These pictures are very large composites; expect 24 megabytes of data if you enlarge the one above.
Commercial electric light was only a few years old when this power station was built in 1889. It was built in a restrained Victorian classical style that seems meant to make electric power look tame and respectable. But just a few years later, a new building was added next door that conveys quite a different architectural message.
The Irwin Avenue Substation was built in 1895, but it has the look of something built shortly after the Norman Conquest. The architectural message here seems to be that electricity is such a mighty force that only a medieval fortress can keep it under control. This building still belongs to Duquesne Light, and it is still called the Irwin Avenue Substation, even though Irwin Avenue has been called Brighton Road for more than ninety years.
According to Wikipedia and the National Register of Historic Places and the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation and numerous books and so on and so forth, the architects of Westinghouse High School were Ingham & Boyd. So you can just take the story as it comes to you, or you can can do what Father Pitt can’t stop himself from doing: keep pulling at a loose thread until the whole story unravels and has to be woven again.
The loose thread was that old Pa Pitt kept running across construction listings that said George S. Orth & Brother were designing a Homewood-Brushton High School in the middle teens of the last century. For a long time Father Pitt had just assumed that the project fell through, and later Ingham & Boyd were hired to design the school that was actually built in 1921. But then he found this elevation of the school as designed by the Orths:
It was printed in the Year Book of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, Incorporated, for 1916—long before the current school was built in 1921. But even a casual glance shows that it is fundamentally the school that stands today. Details are different, but the three-arched entrance, the blank walls on the projections at the ends of the building, the exact number and proportion of the windows, and so on, are all the same.
So why are the Orths not credited as the architects of Westinghouse?
The Wikipedia article on Westinghouse High School explains it, though without mentioning the change of architects. Digging for the foundation of the school began in 1915, while the Orths were still frantically scribbling their final drawings. But then the bids from the construction contractors came in, and they were shockingly high. The school board decided to wait for a little bit. Then there was a big war, and the construction didn’t actually begin until 1921.
So much we can learn from Wikipedia. The article does not mention the Orths, however, so it does not inform us that George S. Orth died in 1918, and Brother (his name was Alexander Beatty Orth) died in 1920. Having gone to a better place, the Orths were not inclined to finish the supervision of the project, so new architects had to be found. Enter Ingham & Boyd.
Comparing the Orths’ drawing with the school as it stands shows us that Ingham & Boyd took over the original plans, but adapted them to their own taste. They made the design more rigorously classical, changed the partly brick walls to all stone, simplified the ornamentation, and added inscriptions (a typical Ingham & Boyd touch) to the blank walls. But the main outlines were already established by George S. Orth & Brother.
Having sifted through the history of Westinghouse High School, we must say that Ingham & Boyd did the larger part of the work. They not only remade the plans in a more modern style, but also supervised the construction and dealt with the school board as the costs kept rising, which must have required patience and many soothing words.
But the original design belongs to George S. and Alexander Beatty Orth, and they deserve the credit for it. It will probably take a long time for that truth to percolate through the many repositories of Pittsburgh architectural history. But, as the book of I Esdras says…
An apartment tower that was part of the original Chatham Center complex, designed by William Lescaze with Pittsburgh’s Harry Lefkowitz as the local architect. It opened in 1966.
The vestibule at the original entrance to the Carnegie Institute building, seldom used now because visitors come in through the modernist Scaife Galleries addition. This picture was taken hand-held in dim light with the ultra-wide auxiliary camera on old Pa Pitt’s phone, so please forgive its obvious flaws.
St. Ann’s was built in our most Hungarian neighborhood for Hungarian Catholics. The cornerstone was laid in 1919; the congregation worshiped in the basement of the unfinished building for a few years, and finished the church in 1925. The church closed in 1998, and the building was sold; its current owners have kept it from falling down.1 That is as much as old Pa Pitt knows about the church, other than what you see in these pictures.
From the front, the church seems extremely tall, with its sanctuary upstairs from the main entrance. However, Hazelwood is a neighborhood mostly built on a slope, and the altar end of the sanctuary is at ground level. The cross in a circle on the façade was originally a rose window.
Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about this building other than what you see in the pictures. It had an attractive front, and it remains interesting to look at even though the windows have been filled in and some of the brickwork has been very sloppily repointed.
The right-hand side was built with rusticated concrete blocks, which were all the rage in the 1920s and 1930s.
The striking feature of this modernist synagogue is the huge relief over the entrance that symbolically depicts the Twelve Tribes of Israel surrounding the Tablets of the Law. The architects were Ben Friedman and Nathan Cantor, although Father Pitt has not yet sorted out whether they worked together or at different times.
Ground was broken for the first part of the building on April 20, 1947; first services were conducted September 3, 1948. Ground for the Rabbi Sivitz Memorial Talmud Torah and Main Building was broken August 17, 1952; it was dedicated on August 27, 1955.
This preliminary sketch for the synagogue was published on the cover of the Jewish Criterion, August 23, 1946. The sketch is quite different from the building as it stands, but obviously an early stage in the evolution of the same idea. Through the halftoning, we can just make out the name “Friedman” in the signature.
The symbols are taken from the prophecy of Jacob in Genesis 49:
Reuben, unstable as water;
Simeon and Levi: instruments of cruelty are in their habitations (but Simeon’s sword is mitigated by a wreath of olive, and Levi later became the priestly class, and thus is represented by a swinging censer);
Judah is a lion’s whelp;
Zebulun shall be for an haven of ships;
Issachar is a strong ass, crouching down between two burdens;
Dan shall be a serpent in the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’ heels, so that his rider shall fall backward;
Gad, a troupe shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last;
Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties;
Naphthali is a hind let loose;
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall;
A rainy November afternoon is the perfect time to spend an hour or two in the art museum. Here are a few of the things you might see if you visited the Carnegie right now.
Aurora Leigh, by John White Alexander, 1904: an imaginative portrait of the heroine of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel. Alexander’s last and greatest work was the decoration of the Grand Staircase in the Carnegie, so you’ll have a chance to see those murals, too.
Sunrise Synchromy in Violet, by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 1918.
Rue de L’Abreuvoir, by Maurice Utrillo, 1911.
Harbor Mole, by Lionel Feininger, 1923.
Rue de Beaujour, Pontoise, by Camille Pissarro, 1872.
