The main tower of Allegheny General is one of the few classic skyscrapers outside downtown, and a landmark of Art Deco in Pittsburgh, as well as a landmark of the style Father Pitt calls Mausoleum-on-a-Stick, where the top of the tower is modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. It was designed by York & Sawyer, who made a specialty of hospitals, and built in 1930. Today we’re going to pay particular attention to the grand entrance on North Avenue, which is covered with extravagant terra-cotta decorations, so we have more than thirty pictures to show you.
Not only is this elegant palace of switching one of the few buildings left in Allegheny Center from before the great urban renewal of the 1960s, but it also preserves a memory of the extinct street layout of old Allegheny.
The architect was probably James Windrim of Philadelphia, who did most of the work for Bell of Pennsylvania in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His mission was to make these necessary industrial buildings ornaments to their neighborhoods, so that the telephone company would not face too much opposition. In the nineteenth century, it had been usual to put street signs on the corners of buildings; it was already a bit old-fashioned by the time this exchange was built, but several of the old Bell Telephone exchanges have them, and we suppose it was another way of making them seem like good neighborhood citizens. These streets no longer exist; the quarter-loop drive that turns around this corner is known as Montgomery Place.
This very Miesian building was designed in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s firm after Mr. Mies had died, which, as old Pa Pitt has said before, explains how the architect, Bruno P. Conterato, got away with making it a white box on stilts instead of a black box on stilts. Since IBM left, it has been known as Four Allegheny Center.
The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was the big science museum on the North Side before it merged with the Carnegie and moved into the Science Center.
For a while the Art Deco classical building, designed by Ingham & Boyd (or Ingham, Boyd & Pratt; Father Pitt is not sure when Pratt came into the partnership) was sparsely used for classes and other activities, but after the Carnegie moved everything into the Science Center, the Children’s Museum took over the building for a huge expansion.
The Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, Andrew Carnegie’s first donation (and the second one to open, after Braddock), set the pattern for many of the larger libraries to come: it included not only a library but also a music hall, so that the building gave the people of the city a palace of culture. This is the first Carnegie Hall ever: the one in Braddock was a later addition to the library. The architects of this building were Smithmeyer & Pelz, who had earned their library-drawing credentials by winning the competition to design the Library of Congress. First Smithmeyer and then Pelz would later be thrown off the Library of Congress job, because it’s hard to work on a huge government project that’s eagerly watched by every newspaper in the nation and supervised by the entire United States Congress. They probably found it much easier to deal with Mr. Carnegie. Nevertheless, all Mr. Carnegie’s other libraries in Pittsburgh were designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, or just Alden & Harlow, who became his preferred firm and knew exactly what he wanted.
The music hall is now in use as the Hazlett Theater.
The main library was damaged years ago by a lightning strike, which provoked the library to move out to a new building on Federal Street; but the Children‘s Museum has taken over and restored this historic building and uses it as the Museum Lab.
The restoration of the Garden Theater, built in 1914 from a design by Thomas Scott, is nearly complete. The storefronts on North Avenue will be filled again for the first time in decades. Old Pa Pitt will try to get back when the rubbish bin is gone from the front, but these pictures give a good impression of how carefully the external appearance has been maintained and refreshed.
The Allegheny Post Office was built in 1897 under the reign of William Martin Aiken as Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury. In 1967, the post office moved out, and the building was scheduled for demolition to complete the modernist paradise of Allegheny Center. However, the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation scraped up the money and rescued it, using it as a Landmarks Museum for a while. Later, when the PHLF moved to Station Square, the building became the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which has since gradually expanded to take over all three of the historic buildings left from the old center of Allegheny—the Post Office, Buhl Planetarium, and the Carnegie Free Library.
“Blue-hour” pictures are very fashionable these days. Old Pa Pitt can do them, too, but only a few at a time, because twilight refuses to stand still and have its picture taken for hours on end.
These pictures are very large composites; expect 24 megabytes of data if you enlarge the one above.
Commercial electric light was only a few years old when this power station was built in 1889. It was built in a restrained Victorian classical style that seems meant to make electric power look tame and respectable. But just a few years later, a new building was added next door that conveys quite a different architectural message.
The Irwin Avenue Substation was built in 1895, but it has the look of something built shortly after the Norman Conquest. The architectural message here seems to be that electricity is such a mighty force that only a medieval fortress can keep it under control. This building still belongs to Duquesne Light, and it is still called the Irwin Avenue Substation, even though Irwin Avenue has been called Brighton Road for more than ninety years.
