This is almost unique in Pittsburgh: an apartment building that curves into a crescent shape to follow the curve in the street. It is deliberately given a Georgian look to remind us of the crescents in London. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to determine an architect yet; the complex was built for James A. Wilson in 1903. In 2011 it was restored under the supervision of Landmarks Design Associates.
The big building included storefronts as well as apartments.
A “flatiron” building is a wedge-shaped building, like an old-fashioned clothes iron. There are many in Pittsburgh: our irregular streets leave odd-shaped parcels that naturally fill up with whatever buildings will fit. This one made the most of its corner location by putting a storefront there, now filled in for an apartment. The ornamental brickwork is attractive, and a few carved-stone decorations give the building properly Romanesque credentials.
In 1915 the city of Pittsburgh was on a school-building binge and could hardly find architects to keep up with the demand. Thus there are schools from that era in widely different styles. Here we have a fine example of Collegiate Gothic with just a touch of Art Nouveau. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, otherwise best known for churches and millionaires’ mansions.
In 1916, when the school was a year old, the architects showed their design and this photograph at the Pittsburgh Architectural Club’s annual exhibition, so we can see that very little has changed about the exterior of the school. The most obvious change is to the windows, which have been replaced with modern windows, the same size as the originals but without the multiple small panes. (The very dark shade of the brick is the result of the film stock of the era, which was not very sensitive to red light.)
Covered with pollen from nearby Rose-of-Sharon bushes (Hibiscus syriacus).
This neighborhood firehouse stands where Damas Street, Homer Street, Buente Street, Walz Street, and Steine Street meet on Spring Hill, just across Damas Street from the spring that gives the hill its name. It was built in 1929, designed by city architect Richard Neff.
Four of the streets at this complicated intersection are paved roads. The fifth, Steine Street, is a stairway, rising just opposite the front of the firehouse, so that we can get this fine front elevation from second-floor level. (Some utility cables were sacrificed for this picture, but old Pa Pitt promises to restore power to the neighborhood one of these days.)
George Nattress & Sons of Philadelphia were the architects of this church, one of the dwindling number of black stone churches in Pittsburgh. The Nattresses were favorites among Episcopalians. Old Pa Pitt can think of any number of Pittsburgh architects of the era who could have done just as well or better from at least an external point of view, but perhaps the Philadelphians had an innate sense of the rhythm of Episcopalian worship.
Impressive wooden doors form the main entrance.
The inscription “My house shall be called the house of prayer for all people” is from Isaiah 56:7, which was later quoted by Jesus on the one occasion in his earthly career when he got really angry: the Cleansing of the Temple.
The rough-cut black stones of the front arcade. Old Pa Pitt still thinks the sooty blackness adds dignity to many an otherwise prosaic church, and he encourages congregations that still possess black stone churches to keep their historical soot.
The parish house is built of matching stone (or at least the stones matched after a few years of exposure to Pittsburgh’s blackening atmosphere), but the neat frames for the windows and doors give it a more urbane and less rustic appearance.
When Pittsburgh was just a frontier town far from the civilized East; when the American Revolution was not yet won; when wars with Indian nations kept Pittsburghers looking over their shoulders every time they left their mostly log houses—one extraordinary man came here to Pittsburgh with the idea that, if he could not find civilization here, he would make it.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge was at Princeton with James Madison and Philip Freneau, where they founded the American Whig Society. Already in college Brackenridge was scribbling furiously. He and Freneau wrote the commencement poem in 1771—“The Rising Glory of America.”
When the Revolution broke out, Brackenridge was not one of the military leaders. But he was the first to write a blank-verse tragedy on the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was performed by the students at the Somerset Academy. Brackenridge was master of the school: it is a good principle for dramatic writers to remember that, if they have difficulty rounding up actors, they can take over a school and simply require the students to perform their work.
In 1778, Brackenridge tried founding a magazine in Philadelphia; but in spite of sharp and clever writing by Brackenridge and his friend Freneau, the publication could not make money. So Brackenridge studied law; but Philadelphia was already stuffed with lawyers.
But Pittsburgh, three hundred miles to the west, had none.
In 1781, therefore, Brackenridge moved to Pittsburgh, where he could make something of himself by making something of the place.
Brackenridge was always involved in politics, and he often held political office—culminating in a seat on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. But literature was his first love. In politics he had to adapt to the whims of the people; in writing, frequently under pseudonyms, he could say what he liked, and indeed contradict himself as much as he pleased. Brackenridge was a man of well-considered contradictions. He was a lifelong believer in the American experiment, and fought hard for the ratification of the Constitution; but he was a thorough cynic as well. He was able to balance the two contradictory ideas that it was right that the people should rule, and that “the people are fools” and would botch the job completely given half a chance. The Constitution was important to him precisely because it also is a careful balance between those two contradictory ideas. “No man was a more convinced democrat than Brackenridge,” said the 1917 Cambridge History of Literature, “but he was also solid, well-read, and deeply bored by fools who canted about free men and wise majorities.”
As a literary man, what outlet would Brackenridge have in a town of less than a thousand people? None whatsoever when he arrived; but he backed an ambitious fellow named John Scull, financing the hauling of a printing press across the mountains. The result was the Pittsburgh Gazette—still clinging to life today, under the name Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as the second-oldest metropolitan newspaper in America and one of the oldest in the world. The Gazette’s columns were filled with clever articles by many correspondents with comical names, most of whom were Brackenridge.
Brackenridge does not loom large in the standard histories of the United States, but it is arguable that his delicate tightrope act in the Whiskey Rebellion saved the young nation from civil war. His memoir of those times, Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794, is in print from our friends at the Franklin Head, and it is not only vital history but also first-class entertainment.
The work for which Brackenridge was long remembered, however, was Modern Chivalry, the first important novel published in America. If you look up “first American novel,” you will probably be led to The Power of Sympathy, which was published three years before the first volume of Modern Chivalry came out; but no one read The Power of Sympathy until it was rediscovered in the late 1800s, when it was given a second chance for no one to read it. Everyone read and laughed over Modern Chivalry, and it remained in print for a generation after Brackenridge had died. The book collector Charles Frederick Heartman believed that it would have been an acknowledged classic if it had been published in Europe. “Millions of copies would have been printed of this book and every bookseller would have a half dozen editions on his shelves. As it is but few people know that such a book was ever written, and fewer still have read it. It is, in fact, one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. One has to borrow names like Swift, nay, Rabelais, to find equals.”
John Quincy Adams was one of the many early fans of the book. After a Pittsburgh friend sent him a new edition of Modern Chivalry in the 1840s, Adams wrote back,
I had read the first part of Modern Chivalry and formed a pleasant acquaintance with Captain Farrago and his man Teague, at their first appearance more than half a century since, and they had then excited much of my attention as illustrations of life and manners peculiar to the times and localities, not entirely effaced when I became more familiarly acquainted with them, by this visit to the latter.… The reappearance of this work, as a second edition, since the author’s death, more than half a century after its first publication, well warrants the prediction that it will last beyond the period fixed by the ancient statutes, for the canonization of poets, a full century. I shall read it over again, I have no doubt, with a refreshing revival of the pleasure with which I greeted it on its first appearance; and if this expression of my opinion can give any satisfaction to the remaining relatives of Judge Brackenridge, or to yourself, it is entirely at your disposal, being with a vivid sense and grateful remembrance of your kindness, and that of my fellow-citizens of Pittsburgh and Allegheny.
Dr. Boli’s Eclectic Library has a number of copies of Modern Chivalry, along with a few other critical assessments.
Judge Brackenridge left an equally literary son, Henry Marie Brackenridge, whose family founded the borough up the Allegheny that still bears their name.
We might add that the portrait at the head of the article belongs to the University of Pittsburgh—a school that was another gift of the far-seeing Hugh Henry Brackenridge to his adopted city. It was painted by Gilbert Stuart, whose most famous work is the portrait of Washington adapted for our dollar bill.
Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about this little bank except that it was built in about 1921. Its classical style is designed to say “bank” as soon as you see the building.
Those spindly Corinthian columns at the entrance look like an afterthought. Father Pitt imagines the architect presenting his clean and dignified plans to the client, who immediately points and says, “Where are the columns? It’s a bank, for Pete’s sake.”
Every city used to be full of stables because every city used to be full of horses. Garages have replaced stables, and most of the old stables have vanished. Here is a rare survivor. It was in the beer business for at least a century, but that it was a stable before that is fairly obvious. The grinning horse tells the story. Even then it may have been a stable for a brewery; the earliest owner old Pa Pitt has been able to trace was J. P. Ober, the Ober of Eberhardt & Ober, whose brewery at the base of this same hill is now the Penn Brewery.
A little modernistic apartment building whose details have been marred somewhat—the stock “picture windows” do it no favors. But enough remains that we can imagine the clean late-moderne look the architect was going for.
