The school is long gone, and the site covered by expressways: it was about where the ramps from the Fort Duquesne Bridge join state route 65 on the way to Ohio River Boulevard, very near the North Side subway station. But here is a rendering of Charles M. Bartberger’s design, which is an early school in a somewhat unusual Flemish style by an architect who came to design many of Pittsburgh’s more distinguished school buildings. It was published in the American Architect and Building News for October 13, 1900.
Old Pa Pitt finds it interesting how many of these architectural renderings include elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen standing in the street waiting to be run over by an omnibus.
Lord & Burnham designed Phipps Conservatory in 1892, which was probably their biggest commission ever; and in this 1896 advertisement for their services, we see them showing a model conservatory that is very much like one of the wings of Phipps.
Southeast wing of Phipps Conservatory, with John Massey Rhind’s Robert Burns.
An interesting building, published in this issue, built after the style of the early English Parish Church, and executed in that character exceptionally well both interior and exterior.
The exterior of the Church is of Rubble Masonry which as a material blends well with the immediate surroundings, the site being on Brownsville Road, Carrick, and of a rural atmosphere. The interior (as the interior of the early English Parish Church) is carried out in a very simple but dignified design, of plaster and timber, finished in a warm color scheme.
The Church has a seating capacity of 500, the Sunday School accommodating 450.
The architect, as the page with the photograph above tells us, was George H. Schwan. Although the immediate surroundings were “of a rural atmosphere” in 1915, they would not remain that way for long. Already in the photograph above you can see the great engine of urbanization: streetcar tracks.
The design of the House Building, with its unusual middle section, is explained by the fact that the upper six floors were added some time after the lower seven were put up. This rendering shows the cornice and parapet at the top, without which the building looks a little too casual.
We prefer not to think about it, but the unfortunate fact is that human beings have natural functions that must be attended to. If we attend to them in the street, we will be arrested. The alternative is to go to some place that is privately owned, where we are subject to the whims of the owner.
Our ancestors occasionally attempted to deal with the problem more forthrightly than we are willing to do. From a 1913 magazine:
Public Comfort Stations in Pittsburgh
Two new public comfort stations installed by the county commissioners at the Allegheny County courthouse in Pittsburgh on either side of the Fifth Avenue entrance have been opened for public use. There are two rooms provided, one for women and one for men. They have been finished in white marble and fitted with most modern plumbing appliances.
A rest room for women is furnished with chairs and couches, and the women’s station will be in charge of a matron from 8 a. m. to 11 p. m. Towels, soap, brushes and combs will be found in both stations free of charge. The men’s station will be open at all hours day and night.
With the opening of the new stations Allegheny County will have four public comfort stations in use in Pittsburgh, two on the Federal Street Bridge and the courthouse station.
Night view of auditorium, illuminated by mercury vapor tubes, nitrogen vapor tubes, carbon and tungsten lamps
From The Brickbuilder in 1913, two views showing how interior spaces in the Allegheny County Soldiers’ Memorial were illuminated.
Night view of banquet hall and ballroom, illuminated by tungsten lamps, screened by amber shades
An interesting note on the auditorium: In 1960, Syria Mosque across the street was the usual venue for Pittsburgh Symphony performances. But when the Symphony made some high-tech ultra-high-fidelity recordings for Everest that year, conductor William Steinberg insisted on using the auditorium in Soldiers and Sailors Hall instead. He thought the acoustics were much better. Those Everest recordings are still regarded by connoisseurs as some of the most real-sounding symphonic recordings ever made.
Update: Once in a while old Pa Pitt has a chance to boast about his architectural instincts, and here is one of those occasions. In the original article, he wrote that he suspected Edward B Lee of having designed the remodeling of the theater into an office building. He was right. Source: The American Contractor, December 15, 1923: “Store & Office Bldg. (remod. from theater): $150,000. 5 sty. & bas. H. tile. Liberty av. & Strawberry Alley. Archt. E. B. Lee, Chamber of Commerce bldg. Owner The Fidelity Title & Trust Co., Wilson A. Shaw, chrm. of bd., 343 Fourth av. Gen. contr. let to Cuthbert Bros., Bessemer bldg.”
The original text of Father Pitt’s article follows.
Edward B. Lee was the architect of the Liberty Theater—or Theatre, as theatrical people often insist on spelling it—when it was built in 1912. These pictures were published in The Brickbuilder in 1913, so they show the theater as it was when it was new. Either the theater failed or the owners decided it would be more profitable as an office building, because only eleven years later, in 1924,1 it was remodeled into the Baum Building, and it still stands today.
The shell and outlines are the same, but quite a bit was changed externally. Old Pa Pitt suspects that Lee was the architect of these changes, too, and they were accomplished so elegantly that we would never know the building had not been planned that way from the beginning.
These small drawings (orchestra, first balcony, second balcony) show the aggressive adaptations Mr. Lee had to make to the irregular shape of the lot—a common difficulty for buildings on the southeast side of Liberty Avenue, where the two grids of the irrationally rationalistic eighteenth-century street plan collide.
Detail over the entrance. These decorations disappeared when the building was converted to offices.
Corner detail. The cornice and pilasters survive, but the elaborate terra-cotta decoration between the pilasters vanished in 1924.
In the original version of this article, Father Pitt had given the date as 1920, following a city architectural survey. The listing from the American Contractor proves that the date was actually no earlier than 1924. ↩︎
Henry Hornbostel’s drawing of the south façade of the School of Mines Building, later State Hall. It was demolished in 1973 to make way for the Chevron Science Center, and perhaps someone thinks that was an improvement.
This drawing was published in 1909 in The Brickbuilder, an architectural magazine from which we’ll harvest more illustrations in the future.
