Built in 1898 for Rowe’s department store, this building has been called the Penn-Highland Building for years now. The architects were Alden & Harlow.
Lions stare back at you from all over the building.
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Rowe Building (Penn-Highland Building), East Liberty
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Engine Company No. 8 and East End Police Station, East Liberty
City architect Richard Neff designed this palace of public safety in the style old Pa Pitt likes to call American Fascist, which combines classical detailing with an Art Deco sensibility. It is currently getting a thorough renovation.
It’s Construction Safety Week! But don’t worry. You still have fifty-one weeks in the year to be careless.
Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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Telephone Exchange, East Liberty
Inside the building was a mass of wires and electrical equipment and operators’ switchboards. But the Bell Telephone Company insisted that the outside of every telephone exchange must be an ornament to the neighborhood. They were all Renaissance palaces like this until the 1930s, and it is likely that they all came from the same architectural office—namely, the office of James Windrim, who also designed the 1923 Bell Telephone Building downtown. After Windrim, Press C. Dowler took over as the Bell company’s court architect, and the style changed to refined Art Deco.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens.
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Detective Building, East Liberty
Built in 1972 for the Bureau of Police Investigations, this building sat vacant for a long while. It was restored in 2019 with a very sensitive eye for its original modernist style.
Those steps in the front were part of the restoration. They make a very attractive composition. To old Pa Pitt’s eyes, they look like a liability lawyer’s every architectural fantasy come true.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens.
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Eastminster Presbyterian Church, East Liberty
Built in 1893 as Sixth United Presbyterian, this church was designed by William S. Fraser, who was a big deal in Pittsburgh in the later 1800s. Fraser adopted a very Richardsonian kind of Romanesque for this church, putting its congregation right at the top of the fashion heap for the moment.
Undated postcard, about 1900, from the Presbyterian Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons. If you ask why there are two Presbyterian churches so close together—this and East Liberty Presbyterian—the answer is that there were two kinds of Presbyterians. Sixth U. P. belonged to the United Presbyterians, a Pittsburgh-based splinter group that eventually merged with the other Presbyterians in 1958. Most neighborhoods and boroughs with large Protestant populations thus had two Presbyterian churches—or more, since there were Reformed Presbyterians and Cumberland Presbyterians as well.
The stained glass is being restored slowly and carefully.
Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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East End Electric Light Company, East Liberty
Here is a relic of the genesis of the Electric Age. In the early days of electric light, the East End Electric Light Company supplied the rich East Enders with current to light their mansions. In 1899 it built this large substation, which is still in use by Duquesne Light today. Although it is clearly industrial, the building was put up at a time when an industrial building had to be ornamental as well as useful. It was therefore built in the style the ancient Romans might have used it they had built electric substations in their cities.
Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. -
Highland Building, East Liberty
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. A long view down Baum Boulevard. This is the only remaining skyscraper in East Liberty. Another of about the same dimensions, designed by Frederick Osterling, used to stand next to it, but was torn down for a one-storey bank, which in turn was abandoned for years and then torn down for a six-storey apartment block with storefronts—East Liberty’s history as a neighborhood epitomized in one lot. The skyscraper apartment buildings designed by Tasso Katselas in the “urban renewal” years are also gone. This one, designed by Daniel Burnham, has Burnham’s usual elegant classicism. In some ways Burnham was one of the most adventurous architects the United States ever produced, but part of the secret to his success was his ability to use the most modern technology to please the most conservative taste.
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East Liberty Presbyterian Church
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Baywood Street, East Liberty
Baywood Street is a typical street of upper-middle-class foursquares in East Liberty, mostly well preserved. Several have been turned into duplexes, but without much damage to the outlines of the house, as in the example below—where you should pay particular attention to the exceptionally fine round oriel on the second floor (and ignore the slightly mutilated dormer). The houses on the northeast side of the 5500 block are all the same dimensions and the same basic design, but with the fronts varied enough to make a pleasing diversity; they seem to have been built all at once at some time between 1903 and 1910, all designed with the same pencil.
Kodak EasyShare Z1285. -
Castle Stanton, East Liberty
Even though it has lost some decorative details over the years, Castle Stanton still drops jaws of passers-by who find themselves in unfamiliar territory here on the border of East Liberty and Highland Park. It looks like a 1920s Hollywood set: we expect Douglas Fairbanks dressed as Robin Hood to leap from an upstairs window and land on his feet after a series of spectacular acrobatics.
This advertisement from the Pittsburgh Press, September 21, 1930, shows us some of the pointy bits that have since been removed.
This Hollywood front hides an unexpected secret, which will be revealed if we walk around to the side of the building.
Now we see the outlines of an older Queen Anne mansion, converted to an apartment house by the addition of a Hollywood-fantasy front facing Stanton Avenue.
Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
