Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Federal Reserve Bank

    Federal Reserve Bank

    Now the Drury Plaza Hotel, this is a splendid example of the far Art Deco end of the style old Pa Pitt calls American Fascist. The original 1931 building, above, was designed by the Cleveland firm of Walker & Weeks, with Hornbostel & Wood as “consulting architects.” It is never clear in the career of Henry Hornbostel how far his “consulting” went: on the City-County Building, for example, “consulting” meant that Hornbostel actually came up with the design, but Edward Lee was given the credit for it; we would not know that Hornbostel drew the plans if Lee himself had not told us.

    At any rate, the lively design almost seems like a rebuke to the sternly Fascist Federal Courthouse across the street, which was built at about the same time.

    The aluminum sculpture and ornament is by Henry Hering.

    An addition in a similar style looks cheap beside the original; perhaps it would have been better just to admit that the original could not be duplicated and to build the addition in a different style.

    Federal Reserve Bank with addition
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
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  • Federal Building

    Federal Building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Altenhof & Bown, a Pittsburgh firm that also designed the State Office Building, were the architects of what is now officially called the William S. Moorhead Federal Building. It’s a good example of mid-century modern architecture—distinctive in its vertical-blind curtain of aluminum panels, yet somehow easy to ignore.

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  • O’Reilly Theater and Theater Square

    O’Reilly Theater

    A quarter-century ago, the O’Reilly opened with a brand-new play by August Wilson (King Hedley II). That makes it a newcomer by Penn Avenue standards. But Penn Avenue has been the heart of the theater district for a century and a half, and the O’Reilly stands on the exact site of Library Hall, whose auditorium was used as the Bijou, Victorian Pittsburgh’s most prestigious theater, where touring stars like Dion Boucicault played. The site had been a parking lot for more than sixty years before the O’Reilly was built, but we can think of this theater as continuing the Bijou tradition.

    O’Reilly Theater

    The building was designed by Michael Graves, the postmodernist whose brand of neoneoclassicism was influential in the movement. Mr. Graves also designed Theater Square next door, which houses the Greer Cabaret and a well-dressed parking garage.

    O’Reilly Theater and Theater Square
    Penn Avenue with the O’Reilly Theater
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    Old Pa Pitt has been dumping quite a load of pictures in these pages for the past few days. He realized that the pictures have been backing up and decided he ought to try to catch up with them. But how backed up were they? Here is a picture of the O’Reilly taken with a Kodak Signet 40 in June of 2000, when the building was only six months old. Father Pitt has never published it here before.

    O’Reilly in 2000
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  • Skyscraper Apartments for the Postwar Era

    Doubletree Hotel
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    This was one of the major developments in postwar Pittsburgh—a $5,500,000 skyscraper apartment house financed by the FHA. Tennyson & Van Wart were the architects—a partnership of Arthur Tennyson, of Mount Lebanon, and John Van Wart, a successful New York architect who had been lured here in the 1930s by a job with Westinghouse. For many decades it has been a hotel under various owners, currently as the Doubletree.

    From the Pittsburgh Press, March 3, 1950.

    “The Federal Housing Administration has insured a mortgage loan to build a 19-story, H-shaped structure on Webster Ave. on the site of St. Mary’s High School and Home for Girls at Webster Ave. and Tunnel St,” the Press reported.

    “It will cost approximately $5½ million and provide housing for 465 families. Construction is expected to begin in June and be completed by June, 1951.”

    Mr. Van Wart died unexpectedly in June of 1950, while this building was under construction. Tennyson continued the practice alone, and would end up designing many more modernist apartment blocks in the Pittsburgh area. We’ll see more of his work.

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  • Gerber Carriage Company Building

    Gerber Carriage Company

    Rutan & Russell were the architects of this Renaissance palace, which opened in 1905. It’s also known as the Oppenheimer Building, and today as Aria Cultural District Lofts.

    Ghost signs

    You can still see the sign for the Gerber Carriage Co. at the top of the building.

    Gerber Carriage Company
    Canon PowerShot SX150IS.

    Map.

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  • Garrison Place

    Garrison Place

    Garrison Place, formerly Garrison Alley, was part of the original Woods plan of downtown Pittsburgh. It was named for the adjacent Fort Fayette. Today it is a typical Pittsburgh alley—which is to say it is a very narrow passage but not called an alley, because Pittsburgh officially has no alleys. Above, looking southward across Penn Avenue toward Liberty Avenue. Below, looking northward, with Allegheny General Hospital in the distance.

    Garrison Place with Allegheny General Hospital in the distance
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Entrance to the Alcoa Building

    Entrance to the Alcoa Building
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    To old Pa Pitt’s eye, this is the most charming part of the Alcoa Building, famous for introducing aluminum as a material for the shell of a skyscraper. The rest of the building still looks like a stack of 1950s television sets to him, but this projection, with its angled glass and staggered panes and weird little space-age hoop, is what he wishes the whole building looked like.

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  • Entrance to the Koppers Building

    Koppers Building

    This is the lushest Art Deco of all our Art Deco skyscrapers. Graham, Anderson, Probst & White were the architects. The firm was one of the successors to Daniel Burnham’s practice, although Burnham would hardly have recognized the world of skyscraper design by 1929, when this building opened.

    Entrance to the Koppers Building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Wildberg Building

    Wildberg Building

    “Penn avenue always has been and seems to continue to be the Mecca of furniture houses,” wrote George Esterhammer in the Pittsburg Press in 1905,1 and indeed Penn Avenue between Ninth and Tenth was lined with huge furniture dealers on both sides for more than a century. (See Spear and Company, for example.) Mr. Esterhammer was the architect of this building, which was designed to the latest fireproof standards, including a 10,000-gallon tank on the roof and sprinklers throughout.

    Architect’s drawing of the Wildberg building

    “The fireproof floors will be covered with narrow white maple,” Mr. Esterhammer continued, “thus allowing to display to better advantage the beauty of carpets and rugs. The front on Penn Avenue will be of plate glass, Cleveland sandstone, buff brick and ornamental fire flashed terra cotta. The main entrance and the stories above are a special feature, highly ornamented and will, in the opinion of the writer, be striking and attractive.”

    The architect’s elevation was published with the article, so we can compare the building as designed to the building as it stands now. The crest has been lost, but other alterations have been minimal. The ground floor has been sensitively updated for a restaurant and storefront, but overall the building makes very much the same impression it must have made when it was new. “Altogether,” said Mr. Esterhammer, “Mr. Wildberg’s new building will lift up its head proud among its neighbors,” and it still does.

    Entrance
    Perspective view
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    1. “Penn Avenue Improvement,” Pittsburg Press, June 18, 1905. The name is spelled “Easterhammer” above the article, but “Esterhammer” in the illustration caption and in other construction listings we have seen. He was a member of the Deutsch-Amerikanischen Techniker-Verband, and in their membership listings his first name is spelled “Georg.” ↩︎
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  • B. F. Jones Building

    B. F. Jones Building

    Built in 1881, this is the only remaining downtown work of Joseph Stillburg—as far as old Pa Pitt knows, but he still hopes for surprises. Stillburg was a very big deal in Pittsburgh in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, but most of his buildings have disappeared. They were prominent buildings in their time—the Pittsburgh Exposition buildings, for example, and the Bissell Block—but they were replaced by other even grander projects as the land they were built on became even more valuable (or, in the case of the Exposition buildings, they were taken down for Point Park).

    This building is a symphonic fugue of perfectly balanced themes and rhythms woven into a composition that must have been strikingly modern in 1881. It has been restored and renovated with good taste, and it is ready for another century and a half of use.

    B. F. Jones Building
    Crest of the building
    Ornament
    Ornament
    B. F. Jones Building from the west
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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