This building stands out among the skyscrapers that surround it like a strange relic of a lost civilization—the pre-skyscraper age. It was built in 1890, and the architect was young Frederick Osterling. He would soon master the Richardsonian Romanesque style and become one of our most accomplished practitioners of it, but this is pre-Richardsonian Romanesque. The weighty but graceful eyebrows over the arches, the complex and irregular rhythm of different sizes, and the surprising but flowing curves all remind us of Osterling’s old master Joseph Stillburg, whose Romanesque ideas went back to his native Austria.
With no other preface, we present a few of the pictures from 2025 that pleased old Pa Pitt the most, beginning with the Pittsburgh Gage & Supply Co., Strip District.
United Steelworkers Building (built as the IBM Building).
Lake Elizabeth, West Park (North Side), on a winter afternoon.
Green tulip.
Buildings by Tasso Katselas at the main campus of the Community College of Allegheny County.
Tiny mushroom on a twig.
Crafton Station on the West Busway, with St. Philip’s Church in the background.
Crafton Borough Building.
Rainbow terrace on Dawson Street in Oakland.
Apartment building on College Street, Shadyside.
Tower of St. Pamphilus Church, Beechview.
Entrance to Fifth Avenue Place.
Light and shade at the CNG Tower, now known as EQT Plaza.
Wilkinsburg Station.
Bernard Gloeckler Co. warehouse, Strip District.
McBride Building. This looks like a fairly ordinary photograph of a building, but a lot of technical fussing went into making the perspective look anything like normal, since the picture had to be taken from very close.
Liberty Bridge.
Wilkinsburg Masonic Temple.
Japanese maple in the South Side Cemetery.
Nodding Foxtail (Setaria faberi).
An Art Deco urn at the Beechwood School in Beechview.
The CNG Tower, now known as EQT Plaza.
A house in Beverly Heights, Mount Lebanon.
The Hall of Sculpture at the Carnegie. The picture was taken with the ultra-wide auxiliary camera on Father Pitt’s phone, so it looks lousy enlarged, but at a small size it seems like a nice composition.
A bungalow in Beechview. The snow and the colors seemed to capture the essence of a winter afternoon.
Charles J. Palmgreen was the architect of this fine Jacobean structure, which looks so much like a school that old Pa Pitt spent an hour trying to figure out which school it was before finally finding a picture of it in the Pittsburgh Press for March 23, 1927, which identified the building.
“The office of the Universal Steel Co. on Station st., the most impressive office building in Bridgeville.”
The terra-cotta decorations were supplied by the Corning Terra Cotta Company of Corning, New York, which we know from a booklet published by the company that listed dozens of buildings, including their architects, which is where we got the attribution to Mr. Palmgreen.
This was a “hotel” in the old Pittsburgh sense, which is to say a neighborhood bar with rooms upstairs to qualify it for a “hotel” liquor license, which was much easier to get than a liquor license for a bar. The last time we saw the Rodler Hotel, about ten years ago, it appeared to be abandoned; but now it has new windows and is stabilized and occupied. The collapsing aluminum awnings have also been removed.
The corner entrance was filled in years ago to make a vestibule. Father Pitt prefers corner entrances left open, but he was not the owner of the building.
Walter R. Fleming, a real-estate developer, built himself one of the finest houses in Brookline in 1913. It still stands today, and it’s still a handsome house in spite of multiple alterations, which form a sort of manual of things that can happen to a Pittsburgh house over the course of a century: porches can be filled in, windows can be replaced with different sizes; half-timbered stucco can be covered with aluminum or vinyl; chimneys can be shortened.
Now Spencer United Methodist. Charles W. Bier was the architect of this church,1 which opened in 1925. It sits on a steeply sloping lot at the southern end of Carrick, so that—like many Pittsburgh churches—it has ground-level entrances on two ground levels.
An open belfry becomes a nuisance to maintain, and when the bells are silenced—as they have been in most of our churches—the belfry is often filled in.
The American Contractor, April 14, 1923: “Carrick, Pa.—Church:$100,000. 1 sty. 100×72. Church st. & Spencer av., Carrick. Archt. Chas. W. Bier, Pittsburgh Life bldg., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner The Spencer M. E. Congr., Spv. Gilbert G. Gallagher, 117 Spencer av., Carrick. Solid brk. Drawing prelim. plans.” The church as built does not seem like a $100,000 church. But the dimensions and estimate went up: November 3, 1923: “Church: $140,000. 1 sty. & bas. 75×143. Church st. & Spencer av., Garrick [sic]. Archt. Chas. W. Bier, Pittsburgh Life bldg., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner The Spencer M. E. Congr., Rev. Gilbert G. Gallagher, 117 Spencer av., Garrick. Revising plans.” The current church looks like Bier’s work; we can only guess that the ambitious plans were scaled back a bit before construction began. ↩︎
The base of the U. S. Steel Tower is where all the drama of the building is concentrated. From a distance, it’s a black slab dominating the skyline, but at the base, the impossibly spindly supports make the building seem to hover like something in a René Magritte painting.
The honest Depression-era simplicity of this building, dated 1931 by the stone beside the front steps, is very attractive. The windows have been replaced; but they have not been blocked in, which sets this apart from almost every other men’s club in southwestern Pennsylvania. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that there is a large and mostly windowless basement with separate entrances.
This row of houses on Alder Street in Shadyside has been attributed to Frederick Scheibler, Pittsburgh’s most famous home-grown modernist, by the guesswork of certain architectural historians. But Martin Aurand, Scheibler’s biographer, could find no evidence that Scheibler designed them. Then who was responsible for this strikingly modern early-twentieth-century terrace?
Old Pa Pitt is confident that he has the answer. The architect was T. Ed. Cornelius, who lived all his life in Coraopolis but was busy throughout the Pittsburgh area. We can be almost certain of that attribution because the houses in the middle of the row are identical to the ones in the Kleber row in Brighton Heights:
And the Brighton Heights houses were the subject of a photo feature in the Daily Post of March 5, 1916, in which T. Ed. Cornelius is named as the architect.
The Alder Street houses are bookended by larger double houses, one of which—this being Pittsburgh, of course—is an odd shape to fit the odd lot.
So remember the name of T. Ed. (which stands for Thomas Edward) Cornelius when you think of distinctive Pittsburgh architecture. It is quite a compliment to have your work mistaken for Frederick Scheibler’s.
