Father Pitt

Category: North Side

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.

  • Sarah Heinz House, North Side

    Sarah Heinz House

    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.

    Entrance

    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.

    Eagle ornament
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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  • First U. P. Church Community House, Allegheny Center

    Community House

    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.

    Front elevation

    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.

    Entrance to the Community House
    Chimney
    Community House
    Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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  • Northeast Fountain, Allegheny Commons

    Northeast Fountain

    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.

    Northeast Fountain
    Northeast Fountain
    Northeast Fountain
    Northeast Fountain

    Old Pa Pitt has written elsewhere about how much he hates the cliché of slow shutter speeds for moving water. In these pictures, he made sure to use no shutter speed slower than a thousandth of a second.

    Northeast Fountain
    Northeast Fountain
    Northeast Fountain
    Northeast Fountain
    Northeast Fountain
    Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans F/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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  • Allegheny Turnhalle, Schweitzerloch

    Allegheny Turnhalle

    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.

    Allegheny Turnhalle

    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.

    Cornerstone: Ecksteinlegung am 21. Juli 1889.

    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.

    Allegheny Turnhalle
    West side of the hall
    Rear of the building
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    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.

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  • St. Peter’s Church, North Side

    St. Peter’s, perspective view

    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.

    Saint Peter Catholic Church, former cathedral of the former diocese of Allegheny, sign

    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.

    Main entrance

    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.

    Left entrance

    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.

    Iron fence in front of the church

    This fine iron fence bears the mark of its makers: Cochran Bros. of Pittsburgh.

    Makers’ mark: Cochran Bros., Pitts., Pa.
    Iron fence
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    And then the rain came. But we have more pictures of St. Peter’s, as well as some pictures of St. Peter’s at night.

    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.

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  • A. M. E. Brown Chapel, North Side

    A. M. E. Brown Chapel

    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.

    Cornerstone with date 1903
    Front elevation
    Tower
    A. M. E. Brown Chapel
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
    1. “Notes for the Afro-American,” Pittsburg Press, June 22, 1902, p. 7. “The plans and specifications of the new Brown chapel, Allegheny, are about completed, and in a few days Architect F. C. Sauer will advertise for bids and material.” ↩︎
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  • Colonel James Anderson Monument, Allegheny Center

    Bust of Colonel Anderson on the Colonel James Anderson Monument

    Colonel James Anderson was the kind gentleman who opened his personal library to working boys on Saturday afternoons at his house in Manchester. One of those boys was Andrew Carnegie, who never forgot; and if you had mentioned Carnegie as the founder of free libraries in western Pennsylvania, Mr. Carnegie himself would have corrected you: “No, that was Colonel Anderson.”

    Colonel James Anderson Monument

    Carnegie himself commissioned this monument to go with his library in Allegheny, because, as he said, “when fortune smiled upon me, one of my first duties was the erection of a monument to my benefactor.” For the sculptor he chose the best: Daniel Chester French, who was already famous for the Minute Man in Concord (Massachusetts), and would later contribute the colossus of Lincoln in the Lincoln memorial. The architectural parts of the monument were designed by Henry Bacon, who would later design the Lincoln Memorial itself. The monument we see today is a duplicate: the sculptures are original, but the original base was destroyed along with the rest of the center of old Allegheny when urban renewal came to Allegheny Center. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation succeeded in raising money to rebuild the base as Bacon designed it.

    Colonel James Anderson Monument

    The monument shows the same approach to honoring a distinguished citizen that French would later take in the Westinghouse Memorial. Instead of an impressive statue of the subject, French represents his accomplishments in bronze. Here the bust of Colonel Anderson sits on top of the monument, but the main subject is a a young blacksmith’s apprentice who has paused in his work and is sitting on his anvil, absorbed in a book. That pause from manual labor to enter the realm of literature was what Colonel Anderson made possible.

    Young blacksmith on the Colonel James Anderson Monument
    Young blacksmith on the Colonel James Anderson Monument
    Mark of Daniel C. French in bronze

    Here is the artist’s mark in the bronze: “DANIEL C. FRENCH Sc.” (for “Sculpsit”) “1903.”

    Colonel James Anderson monument
    Bronze plaque with inscription: "To Colonel James Anderson, founder of free libraries in Western Pennsylvania. He opened his library to working boys and on Saturday afternoons acted as librarian, thus dedicating not only his books, but himself to the noble work. This monument is erected in grateful remembrance by Andrew Carnegie, one of the "working boys" to whom were thus opened the precious treasures of knowledge and imagination through which youth may ascend."
    Fujifilm FonePix HS20EXR.

    A bronze plaque duplicates the original inscription. Pedantic instincts force old Pa Pitt to point out that placing the whole inscription in quotation marks was unnecessary; but if it had to be done, the quotation marks around “working boys” should have been single.

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  • Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny

    Inscription: “Carnegie Free Library”

    Smithmeyer & Pelz designed Andrew Carnegie’s first library donation—though, as the people of Braddock are proud to point out, it was the second Carnegie Library to open, since the smaller Braddock library took less time to build. The same architects had designed the Library of Congress, which turned into a quagmire from which they had a hard time extricating their careers intact. (The library part was a piece of cake; it was the Congress part that was impossible to manage.) Unlike the classical Washington library, though, this one was done in a Romanesque style, which architects seem to have instinctively hit on as more suitable for muscular industrial Pittsburgh.

    Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny

    After the library was damaged by a lightning strike, the Carnegie Library moved out and built a smaller branch library northward on Federal Street. This building now is the Museum Lab of the Children’s Museum.

    Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny
    Toewr of the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny
    Pinnacle
    Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny
    Clock tower
    Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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  • A Walk on Boyle Street, North Side

    Boyle Street street sign

    A short evening stroll on two blocks’ worth of Boyle Street, one of those narrow rowhouse-lined streets on the North Side near Allegheny General Hospital. The street sign above is on a corner house; the sign probably dates from the late 1800s, and the house, though altered with new windows and other adaptations, may date from before the Civil War.

    1300 Boyle Street

    The basement door makes us think of Alice in Wonderland.

    Houses in the 1200 block

    This Second Empire row was probably put up in the 1870s or 1880s, replacing earlier smaller houses. Thirty years ago this was a poor neighborhood, but now much restoration is being done, without wholesale displacement of the older residents.

    Rowhouse with sea-turtle mural

    You have a blank wall facing an alley? We can do something about that. The mural is by Jeremy Raymer, who has beautified many spots around the city, especially in Lawrenceville and on the North Side.

    Rowhouse with sea-turtle mural
    An Italianate house

    An Italianate house, again altered with new windows, but preserving a splendid doorframe and some original carved wooden brackets.

    Woodwork above the front door
    Brackets
    1320 Boyle Street
    Small apartment building

    An unusually attractive small apartment building whose details are well preserved. Addendum: It was built in about 1910, and the architects were Allison & Allison.1

    Front elevation of the apartment building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
    1. Philadelphia Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide, October 27, 1909, p. 684: “Architects Allison & Allison, Westinghouse Building, have prepared plans for a brick and cement apartment house, to be erected at Boyle and Hemlock streets, North Side, for W. B. Nelson. It will be of brick, with stone trimmings, hardwood finish, steam heat and electric lights.” Thanks to David Schwing. ↩︎
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  • Allegheny General Hospital, North Side

    Allegheny General Hospital

    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.

    Allegheny General Hospital
    Allegheny General Hospital from North Avenue
    Many more pictures…