Frederick Sauer was the architect of this ornate commercial palace, built in 1908. It is covered in white enameled terra-cotta ornaments that give it a sense of opulence above its budget.
We also have some earlier pictures of the Werner Building and some remarks on its history.
Like a great European cathedral, East Liberty Presbyterian Church, which Ralph Adams Cram considered his masterpiece, is too huge and complex to take in all at once. We can only appreciate some of the details, and then come back later for more. Here are some views from various spots in East Liberty.
This was the first telephone exchange for East Liberty: it was already here by the time the 1890 Hopkins plat map was compiled. It was built for the Central District & Printing Telegraph Company, which was soon absorbed into the Bell system.
The building has lost a cornice or crest in the front, but otherwise is well preserved.
The style is what old Pa Pitt likes to call Rundbogenstil, because Rundbogenstil is fun to say: it combines classical details, like the arches from the Baths of Caracalla in the third-floor windows, with decidedly unclassical decorative details in terra cotta and stone.
Carpenter & Crocker designed this rich-looking building for a real-estate man named S. H. Lloyd. It was built in 1905 or 1906, and a photograph published in 1907 shows it looking little different from the way it looks today.
Once the building was finished, the architects moved their own office into it,1 thus making a favorable impression on potential clients even before they walked in the door.
In 1915 the city of Pittsburgh was on a school-building binge and could hardly find architects to keep up with the demand. Thus there are schools from that era in widely different styles. Here we have a fine example of Collegiate Gothic with just a touch of Art Nouveau. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, otherwise best known for churches and millionaires’ mansions.
In 1916, when the school was a year old, the architects showed their design and this photograph at the Pittsburgh Architectural Club’s annual exhibition, so we can see that very little has changed about the exterior of the school. The most obvious change is to the windows, which have been replaced with modern windows, the same size as the originals but without the multiple small panes. (The very dark shade of the brick is the result of the film stock of the era, which was not very sensitive to red light.)
“And I want a turret,” says the client. “I want the biggest turret in the neighborhood.”
“You got it,” says the architect.
The busways in Pittsburgh are built mostly along old railroad right-of-way, and most of the stations are placed very near where the old commuter-rail stations stood. The Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway is unique in that the railroad still runs next to it; space for the busway came from the abandonment of extra parallel tracks on the busy Pennsylvania Railroad main line. Above, an outbound bus stops at the East Liberty station.
These views were taken from the Highland Avenue bridge across the railroad and busway. The bridge bears the Pennsylvania Railroad emblem in concrete.
The use of the old railroad right-of-way, which runs in a series of hollows below the main street level of the neighborhoods it goes through, makes the East Busway a true rapid-transit line, as much grade-separated as a subway.
Here is a drawing of Rowe’s department store that was published in 1907, when East Liberty was booming as it became the business hub for rapidly developing East End neighborhoods. The building, put up in 1898, still looks much the same today, though it has been many years since it housed a department store. By choosing Alden & Harlow, the most prestigious firm in the city, as his architects, Mr. Rowe declared to East End residents that he would offer them as high a class of merchandise as they could find anywhere downtown.
The drawing came from a lavishly illustrated book published in 1907 by the Pittsburg Board of Trade—a book that, oddly, has two titles: Up-Town: Greater Pittsburg’s Classic Section/East End: The World’s Most Beautiful Suburb. Here is what the book tells us about Rowe’s:
C. H. ROWE CO.
To the residents of the East End the department store of C. H. Rowe Company, at Penn and Highland avenues, is a household word. Little can be said of it which every woman and child does not already know, yet no history of the development of the East End would be complete without mention of this enterprising company.
It was in 1898 that C. H. Rowe Co. began to relieve the residents of the East End of the necessity of going down town to meet any requirements they had in the matter of dress goods, undermuslins, white goods of every description, millinery, children’s outfittings, all that the feminine domestic economy required.
Such enterprise as the firm of C. H. Rowe Co. has shown has naturally received a hearty response from the residents of the East End. The aim of this section of the city is to provide every want that its citizens require. So far as the dry goods business is concerned that is what this company has done.
It takes a modern four-story establishment, with 58,000 square feet of floor space to accommodate the company’s stock of goods. It requires 125 persons in the dullest season to attend the wants of the customers of C. H. Rowe Company and many delivery wagons are employed in distributing the goods to such customers who prefer that accommodation.
The directors of the company include Messrs. C. H. and W. H. Rowe, D. P. Black, H. P. Pears and J. H. McCrady. James S. Mackie is the general manager.
It is little wonder with such attention to all the requirements of the East End public that C. H. Rowe Company’s store has become the veritable center of the East End trade, and that its growth is so much a matter of pride not only to the members of the firm but to the residents of the entire East Liberty community.
More pictures of the Rowe’s or Penn-Highland Building.
The life of Christ is depicted in relief at the main entrance to East Liberty Presbyterian Church. We believe the sculptor was John Angel (but we would be delighted to be corrected). Above, the Nativity.
The baptism of Christ by John the Baptist.
The Sermon on the Mount.
The Commission to the Disciples.
Christ washing the disciples’ feet.
The Last Supper.
“Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Parables and miracles of Christ are illustrated in the smaller panels below.
Ralph Adams Cram considered this church his greatest accomplishment, and it would be possible to argue that it is the greatest work of Gothic architecture in North America. Cram was intensely aware of the Gothic tradition, but he was not an imitator: he was as unique and original among the Gothicists as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among the modernists. The tower of this church is a feast of Gothic detail, but it also takes inspiration from American skyscrapers, and it looms higher than the Highland Building, a steel-framed skyscraper across the street.
Cram himself was a high-church Episcopalian, a monarchist, and a member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, so it is one of history’s amusing little jokes that his greatest work was built for Presbyterians. But the Mellons, Richard Beatty and Jennie King, gave him complete freedom—a privilege seldom granted even to the greatest architects. The Mellons poured so much money into this church that locals still call it the Mellon Fire Escape, and the late Franklin Toker guessed that it was probably, per square foot, the most expensive church ever built in America.
