Father Pitt

Category: Architecture

  • Victory Building (in Better Light)

    Old Pa Pitt published a nearly identical picture of the Victory Building a while ago, but he was unhappy with the patch of blinding sunlight that washed out one corner of it. Here is the same view in more even lighting.

  • 945 Liberty Avenue

    From the days when this part of Liberty Avenue was mostly warehouses and light industry, this building, nicely restored, shows how much effort once went into ornamenting at least the front even of a utilitarian commercial structure.

  • Forbes Avenue Side of the Frick Building

    Louis Sullivan was of the opinion that Daniel Burnham’s success in the classical style was a great blow to American architecture. But what could be more American than a Burnham skyscraper? Like America, it melds its Old World influences into an entirely new form, in its way as harmonious and dignified as a Roman basilica, but without qualification distinctly American.

  • Regal Shoe Company

    This oddly domestic-looking storefront is made for a high-class tenant, and has found the perfect match in Heinz Healey’s haberdashery. The building was designed by Alden & Harlow, whose usual good taste is apparent.

  • Fifth Wood Building

    This is classicism walking the knife edge between Art Deco on the one side and modernism on the other. The architect was George H. Schwan, a Pittsburgher whose only other major commission in town that old Pa Pitt knows about is the Twentieth Century Club in Oakland. [Update: The Twentieth Century Club is usually attributed to Benno Janssen. Schwan may also have designed the Natatorium Building in Oakland, or the renovations that made it into a movie theater.] Schwan did not starve, however: he was a much-employed designer of attractive smaller houses, and his most famous commission was designing practically all the original buildings in the model Akron suburb of Goodyear Heights.

    Addendum: Father Pitt knows of more works by Schwan than he did when he wrote this article. See the Great Big List of Buildings and Architects for old Pa Pitt’s latest research.

  • Standard Life Building

    This Fourth Avenue tower is smaller than some of the others, but just as splendid as its most ostentatious neighbors. It was designed by Alden and Harlow in their usual exquisite taste.

  • Morse School

    Now part of the Morse Gardens apartments, this fine-looking 1874 school was designed by T. D. Evans, about whom old Pa Pitt knows nothing else. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

  • Ewart Building

    The prolific Charles Bickel designed this well-balanced Romanesque building, two doors up from another one of his Romanesque creations on Liberty Avenue, the Maginn Building. Below we see both of them in context, with, of course, a bus coming toward us, because old Pa Pitt likes to do that.

  • 242 Fifth Avenue

    This ostentatious little building on Fifth Avenue is in need of some restoration. Something could be done with the ground floor to make it more in sympathy with the upper storeys without spending the immense fortune it would probably take to recreate the original classical front. Even a simple modernist glass front would be more harmonious.

  • K&L Gates Center

    Formerly One Oliver Plaza, this modernist block from 1968 was one of the last works of William Lescaze, pioneer of modernism, who died the next year. Old Pa Pitt confesses to not missing him a whole lot.