Old Pa Pitt does not indulge in clickbait headlines. If he did, the headline for this article would have been,
This Picture Is Impossible (but We Did It Anyway).
This building faces Canal Street, which is an absurdly narrow street. The other side of the street is a wall, on top of which trees grow, and behind them a railroad. So there is no way to stand back and get a picture of the front of the old Allegheny Turnhalle except by trickery. But Father Pitt has never been above trickery. The image above is not perfect, but considering the adverse circumstances it came out pretty well. It is made from ten separate photographs.
The Allegheny Turnhalle was designed by Joseph Stillburg for the Turners of Allegheny; it is one of his few remaining large works. The original front was more elaborate, as we see in this picture from Preservation Pittsburgh.
Here we see the adroit combination of classical and Romanesque detailing that marked Stillburg’s work—a style architectural historians like to call Rundbogenstil, because Rundbogenstil is much more fun to say than “round-arch style,” which is what the German word means. There was also an interesting diagonal asymmetry to the front, doubtless reflecting stairways in the interior. The current state of the building is the result of its conversion into a warehouse, which is what has saved it when almost all of the old Schweitzerloch neighborhood—an isolated rectangle just off the Sixteenth Street Bridge—has been razed to weedy vacant blocks.
The cornerstone tells us it was laid on July 21, 1889. Newspapers of the time tell us that about two thousand people were there to watch the ceremonies. Since they were Germans, there was probably good beer, too.
What used to be a dense Swiss-German, and later Slovak, neighborhood is now mostly weeds and overgrown asphalt. It’s shocking that this emptiness is right across the river from the bustling Strip and a short stroll from the lively North Shore, but it’s hemmed in by railroads, bridges, and expressways.
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