Father Pitt

Built in 1938, the Crafton Borough Building was designed by Vincent L. Schoeneman and H. L. Carter.⁽¹⁾

This is about the peak of Art Deco modernity in Pittsburgh, and it impressed its neighbors enough that Munhall’s borough building (which old Pa Pitt really needs to visit soon) is very obviously influenced by it. Nor do we have to rely on the evidence of our own senses: it turns out that the Munhall council sent its architect over to inspect the Crafton Borough Building, telling him, “We want something like that.” The story about it in the Press was headed “Crafton Serves as ‘Model.’ ” “Munhall’s proposed new municipal building, to be erected at West Field, will be constructed along the lines of the one at Crafton. Adam G. Wickerham has been retained as architect.”⁽²⁾

So here is the building that hit late-1930s suburbanites as the ideal of a borough building, and old Pa Pitt can see why.

“God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said, and here the details are perfectly harmonized, and we might add scrupulously kept by the borough. The windows have been replaced, which was probably necessary, but they were replaced with windows of the right size (which is regrettably unusual around here), and all the other trimmings are still there and mostly in good shape.

The clock is not keeping time right now. Does anyone in the borough want to take up a collection for a new movement?

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Footnotes

1. Source: “Borough Building Work Starts Soon,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 20, 1937, p. 7 (↩)
2. “Crafton Serves as ‘Model,’” Pittsburgh Press, May 31, 1940, p. 11. (↩)