Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Burke Building

    Burke Building

    Designed by John Chislett, our second resident professional architect (Benjamin Latrobe was our first), the Burke Building opened in 1836. It just missed the Great Fire nine years later, and it was substantial enough to remain valuable through the many booms that followed, so that it has survived to be the oldest building downtown outside Fort Pitt. That seems astonishing when we recollect that there had been a city here for 78 years before this building was put up, but flood and fire wiped away much of what came before, and prosperity destroyed the rest.

    We are lucky to have the Burke Building. It is a particularly elegant example of Greek Revival design, and it manages to create a very rich appearance with minimal ornament. Young architects would do well to imitate it.

    Wreaths
    Scallop lintel

    The Brookline Connection site has a page on the Burke Building with some interesting historical pictures.

  • Fort Pitt Blockhouse, by Arsene Rousseau

    Fort Pitt Blockhouse
    From The Charette, December, 1928.

    This sketch was a winner in the Pittsburgh Architectural Club’s Summer Prize Sketch Competition. The artist was Arsene Rousseau (misspelled in the caption), who later became a successful architect in Youngstown.

    The sketch shows the situation of the Blockhouse as attractively as the artist can manage consistent with honesty. It had been restored to its past and present condition by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who maintained a little patch of green in the decaying warehouse and slum district of the Point. We see just a little of the Point Bridge in the background.

    For comparison’s sake, here is how the Blockhouse looked in 1887, before the ladies of the DAR got their hands on it:

    Fort Pitt Blockhouse in 1887
    From Fisher & Stewart’s Guide and Handbook of Pittsburgh and Allegheny, 1887.

  • Cast-Iron Fronts on Wood Street

    Victorian building with cast-iron front

    We have seen these beautiful storefronts before, but only obliquely. Here they are again, because we can never see them too often. This is one of the best Victorian cast-iron fronts in the city. Note that whoever designed the building has tried very hard to make you perceive it as symmetrical, though in fact the section on the right is significantly wider than the other two.

  • 907 Liberty Avenue

    907 Liberty Avenue

    Penn and Liberty Avenues are living museums of Victorian downtown architecture: in very few other places can we get such a vivid impression of what a big city looked like in Victorian times before the age of skyscrapers began. From old maps, we can see that this splendid building appears to have been put up in the 1880s for one W. T. Shannon, who was still the owner in 1923. The upper floors are now loft apartments.

  • Cast-Iron Front on Liberty Avenue

    951 Liberty Avenue

    To judge by old maps, this splendid cast-iron-fronted building was put up in the 1880s for William Carr, and it remained in the Carr family for decades after that. These days the details are picked out in shades of pale blue.

  • August Wilson African American Cultural Center

    August Wilson Cultural Center

    Old Pa Pitt nursed a secret grudge against this building for years, for the very petty reason that it replaced the old Aldine Theatre, which he had hoped to see restored as part of the revival of the theater district downtown. But on its own merits, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center is a striking building that makes the most of its triangular site, and certainly no Pittsburgher better deserves the naming rights to the first theater to meet our eyes on Liberty Avenue. San Francisco’s Allison Grace Williams was the lead architect, and she made the building into a kind of announcement for the Cultural District: here, it tells us, you are entering a place where great things are happening.

  • W. J. Gilmore Drug Company Building

    W. J. Gilmore Drug Company Building

    This feast of deco-Gothic terra cotta on the Boulevard of the Allies was designed by Joseph F. Kuntz, who worked for the Wm. G. Wilkins Company. It opened in 1925. Several of Kuntz’s buildings are notable for their terra-cotta fronts: see, for example, the Maul Building and the Hunt Armory.

    View along the front
    Ornament
    Ornaments
    Ornament
    Metalwork
    Probably cast iron
    Transom
    Ornament
    Perspective view

  • Looking Up

    Koppers and Gulf Towers

    …at the Koppers Building (left) and the Gulf Building (right).

  • Under the Rotunda at Penn Station

    Skylight in the Rotunda

    The rotunda of Penn Station is such a remarkable structure that it has its own separate listing with the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. The skylight is a fine example of abstract geometry in metalwork.

    Arch in the rotunda

    The current owners of the Pennsylvanian hate photographers and tourists who come up to see the rotunda, and post signs on the walk up to the rotunda warning that this is private property and no access beyond this point and, with dogged specificity, NO PROM PHOTOS. But old Pa Pitt walked up through the parking lot, taking pictures all the way, and therefore saw the signs only on the way back. Sorry about that, all ye fanatical upholders of the rights of private property, but these pictures have already been donated to Wikimedia Commons, so good luck getting them taken off line.

    Face above Philadelphia

    The four corners of the earth, or at least the four corners of the Pennsylvania Railroad, are represented on the four pillars of the rotunda.

    Pittsburg

    “Pittsburg” was the official spelling, according to the United States Post Office, when the rotunda was built in 1900.

    Pittsburg
    Philadelphia
    Philadelphia
    New York
    New York
    Chicago
    Chicago

  • Reliefs by Henry Hering on the Federal Reserve Bank Building

    Eagle by Henry Hering

    This building, put up in 1930–1931, was a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and the Clevelanders Walker & Weeks were the architects—but with Henry Hornbostel and Eric Fisher Wood as “consulting architects.”1 Old Pa Pitt doesn’t know exactly how far the consulting went. At any rate, the architects chose sculptor Henry Hering, who had done several prominent decorations in Cleveland, to create the cast-aluminum reliefs for this building. The picture below is from 2015, but it will serve to show the placement of the reliefs:

    Federal Reserve Bank Building

    The three main figures are obviously allegorical; they seem to represent industry, agriculture, and the professions.

    Relief by Henry Hering
    Relief
    Relief
    Decoration in aluminum
    1. Source: Walter Kidney, Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch, where this building is no. 137 in the List of Works. ↩︎