When he published his recent pictures of the Craig Street automotive row, old Pa Pitt promised his readers pictures of some of the other nearby buildings from the early days of the automobile. Yesterday he walked over to Melwood Avenue to get pictures of the old Chevrolet dealer and found that he hadn’t walked fast enough, because this is what it looks like now:
Yes, it has been demolished for another apartment tower. Doubtless this will bring rolling waves of prosperity, though not everyone in the neighborhood is happy about it:
On the bright side, the demolition revealed an old painted sign that probably had not been visible for more than a hundred years:
Father Pitt has not been able to read the names of the two superimposed companies. This wall had been obscured by the Chevrolet dealer since before 1923, so this sign dates from the first decades of the automobile.
The Pittsburgh Athletic Association, one of the prolific Benno Janssen’s most elaborate designs, as it was in 2000 before the recent renovation. Above, from across Fifth Avenue; below, from the grounds of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial. Old Pa Pitt took these pictures with a Kodak Retinette, which comes close to his ideal of the perfect 35-millimeter camera.
We have mentioned before how thick the air was with clubs in Oakland. Here is one that has been almost forgotten: a small clubhouse by a big architect. The Bellefield Club on Craig Street was designed by James T. Steen, who also gave us the House Building, among many others.
The club opened in 1904; since then the building has had some small alterations. Cheap stock windows have replaced the windows upstairs, with cheap filler to take up the rest of the space. (Father Pitt has not seen a picture of the building in its original state; it is possible that there was a balcony behind those upper arches.) The front has been painted in a gaudy combination of brown and cream; it probably looked better with the original yellow brick. But the alterations are not severe and could be reverted by a sensitive owner.
This building was one of those unexpected discoveries one sometimes makes in the big city. Old Pa Pitt was walking up Craig Street to take pictures of the Craig Street automotive row when this building arrested his attention. He must have gone past it in a car or a bus a hundred times, but this time he noticed it. It seemed like something different from the surrounding buildings. Was it an old theater or some institution? The Pittsburgh Historic Maps site revealed that it had been built as the Bellefield Club, and less than twenty years later in 1923 was inhabited by the Pittsburgh Academy of Medicine. A little more poking around found the architect.
Update: Father Pitt has improved on these pictures and published more or less the same article over again, but with much better lighting.
If this is not unique in North America, it has to be at least very rare: a complete contiguous row of buildings from the early days of the automotive industry, intact and largely unaltered. They are lined up one after another, without any gaps, along Craig Street from Baum Boulevard northward. It is one of Pittsburgh’s unrecognized treasures. Fortunately only one of the buildings seems to be endangered at the moment: the others have found new uses, and the owners have not made substantial alterations to the façades, several of which have fine terra-cotta details.
In 1905, a splendid amusement park opened on this site: Luna Park, the first of a chain of Luna Parks that spanned the globe.
This one did not last long, however: it closed in 1909—partly as a result of competition from the well-established Kennywood Park, where you can now see a smaller model of the Luna Park entrance.
The closing of the park opened up a broad expanse of cleared land, and the newly rich automobile industry moved in here. By 1923, all these buildings had been constructed in a long row.
We begin at the corner of Baum Boulevard (the picture at the top of the article), where the grandest of the lot actually sold low-priced cars. This was a dealer in—coincidentally—Oakland motor cars, which were named for Oakland County, Michigan, where they were made. Oakland was General Motors’ cheap division before GM bought Chevrolet.
The ornate capitals of the corner columns are worth a closer look.
Next in the row up Craig Street is a Franklin dealer.
Next come two tire dealers in identical buildings. The one on the left sold Kelly-Springfield; the one on the right sold B. F. Goodrich. These buildings are now the Luna Lofts, which probably sounds better than Kelly-Springfield and B. F. Goodrich Tire Lofts.
Here is the one building Father Pitt considers endangered, beacuse vacant and ill-kept buildings catch fire mysteriously. It belonged to the Van Kleeck Motor Co., which sold Jordan automobiles. The façade is mostly original, though it has had some curious alterations, especially the door to nowhere with its tiny iron balcony.
Next (and please forgive the glare from the sun in the wrong part of the sky) comes an Oldsmobile dealer.
And finally the Nash dealer, now home to a branch of North Way Christian Community, which has made the front look gorgeous.
This is the whole contiguous row along Craig Street, and it is incredible enough that the entire block of buildings has survived intact. There were also other car dealers in the same immediate area, and even more remarkably they have survived, too. In the future, Father Pitt hopes to bring you pictures of the Chevrolet dealer, the Packard dealer, the Studebaker dealer, the Ford dealer, and the Sampson dealer.
Among the institutional buildings and skyscraper apartments on Craig Street are a few domestic survivors of old Bellefield, the pleasant suburban village that occupied the eastern part of Oakland. Here is one of them, a fine Queen Anne house that has lost very little of its original splendor. It now houses the Tamarind Indian restaurant.
The richly decorated front gable is especially worth noting.
A bit of carving picked out by a very long lens.
The sub-gable over the side bay was richly decorated as well. Note the many textures that come together here: roof shingles (they would have been slate originally), wooden shingles, carved wood, wavy board siding, terra-cotta frieze, decoratively textured brick.
The Schenley Farms section of Oakland was crusty with clubs a century ago, but few were as influential as this one.
Charles Bickel designed this elegant clubhouse for a Jewish gentlemen’s club made up mostly of members of the Rodef Shalom congregation. To call it a gentlemen’s club brings up images of well-dressed men sitting inert with newspapers in their hands, but these gentlemen were far from inert. These were gentlemen who got things done. This club was the incubator of Reform Judaism; it was at the club (when it lived on the North Side) that the Pittsburgh Platform was signed.
This clubhouse was built in 1913, and the club continued to use it for almost a century. It finally fell to the same forces that evicted most of the other clubs in this section: declining membership in our antisocial age, and the bottomless well of money that the University of Pittsburgh can draw on. It was sold to Pitt in 2009, and is now known as the O’Hara Student Center.
The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was founded as part of the University of Pittsburgh, and this was its home for the first two decades of its life. When the Mellon Institute declared its independence, it moved to its palatial quarters out Fifth Avenue, and the old Mellon Institute building became Allen Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.
The building, which opened in 1915, was designed by J. H. Giesy, and it was properly classical to match Henry Hornbostel’s slightly mad plan of making the University a new Athenian Acropolis in Pittsburgh. (The plan was later abandoned in favor of Charles Z. Klauder’̑s much madder plan of a skyscraper university.)
The richly detailed bronze doors are unique.
The building is precisely located for the best vista up Thackeray Street.
Here is a picture of the building when it was new in 1915:
And old Pa Pitt has duplicated that picture for you in 2022, because that is the kind of effort he puts into serving his readers:
Nothing about the exterior has changed except the plantings, and even those have been reduced to show off the building: a few years ago much of the front was obscured by trees.
Old Engineering Hall at the University of Pittsburgh is a fairly successful marriage of modernism and classicism. It is almost postmodern avant la lettre, with classically inspired details but a shape that owes nothing to the classical world. It was built in 1955, when it was still common for modernist buildings to apologize for themselves by including a few dentils and a suggestion of a Greek-key frieze. This was Engineering Hall for only about fifteen years; the School of Engineering moved out in 1971 (into the uncompromisingly modern Benedum Hall), and since then this building has been put to such miscellaneous uses that the university has never been able to come up with a better name for it than “that building that used to be Engineering Hall.”
