKeesport Masonic Temple.
A slightly later bloomer than the common dooryard lilac, the compact Korean Lilac (Syringa pubescens subsp. patula) is also more intensely scented.
The top of Penn Station seen from the Bigelow Boulevard bridge over the Crosstown Boulevard.
The potato bug was encouraged to remain to provide a sense of scale.
This building is probably the work of Sylvanus W. McCluskey, a Lawrenceville architect. Our source spells the name “McCloskey,” but that is within the usual limits of Linotypist accuracy. From the Pittsburg Post, October 9, 1900:
Another apartment house is to be built in the Sixteenth Ward. It will stand on a plot at Nos. 4517 and 4519 Liberty street, Bloomfield, and will be owned by Michael McKenna. It will be a three-story brick building with storerooms on the first floor. Architect S. W. McCloskey designed it and has awarded the contract for its erection to Frank McMasters. Work on it will be started at once. The building without the interior finish will cost about $15,000.
This building on Dinwiddie Street stands at the end of the Fraser rows, but it could hardly be more different in style. From old maps it appears to have been built after 1910, replacing an earlier three-storey house on the same lot. It is hard to pin down the style, but the baroque crest, complete with urns, is an outstanding feature.
