Built in 1914, the Garden was designed by Thomas Scott, who was responsible for a large number of buildings on the North Side and lived within walking distance of this one. Its last years as a theater were a bit disreputable, but it was spared the drastic exterior changes most other theaters suffered. It is now on its way to a new life as an apartment building; and, while we wish it might have been made a reputable theater again, at least the splendid terra-cotta front will be preserved.
Pittsburghers know it as the Gimbels Building, because for most of the twentieth century it was the home of the Gimbels department store in Pittsburgh. But it was built for the Kaufmann & Baer Company, which Gimbels bought out a few years later.
In November of 1913, this colossal department store was still going up. But in the front of the directory that went to every telephone subscriber in Pittsburgh was this beautifully executed rendering, part of a full-page ad to build up enthusiasm for the store’s opening in the spring of 1914. The architects were Starrett & Van Vleck, specialists in department stores; the drawing is signed with a name that Father Pitt could not read, but he is fairly certain it was neither Starrett nor Van Vleck. Probably it was a draftsman in their office, and in old Pa Pitt’s opinion they could not have paid that employee enough. It’s a first-rate piece of work.
“The vast new building of the Kaufmann & Baer Company,” said the advertisement, “having a floor area of about 800,000 square feet (nearly 20 acres), will be opened for business in the Spring 1914. It will be not only the BIGGEST, but also the BEST and MOST MODERN shopping center in the city of Pittsburgh. Its stocks will be the largest and most varied; its prices, the lowest. It will be the store for ALL THE PEOPLE.”
It would not be possible to get a photograph from the same angle, either in 1913 or today, without picking up the Oliver Building and setting it aside somewhere. The closest old Pa Pitt could come to replicating the angle of the drawing with a photograph from his collection was this:
The Kaufmanns in the name, by the way, were a different branch of the same Kaufmann family that owned that other department store a block away.
Now Coraopolis United Methodist. T. B. and Lawrence Wolfe, father and son, were the architects of this church. Here’s a walk all the way around from front to back on a drizzly day.
Alexander Sharove is best remembered today for the synagogues he designed, but like most architects he took on a variety of jobs, including this house built in 1937 for Stanley Hohenstein in the less expensive end of Murdoch Farms. Here Sharove juggles an eclectic assortment of styles from Jacobean to Georgian to Moderne.
The arch with rays was a popular motif in the 1930s. Sharove’s version of it uses thin strips of terra cotta for the rays.
The Second Empire style is a good fit for high-class rowhouses, because it was created specifically to stuff the most usable volume into the least taxable building. Supposedly it came about because houses in France of Napoleon III’s time were taxed by the area of the rooms, but attics were not counted in the calculation. All the space above the roofline was dismissed as attic by the law; therefore, if the roof could bulge out to make an attic the same size as the other floors, you got an extra floor tax-free. Americans adopted the style because they liked the way it looked and the way it solved the practical problems of space.
This row of seven houses drops a few feet after the first three. Manchester is a flat neighborhood, but only by Pittsburgh standards. Old maps show that the row was built between 1872 and 1882.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Nikon COOLPIX P100;
A very clever detective might deduce that these pictures were taken on two different visits.
Carson Street on the South Side is reputed to be one of the best-preserved Victorian commercial streets in North America. Mere snow cannot deter old Pa Pitt from his duty of documenting the city around him, so here is a generous album of Carson Street buildings, most of Victorian vintage, with falling snow for added picturesque effect.
Carson Street on the South Side is known as one of the best-preserved Victorian streetscapes in North America. Father Pitt loves to photograph those Victorian buildings, with their lavish yet careful attention to detail; but in a spirit of contrarian perversity, old Pa Pitt also likes to point out the post-Victorian additions to the streetscape. This building was probably put up shortly before 1910 in a very modern style for its time. The front is unusually well preserved, with big display windows wrapping around properly inset entrances.
Manchester is known for its splendid brick Victorian houses, but there are blocks of more modest houses as well—often older than the big brick ones. Here is a row of neat little frame houses, some of which appear—from both old maps and the style of the houses—to date back to the Civil War era.
A few of the commercial buildings on Fifth Avenue, the mainest of the main streets in Coraopolis. We begin with a curious building that reveals its secret as we move along the street: it is a Second Empire building from the late 1800s with a later commercial front added.
An interesting roofline and a bit of Art Nouveau terra-cotta decoration enliven this little storefront.
