The congregation dissolved in 2020, so here is an excellent opportunity for an investment in a beautiful building in a trendifying neighborhood. It is in very good shape, and it has enough architectural distinctiveness to make its new owner proud. It also commands a prominent corner on Brownsville Road.
An attractive duplex built on what had been part of the Neeld estate; it was probably put up in the 1920s. It has retained most of its original details, including its tile roof and flamboyant wooden brackets.
The busy and chaotic Mon Wharf, where goods were loaded and unloaded and passengers came to board downstream-bound steamboats. This picture was published in 1894, and we can see the dawn of the skyscraper age just beginning to break: the Conestoga Building, finished in 1892, was the first building in Pittsburgh built on a steel frame, and one of the first in the world.
The view is quite different today (or in 2021, when these pictures were taken), though many of the same buildings are there. The Robert Moses plan ringed downtown Pittsburgh with expressways, as Moses had done with Manhattan, cutting off the people from the rivers. It was an understandable adaptation: if there must be expressways, the riverfronts made space for them without knocking down a lot of buildings. But it took us decades to begin to reclaim the shores with a system of parks and bicycle trails.
This section of North Charles Street has had at least four names. It began as Union Avenue; then it took on the name of Taggart Street, the continuation of the street to the south; then, when Allegheny was absorbed by Pittsburgh, Charles Street, the continuation of the street to the north and east, was renamed Taggart Street, to distinguish it from Charles Street on the Hill, which itself was soon renamed Elmore Street; and then for some reason the whole street was renamed Charles Street North, which has gradually turned into North Charles Street.
At any rate, under all its names, this used to be the central street of a narrow neighborhood in the valley or ravine leading up to Perry Hilltop. Whole streets crowded with little frame houses have disappeared, leaving occasional isolated survivors. This substantial brick building may go back as far as the 1870s, though if so it has been heavily altered; or it may have replaced another brick building of similar dimensions. Either way, it is an interesting building to look at, so we need no more excuse for publishing its picture.
Since we were looking at department-store warehouses a week ago, here is another one. This one was built in 1901 for Kaufmann’s department store, and as a work of architecture it is the most pleasing of the department-store warehouses we’ve seen. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, with the architect listed as D. H. Crisman; but old Pa Pitt, with all due deference to the experts, thinks that attribution is a mistake.1 Crisman was probably the contractor. He is listed in a 1900 city directory as a carpenter, and in 1902 we find him hiring an architect to design an apartment building, strongly suggesting that he was not an architect himself.
If Father Pitt had to make a guess, he would guess that Charles Bickel was the architect. Bickel designed the store for the Kaufmanns downtown, so he would be an obvious choice. He was also our most prolific producer of warehouses, so he is the safest bet. The style of the building is similar to that of Bickel’s colossal Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse & Transfer Company on the South Side.
The architect gave the bricklayers a workout. The bricklayers were up to the challenge.
Other department-store warehouses: Frank & Seder and Rosenbaum’s, Gimbels.
From The Pittsburgh Bicentennial in 1958, an advertisement for Alcoa aluminum as the new wonder material in construction. All these buildings are still standing, though the Heinz Food Research Center badly needs a rescue.
This 1950s modernist apartment building was put up on what had been the Neeld estate in Beechview until after the Second World War. It has kept much of its original detail, including the windows. The one big change has been the addition of a hipped roof, which was probably the simplest and most economical way to solve persistent problems with the original flat roof. The colored sections give the building a cheery whimsy that most modernist boxes lack.
This tiny house on Arch Street, which is now part of the Mexican War Streets Historic District, is one of the less distinguished houses from an architectural point of view. Crammed into a half-size lot beside a much larger house, it has nothing but a little plaque on the front to tell you that a great man once lived here. This was the home of George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., when he invented the Ferris wheel.
The great wheel was conceived as an answer to the Eiffel Tower. The Exposition Universelle in Paris had attracted the admiration of the world with the world’s tallest structure. Chicago was planning the World’s Columbian Exposition: what could possibly outdo the Eiffel Tower? George Ferris, until then a moderately successful engineer in Pittsburgh, designed the great wheel, and it was a success.
A few numbers will show what a colossal construction this was. It had 36 cars. Each car had 40 seats, with room for 20 more people standing. Altogether, more than two thousand people could ride the Ferris Wheel at once.
The Lumiere Brothers, pioneer moviemakers, captured the wheel in motion in 1896.
George Ferris never made much money from his great wheel; in fact he believed that the fair promoters had cheated him out of his share of the profits. In November of 1896, just three and a half years after the fair opened, Ferris died of typhoid fever. He never got rich enough to move out of this tiny house on Arch Street.
Perched on the side of a steep hill, this tiny schoolhouse was built in 1874.1 After Allegheny was conquered by Pittsburgh, this was known as the Milroy School (after Milroy Street, which passes on the right side of the school). After it closed as a school in 1938, it was used as community center called Milroy House, and then a preschool; and now it is abandoned and waiting for its next life.
The school appears to have had three classrooms: left, right, and rear.
A picture taken in 1923, when the building was already half a century old, shows how the school looked with its belfry and its real windows.
The corner of Sidney Street and South 19th Street, where we find a Second Empire building with a beautifully kept storefront.
