Father Pitt

Category: Oakland

  • Croatian Fraternal Union Building

    Croatian Fraternal Union Building

    UPDATED UPDATE: The building is now demolished, but the terra-cotta façade will supposedly be re-erected on the new building.

    This sadly abandoned building, which has its own Wikipedia article, has been sitting empty in what has become a valuable part of Oakland for at least three years. It has come into the hands of the University of Pittsburgh, as everything in Oakland does sooner or later, and Pitt wants to demolish it. Preservationists want to keep it, because it is an important part of Croatian-American history. Pitt usually wins.

    The architect was Pierre A. Liesch, a disciple of the great Frederick Osterling. Liesch is credited with some of the detail on the Union Trust Building downtown: “Liesch was a native of Luxembourg and later used a similar Flemish Gothic style for his design of the Croatian Fraternal Union Building,” says Wikipedia. “Similar” is generous. The Union Trust Building is, in Old Pa Pitt’s opinion, a work of colossal genius. This building is interesting and, again in Father Pitt’s opinion, not in the best taste. (His opinion might be different if the building still had the “highly ornate overhanging cornice and a pointed-arch apex topped with a sculptural element” mentioned in the Wikipedia article.) Of course it may well be that the Croatian clients had no budget for colossal genius, and Mr. Liesch gave them what they could afford.

  • Herron Hill Pumping Station

    Herron Hill Pumping Station

    Why shouldn’t a water-pumping station look like a Roman basilica? It’s what the Romans would have done. This substantial building was designed by William Smith Fraser, and it has its own appropriately substantial Wikipedia article. Unfortunately the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority has thought it necessary to brick up the windows, so that what used to be an airy temple of technology must be like a tomb inside now.

  • Gailliot Center for Newman Studies

    Gailliot Center for Newman Studies

    There is still at least one architect in Pittsburgh who can work in the Gothic idiom with modern materials. His name is David J. Vater, and he designed this building on Dithridge Street (which opened in 2007) and the Ryan Catholic Newman Center around the corner on Bayard Avenue. His listing on Porch.com has this to say about his firm: “Based in Pittsburgh, David J Vater Ra is an architectural firm that provides bathroom design, site planning, and master planning as well as other services.” The fact that bathroom design is mentioned first suggests that the demand for grand Gothic institutional buildings is low.

  • Stairway in Schenley Farms

    Stairway in Schenley Farms

  • Hillside House in Schenley Farms, Cleaned

    Hillside house in Schenley Farms

    This house in Schenley Farms has had a thorough cleaning and looks just built. It has also lost a large and perhaps obstructive tree. Compare the picture above to the one below, which Father Pitt took in 2014:

    Addendum: This house, known as “Ledge House,” was designed by Henry Hornbostel. It was the home of Arthur Hamerschlag, for whom Hamerschlag Hall was named.

  • Schenley High School

    Schenley High School

    This is the most magnificent work of an architect who specialized in magnificent schools: Edward Stotz, whose son was the noted preservationist Charles Stotz. The building occupies a triangular sloping plot, which certainly challenged the architect. Mr. Stotz responded with a triangular building that looks inevitable on its site.

    When it opened in 1916, Schenley High was a shrine of culture and art, an idealized version of what high-school education could be in an enlightened city. It closed as a school in 2008, and it has now, like every other substantial building in a desirable neighborhood, been refurbished as luxury apartments.

    Curiously, Edward Stotz was also responsible for another famously triangular building: the Monongahela Bank Building, which is now the Wood Street subway station and the Wood Street Galleries.

  • Cathedral of Learning in the Rain

    Cathedral of Learning from Schenley Farms

    It started to rain while Father Pitt was out for a walk today, which gave us this atmospheric picture of the Cathedral of Learning looming through the mist like a heavenly palace behind the pleasant houses of Schenley Farms. This is why old Pa Pitt’s cameras live in a waterproof bag. Father Pitt himself is not waterproof, but he does dry fairly quickly.

    If you like black and white and all the greys in between, you might enjoy Father Pitt’s Monochrome World, a very simple site that collects his favorite black-and-white pictures from Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

  • Central Catholic High School

    Central Catholic

    A kind of cartoon castle, the main building of Central Catholic is technically in Squirrel Hill, though most Pittsburghers would probably say “Oakland.” The building was put up in 1927; the architect was Edward J. Weber.

  • Hampton Hall

    Hampton Hall

    The Tudor style adapts itself to an apartment building with some success. Old Pa Pitt can’t keep himself from wondering whether there are actually apartments up there under those peaked roofs with the dormers. Most of the Tudor atmosphere is in the detailing of the stone, but we have a few cartoonish suggestions of half-timbering just so nobody mistakes the style for anything else.

    Addendum: According to the city architectural inventory (PDF), Hampton Hall was built in 1928.

  • D’Arlington Apartments, Oakland

    D’Arlington Apartments

    Edward Keen was the architect of this intriguing apartment building on the edge of Oakland, just where it meets Shadyside. It was built in 1910, and the style seems to old Pa Pitt to be something like Italian Renaissance fading through Prairie Style to modernism. It has the simplicity and squareness of all three styles; the details are subtle but rich (especially the cornice); and the inset balconies, with much effort put into preventing them from breaking the lines of the rectangular walls, presage the simplicity-at-all-costs of the modernists.