Category: East Liberty

  • Gone but Not Regretted

    East Mall Apartments

    “I bestride the narrow street like a colossus,” said the East Mall Apartments. They were put up literally on top of Penn Avenue, with a narrow passage for a trickle of traffic, in 1970. The architect was Tasso Katselas, early in his decades-long reign as the leading architect of giant public works in Pittsburgh, and to be fair to him he gave the city just what it thought it wanted: a skyscraper warehouse for poor people. In fact Katselas didn’t like what the city was doing to East Liberty at all, according to this interesting article about his career. But it was good money for an architect.

    “Urban renewal” was all the rage in the 1960s and into the 1970s, and it was pushed with evangelical ardor. But it was never quite clear what “urban renewal” was supposed to be. Often it was a combination of suburbanization and Bauhausization. The things that were distinctive about city neighborhoods—concentrated commercial districts, rowhouses, churches and schools and backstreet groceries just down the street—had to give way to shopping centers, suburban-style tract homes, and modernist towers-in-a-park. One after another, these projects crippled or killed the neighborhoods they were inflicted on, but the urban-renewal evangelists were sure that the next one would be a howling success.

    East Liberty was subjected to a particularly strong dose of urban renewal. Penn Avenue, the commercial spine of the neighborhood that had been known as the “second downtown” of Pittsburgh, was closed to vehicles and made into a pedestrian mall. Traffic was diverted to “Penn Circle,” an orbital boulevard made by widening and consolidating peripheral streets and blowing up whatever didn’t fit with the new vision of East Liberty. And apartment towers like this one went up to house people displaced from their neighborhoods by urban renewal. Three of them were designed by Tasso Katselas—this one and the even taller Penn Circle and Liberty Park apartments. Of the three, this was the one that sealed the urban-renewal project, because this was the one that defiantly went up right on top of Penn Avenue, as a guarantee that the main boulevard of the business district would never again carry substantial vehicular traffic. (An artist friend of Father Pitt’s, noting the odd flared buttresses that flanked the narrow passage for vehicles, described the building as “lifting its skirts for cars to go under.”)

    Pedestrianization projects in the United States have seldom succeeded. Old Pa Pitt would love to see most of Pittsburgh closed to automobile traffic, but he recognizes that the rest of the world does not share his prejudices against motor vehicles. Keeping them away keeps their drivers away, and businesses flounder. Urban planners figured that out after a few decades’ worth of failures, and modern urban planning—finally—tends in the direction of emphasizing rather than destroying what is unique about city neighborhoods. Not coincidentally, suburbanites are moving back into the city.

    Father Pitt took this picture in about 2001. The East Mall Apartments were blown to bits in 2005 in a controlled demolition, and traffic was allowed to flow on Penn Avenue once more without going through somebody’s basement. That same year, Tasso Katselas retired from active architecture, although he still served his firm as a consultant. As of this writing, Mr. Katselas is still alive at the age of 94 or 95, having survived a good bit longer than several of his buildings.

    Do we miss those buildings? Not much; they represent an embarrassing failure in the history of our urban planning. But in his modernist idiom, Tasso Katselas did develop a distinctive style. The classic modernists like Mies van der Rohe insisted on simple lines and flat slabs of identical windows. But Katselas from the beginning preferred a much more cluttered aesthetic. He sometimes seemed like a child playing with blocks, deliberately misaligning them just to see what would happen, as we see here in the staggered façade of the East Mall Apartments. We should also mention that he had a strong understanding of what was practical in a public building. His terminal for the Pittsburgh International Airport is a masterpiece of practical design: everything was thought through with the paramount object of making the functions of an airport work as well as they possibly could. That kind of practical thinking was rare among modernist architects, and Father Pitt praises Katselas unreservedly for it, even if the buildings give old Pa Pitt the visual impression of dance music that you can’t dance to.

  • Adath Jeshurun Congregation, East Liberty

    Adath Jeshurun Congregation

    Probably the most popular style of synagogue architecture in Pittsburgh a century ago was what we might call Jewish Romanesque, with the round arches typical of Romanesque architecture along with some elements taken from traditional European Jewish architecture to make it clear that this is not a Christian church. Here is a good but endangered example of that style.

    Inscription over the enstrance

    It was built in 1923 or 1924 on Margaretta Street, now East Liberty Boulevard, and its members knew it familiarly as the Margaretta Street Shul. (Addendum: The architect was Ralph Friedberg.1) The congregation sold the building in 1996 and moved to Monroeville, where it withered away a few years later. For a while after that this was a Baptist church; but it seems to be vacant now. That is the danger. Even in the most prosperous neighborhood, it can be hard to find a use for an old church or synagogue. This part of East Liberty is far from the worst neighborhood, but it has not reached the prosperity of Highland Park to the north or the newly lively core of East Liberty to the south. If the neighborhood stays as it is, this building will probably simply decay and eventually have to be demolished. If the neighborhood prospers, it will probably be demolished to make way for something else.

    Structurally, the building seems quite sound. But the details are suffering, notably the crumbling parapet, which is one of the distinctive and remarkable features of the façade.

    Crumbling parapet

    Some interesting history of the congregation is in this article in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.

    Inscription
    Inscription
    Adath Jeshurun Congregation
    1. Assuming the name was reported correctly in the American Contractor for October 13, 1923: “Synagogue: $120,000. 1 sty. & bas. 70×95. Margarotta [sic] & St. Clair sts. Archt. Ralph Friedberg, Farmers Bank bldg. Owner The Congregation of the Adah, Jeshurum Hausman, chrmn. of comm., 720 N. Negley av. Brk. Gen. contr. let to Harry Rubenstein, 601 N. Euclid av. Carp. by gen contr. by day work. Htg. to Reliance Htg. Co., 3610 5th av. Plmg. to Moss & Blakeley, Climax & Beltzhoover st., South Side. On 1st sty. brk. wk.” Considering how garbled the rest of the entry is, we have less than complete confidence in the architect’s name. ↩︎
  • Torath Chaim Congregation, East Liberty

    Some work has been going on at this abandoned synagogue, so perhaps it will find a new purpose. The abstract menorah (it once had electric light bulbs for candles) and irregular horizontal stone date it to the middle twentieth century. But although you wouldn’t know it from the front, this is really a luxurious early-1900s private house with a modernist façade grafted on.

  • Liberty National Bank

    This cover design “from a beautiful, dignified and readable booklet designed by Arthur C. Gruver, Pittsburgh,” was picked out by a printing trade journal as an outstanding example of design in 1919. It appears to show the original ground-floor front of the Romanesque Liberty Building on Penn Avenue.

  • Art Deco Row, East Liberty, 1999

    East Liberty was down on its luck at the end of the twentieth century, but this row was still filled. The buildings have not changed much since then, fortunately, since this is one of the better Art Deco streetscapes in Pittsburgh, which never really embraced Art Deco as much as many other cities did. Surprisingly enough, Sam’s (no longer Bostonian) Shoes is still here; the terra-cotta tiles have disappeared from the front of that building. Its neighbor Anthon’s is also still in business. Most of the rest of the businesses in the row have changed, but the buildings are still there, and since East Liberty is a trendy neighborhood now, they have a good chance of preservation.

  • Tower of East Liberty Presbyterian Church

    This picture was taken in 1999 with a Smena 8M, a plastic Russian all-manual 35-millimeter camera that was cheaply made but surprisingly capable.

  • The Regent Theater, Newly Built

    From a movie trade magazine of 1915 we take this interesting article about the newly opened Regent in East Liberty, now the Kelly Strayhorn Theater. Click on the image for a much larger version.

    “The foyer is decorated in the Adams period” probably means in the Adam style—that is, the neoclassical style made popular by the Adam brothers in the 1700s and undergoing a revival in the early twentieth century.

    The picture below shows how the theater looks today: stripped of its projecting awning, but otherwise very much the same.

  • Motor Square Garden

    Originally the East Liberty Market, this grand structure was designed by Peabody & Stearns, architects of the Joseph Horne department store downtown and the iconic Custom House Tower in Boston.

  • East Liberty Presbyterian Church

    Franklin Toker suggests that, per square foot, this is the most expensive church ever built in America. It was built with Mellon money, so it is sometimes called the Mellon Fire Escape by locals who see it as an atonement for the sins inevitable on the way to becoming the richest family in America; but the congregation prefers the nickname “Cathedral of Hope.” The architect was Ralph Adams Cram, who could easily be called America’s greatest Gothic architect, and the Mellons gave him free rein and an unlimited budget. The result was Cram’s ultimate fantasy Gothic cathedral, whose massive central tower dominates the skyline of the neighborhood. To the left, in the distance, we see the Highland Building.

  • Regent Theater (Kelly Strayhorn Theater), East Liberty

    Opened in 1914, this splendid little movie palace, renamed for two of East Liberty’s biggest stars, is now a venue for live performances. The architect was Harry S. Bair, who designed several theaters in the area and also designed the old Dormont Municipal Building, which is now the home of the Anne Gregory bridal shop.

    Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.