Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • Kilkeary’s Hotel

    Kilkeary’s Hotel
    Composite photograph.

    This building on Ninth Street has housed various establishments of varying reputability over the years. It was built, however, as a good hotel for Joseph F. Kilkeary, and it was designed by the very reputable Edward B. Lee, a young architect who had made his reputation as the winner of the design competition for the City-County Building (though Lee would later insist that the real designer of that one was Henry Hornbostel).

    It seems that the project for this hotel evolved gradually from a remodeling of Kilkeary’s much smaller existing hotel to a full-scale reconstruction. In The American Contractor, July 5, 1924, we read: “Hotel (Kilkeary’s, rem.): $15,000. 9th st., bet. Penn. av. & Duquesne Waw [sic] Archt. Edw. B. Lee, Chamber of Commerce bldg. Owner Jos. F. Kilkeary, 131 Ninth st. Drawing plans.” This would have bought an extensive renovation of a smaller building. But by 1926 the plans were more ambitious, as we read in The Charette, April 1926: “Lee, Edward B., Architect, Chamber of Commerce Building, Pittsburgh, Pa. Hotel, 9th and French Sts., Pittsburgh, Pa. J. F. Kilkeary, Owner, address care Architect. Working drawings are being made. General contractor has been selected by owner, Taylor-Meyer Company, Keystone Building. Size of building 57 ft. x 56 ft., six stories in height. Basement with heating plant and two store rooms; guest rooms on 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th and 6th floors; steel frame; metal partition walls; brick and stone trim on front; side and rear tile curtain walls; 8 in, cement floors; each room with bath; steam heat; conduit wiring; modern hotel equipment; cubage approximately 150,000 cu. ft.” This listing describes the building more or less as it stands today.

  • Liberty Center

    Liberty Center

    The local firm of Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman designed the second-most-important Postmodernist development in Pittsburgh, after PPG Place. This one does not get the attention lavished on Philip Johnson’s forest of glass-Gothic pinnacles: it never gets to play a supervillain’s headquarters in the movies, and it is seldom pointed out as one of Pittsburgh’s top sights. But to old Pa Pitt’s eye it is a particularly pleasing manifestation of what was called Postmodernism at the time, but might be more accurately termed the Art Deco Revival. It consists of two skyscrapers—currently known as the Federated Hermes Tower and the Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh—linked by lower sections of building that fill in the rest of the block.

    Clock tower
    Federated Tower
    Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh
    Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh
    Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh
    Liberty Center

  • United Steelworkers Building

    United Steelworkers Building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Seen from Mount Washington. We also have some pictures from Gateway Center Park (with a little more about the building), and from the Boulevard of the Allies.

  • Wm. O. Johnston & Co. Building

    Corner of Penn Avenue and Ninth Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    The corner of Penn Avenue and Ninth Street. The building on the corner is the Wm. O. Johnston & Co. building, built for a printer who was one of the successors to the venerable Zadok Cramer of the Franklin Head Bookstore. We also have a composite picture of the front of the building.

  • Decorations on the Maginn Building

    Arch on the Maginn Building

    Father Pitt is fairly certain that the ornamental stonecarving on the Maginn Building was done by Achille Giammartini, Pittsburgh’s master of Romanesque whimsies. The style is Giammartini’s, and the building was designed by Charles Bickel, who is known to have brought in Giammartini for the German National Bank (now the Granite Building) around the corner, as we see in this advertisement:

    Advertisement for Achille Giammartini

    But, you say, speculation is not enough for you. You want the artist’s signature. Well, to old Pa Pitt, this looks like a signature:

    Face with mustache in the corner of the arch

    In fact, Father Pitt has formed the hypothesis that Giammartini littered the city with self-caricatures in Romanesque grotesque. Several other buildings bear carved faces similar to these two in the corners of the arch on the seventh floor of the Maginn Building.

    Grotesque face

    The rest of the ornaments are also in Giammartini’s trademark style: lush Romanesque foliage with slightly cartoonish faces peering out from the leaves.

    Capital
    Capital with face
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Firstside

    Firstside from Mount Washington

    A large composite picture (it’s 8,911 × 2,319 pixels if you enlarge it) of the row of buildings along Fort Pitt Boulevard in the Firstside Historic District. Before the boulevards isolated the city from the shore, these buildings used to face the Monongahela Wharf, a chaotically busy inland port where steamboats by the dozens loaded and unloaded their passengers and cargo.

  • Logan-Gregg Hardware Co. Building

    Logan Gregg Hardware Co. Building
    Composite of six photographs.

    Built in 1915 from a design by Charles Bickel, who was probably our most prolific architect of commercial buildings. It is now part of the Creative and Performing Arts High School, the rest of which has adopted the horizontal stripes as a running theme.

    We also have a perspective view of the building.

  • Entrance to the Union Trust Building

    Entrance to the Union Trust Building

  • Mellon National Bank Building

    Mellon National Bank Building
    This picture has been manipulated on two planes to give the building a more natural perspective than is really possible in Pittsburgh’s narrow streets, at the cost of distorting a few other things.

    The Mellons ordered a bank that would convey the impression of rock-solid stability. It was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, who would later design the even more imposing Federal Building and the Gulf Building, both also Mellon projects. (We call the Federal Building a Mellon project because Andrew W. Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury who specified it and wrote his name on it in bronze.) It was a Lord & Taylor department store for about four years in the early 2000s, for which the splendid interior was mostly destroyed. Later, PNC took it over as a call center, and restored some of the bits of interior that were left.

    Inscription: Founded MDCCCLXIX—Chartered MDCCCCII; this building erected MDCCCCXXIII
    Entrance
    Copper cornice
    Light fixture
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Muddling a Building in Chinatown

    513 Court Place
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    The front of this building from the 1920s has been subjected to a series of ill-conceived renovations, and it is about to get another one. This one will make a drastic change in its appearance by imposing a modern front that will make it look like an entirely different building—one in a 2020s style that will be embarrassingly passé in a few years. The good news is that the new front appears to be more or less disposable: it is simply covering the existing building (except for the parts on the ground floor that had already been rubbished by previous renovations), and a future owner will be able to peel it away and reveal the original building behind.