This category includes mostly articles about things in the central core of the North Side. Many other articles will be found under the names of individual neighborhoods.
Now part of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which began in just part of this building and has gradually expanded to take over all of it, and Buhl Planetarium, and part of the old Carnegie Free Library, in addition to its own new buildings in between. This was one of the buildings scheduled to be demolished for the “urban renewal” of Allegheny Center, but the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation scored a major victory in preserving it, and then kept its headquarters here for a while before the redevelopment of Station Square.
The building was put up in 1897, after the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 had created a sudden mania for pristine white classical buildings. The architect was listed as William Martin Aiken, Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury, and a building this size might well have had his personal supervision.
Many buildings have blank faces around the back where no one is expected to go, but this is a building designed to be seen from every angle.
Ol’ Ptolemy had heard of that weird theory that the earth moved around the sun instead of vice-versa, but he rejected it as unnecessarily counterintuitive. Hs sure did know his stars, though.
For half a century a trip to Buhl Planetarium was one the most enduring childhood memories of anyone who grew up in Pittsburgh. The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was most famous for its star shows—with its massive Zeiss projector, it was touted as the most sophisticated planetarium in the world—but it had many other scientific exhibits as well.
The building was designed by Ingham & Boyd, who specialized in educational buildings—Ingham & Boyd, and later Ingham, Boyd & Pratt, had the franchise for all the school buildings in Mount Lebanon for decades, and designed numerous others in the city and suburbs. Their style for institutional buildings was purely classical into the 1930s, and then began to take on an Art Deco hue. But they kept their classical mania for symmetry, and the front of Buhl Planetarium is typically symmetrical.
The building is decorated with extraordinary sculptures by Sidney Waugh, whose Art Deco sensibilities perfectly complement the Deco classicism of the architecture. He has made use of the symmetry of the building to arrange his sculptures as complementary pairs. Over the entrance are the bronzes Primitive Science and Modern Science, and Waugh shows them as engaged in the same intellectual enterprise. Instead of placing the modern scientist in a superior position, Waugh has the American Indian scientist and the lab-coated scientist at exactly the same height and scale admiring each other’s work as intellectual equals. In the most literal sense, they see eye to eye.
Note the three inventions Waugh has chosen to represent the accomplishments of pre-Columbian American thought: smoke signals, which created long-distance communication; the bow and arrow, which were developed to a high degree of accuracy; and snowshoes, an invention that was unique to North America.
The modern scientist has his globe, his microscope, and his test tube. He looks across the ages at the American Indian and sees a peer who knew his onions.
On the front wall of the building are two allegorical stone reliefs: “The Heavens” and “The Earth,” again facing each other at the same scale.
Finally, the exit doors from the planetarium have small reliefs of “Night” and “Day.” Here old Pa Pitt must confess that he failed to capture “Day”; it was obscured by leafy trees when he visited, and perhaps he will be able to get a picture when the leaves come down in a month or so.
When the Buhl Planetarium merged with the Carnegie, the result was the Carnegie Science Center—now Kamin Science Center—which brought a much larger science museum to the North Side, including a new higher-tech Buhl Planetarium. But after a few years of mostly lying fallow, the Buhl Planetarium building was taken over by the Children’s Museum and resumed its mission of educating children by delighting them.
If you look closely, you can see that there is a seam right down the middle of the Isabella Street face of this building. It was put up in two stages: the left half in 1906, the right half after 1910.
Kerr & Snodgrass were wholesale wallpaper dealers—obviously very successful ones. They commissioned William J. Shaw of Bellevue to design this building, and it was announced in the Gazette for October 15, 1905, with a reproduction of Shaw’s rendering.1 (Note that the building grew a ninth floor by the time it was actually constructed; apparently Kerr & Snodgrass could hardly keep up with their own prosperity.) The rendering shows the front on Isabella Street and the side along Vulcan Way. According to the news story, this building was to be very similar to the one on the other side of Vulcan Way, which has since disappeared, replaced by a bigger building.
This building has prospered with the rise of the North Shore as a desirable address; it is now known as Four North Shore Center. Its next-door neighbor on Sandusky Street is the Andy Warhol Museum.
Kerr & Snodgrass were willing to spend more than usual for a mere warehouse: the two lower floors are stone, not brick, and festooned with fine carved decorations.
George H. Schwan was the architect of this parish house,1 built in 1906 for Christ Episcopal Church. Like the First United Presbyterian Community House next door, it somehow survived when its church was demolished for “urban renewal” in Allegheny Center.
Record & Guide, September 27, 1905, p. 629. “Architect George Schwan, 326 Fourth avenue, has prepared plans for a brick parish house to be erected on Union avenue, Allegheny, for Christ Episcopal congregation, at a cost of about $30,000.” Ultimately the building was faced with stone and probably cost a good bit more. ↩︎
The Sarah Heinz House was a settlement house built in 1915 by H. J. Heinz in memory of his wife Sarah. The idea of a settlement house was that it would become a center of cultural uplift in a poor neighborhood: educated people would settle in the neighborhood and bring educational and recreational opportunities to the people around them. This is one of the few such institutions still operating: the Sarah Heinz House is still doing good work today, and still in the same building. The architect was R. Maurice Trimble, and if you compare this building to the Allegheny YMCA and the First U. P. Community House, you will see that Mr. Trimble had a very distinct idea of what a public building should look like. Of all his large buildings, this may be old Pa Pitt’s favorite.
These pictures were taken from quite a long distance: we stood at the base of Troy Hill across the street from the Eberhardt & Ober brewery in order to get a good view of the whole building. The Kodak Z990 camera has a lens that extends to the equivalent of 840mm in full-frame terms, so we could even pick out the terra-cotta eagle at the top of the building (the picture below is uncropped, by the way). This is about the practical distance limit for photography on most days: the intervening atmosphere softens the details enough that contrast had to be boosted quite a bit, which introduces more grain to an already grainy sensor. But for most purposes the picture is quite usable.
At least fifteen churches were destroyed to make way for the redevelopment of Allegheny Center. It was one of the most audacious applications of the ideas of Le Corbusier ever attempted: an entire city center destroyed and rebuilt to modern taste, with only a few isolated landmarks left as museum pieces. The fact that only one of them (St. Peter’s) was a church may tell us something about the assumptions of twentieth-century urban planners.
Oddly, this building, which originally belonged to the First United Presbyterian Church of Allegheny, was one of the few buildings the demolishers left, even though the church next to it was destroyed. It was built in 1916; the architect was R. Maurice Trimble. It now belongs to the Allegheny Center Alliance Church.
The parapet with a rounded crest at the top of the building is a favorite Trimble detail; we see a similar treatment, for example, on the Allegheny YMCA, built ten years later.
There are not enough fountains in Pittsburgh, and too many have vanished or been allowed to decay. This one was restored in 2019, and it is now a favorite spot for hospital workers from Allegheny General across the street to sit and relax on their lunch breaks.
Old Pa Pitt does not indulge in clickbait headlines. If he did, the headline for this article would have been,
This Picture Is Impossible (but We Did It Anyway).
This building faces Canal Street, which is an absurdly narrow street. The other side of the street is a wall, on top of which trees grow, and behind them a railroad. So there is no way to stand back and get a picture of the front of the old Allegheny Turnhalle except by trickery. But Father Pitt has never been above trickery. The image above is not perfect, but considering the adverse circumstances it came out pretty well. It is made from ten separate photographs.
The Allegheny Turnhalle was designed by Joseph Stillburg for the Turners of Allegheny; it is one of his few remaining large works. The original front was more elaborate, as we see in this picture from Preservation Pittsburgh.
Here we see the adroit combination of classical and Romanesque detailing that marked Stillburg’s work—a style architectural historians like to call Rundbogenstil, because Rundbogenstil is much more fun to say than “round-arch style,” which is what the German word means. There was also an interesting diagonal asymmetry to the front, doubtless reflecting stairways in the interior. The current state of the building is the result of its conversion into a warehouse, which is what has saved it when almost all of the old Schweitzerloch neighborhood—an isolated rectangle just off the Sixteenth Street Bridge—has been razed to weedy vacant blocks.
The cornerstone tells us it was laid on July 21, 1889. Newspapers of the time tell us that about two thousand people were there to watch the ceremonies. Since they were Germans, there was probably good beer, too.
What used to be a dense Swiss-German, and later Slovak, neighborhood is now mostly weeds and overgrown asphalt. It’s shocking that this emptiness is right across the river from the bustling Strip and a short stroll from the lively North Shore, but it’s hemmed in by railroads, bridges, and expressways.
On a rainy evening not long ago, old Pa Pitt stopped to take a few pictures of the former cathedral of the former diocese of the former city of Allegheny.
He took a few pictures of a few details, and then the windows of heaven were opened and a drenching downpour sent him scurrying for shelter.
Andrew Peebles, one of our most important architects in the latter 1800s, designed this fine example of mid-Victorian Gothic, which was built in 1872–1874. It was a cathedral-sized church; so when, shortly after it was finished, Bishop Domenec threw Catholic Pittsburgh for a loop by coming back from Rome with the news that there was a new diocese of Allegheny, this church was ready to slip comfortably into its new role.
The new diocese, however, was a flop. Allegheny had all the rich churches; Pittsburgh had all the debt. Bickering followed, until the Pope, declaring that you kids should just settle down and let a body think for a while, suppressed the diocese of Allegheny in 1889, and Pittsburgh absorbed the territory again. In the secular world, the city of Pittsburgh would soon absorb the city of Allegheny itself.
But a diocese never really goes away in the Catholic Church, and there is still a titular bishop of Allegheny, who the last Father Pitt heard was an auxiliary bishop of Newark. And a church never forgets that it has been a cathedral.
This fine iron fence bears the mark of its makers: Cochran Bros. of Pittsburgh.
It’s worth noting that the cathedral was hit by a disastrous fire in 1886 that destroyed everything but the walls. But the original plans were followed in the reconstruction, and Peebles was still around to supervise, so the current church is essentially the one that was built in the 1870s.
This historically Black congregation has met in this building for more than 120 years. Some of the stained glass is being restored, so old Pa Pitt will have to return for more pictures when the work is done. The architect was Frederick Sauer,1 who specified his favorite buff Kittanning brick for the job. These streets in the central part of the North Side are tiny, and Sauer’s challenge was to cram as much church as he could into a minuscule lot. He employed the usual Pittsburgh expedient of putting the sanctuary upstairs, with Sunday-school rooms and offices on the ground floor. It seems, by the way, that old Pa Pitt succeeded in finding the architect where other local historians failed (or didn’t try), but the citation is no surprise. This buff Kittanning brick was almost Sauer’s signature, and the building looks like what would happen if you squished St. Mary of the Mount into an impossibly tiny lot.
