The soldier and the sailor who guard the entrance to Soldiers and Sailors Hall, by sculptor Frederick Hibbard. They were installed in 1923, one hundred years ago.
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“Parade Rest” and “The Lookout”
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The Schenley, Newly Built
From Our Cities, Picturesque and Commercial, a souvenir book of Pittsburgh and Allegheny published in 1898, the year the Hotel Schenley was built. Except for the sensitively matched addition in the front and the loss of the cornice, the building looks much the same today.
Note the big expanse of nothing on the hill to the right. That was still open land belonging to Mary Schenley when the hotel was built.
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Hotel Schenley Advertisement from 1929
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 29, 1929, page 10. Note the exaggerated height; compare it to the proportions in old Pa Pitt’s pictures.
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Hotel Schenley, Oakland
This picture reminded old Pa Pitt of an old postcard, so he rendered it in two colors to make it look even more like an old postcard. The rest of the pictures in the article are in natural colors. Designed by Rutan & Russell, this was our first skyscraper hotel, and the most luxurious hotel in the city when it went up in 1898—at a time when it was actually at the edge of the urbanized area. It remained the Pittsburgh base of the rich and famous for half a century, but it declined after the Second World War, and in 1956 was sold to Pitt. It is now the William Pitt Union, with many of the exterior and interior details scrupulously preserved.
The same as the first picture, but in natural colors. Addendum: See a picture of the Hotel Schenley in 1898, the year it was built.
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America by Charles Keck
Charles Keck was a very successful sculptor who had a fruitful relationship with the architect Henry Hornbostel. He decorated the City-County Building, Pennsylvania Hall at Pitt, the Education Building in Albany, and the City Hall in that other Oakland, the one in California, all of them buildings by Hornbostel. He was a natural choice for this allegorical sculpture over the entrance to Soldiers and Sailors Hall, whose message seems to be that America is always ready, so don’t mess with her.
Note the large eyes. They may be inspired by late-antique sculpture, in which the eyes are usually disproportionately big. In a sculpture meant to be seen from a distance, the disproportion is not obvious at normal viewing range, but the large eyes give expression to the face that it would not have if they were natural size.
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Western Psychiatric Institute, Oakland
This picture is very large: if you click or tap on it, expect 12 megabytes of data and about 50 megapixels. It is not possible to get a straight-on picture of the whole front of this Art Deco skyscraper hospital. But old Pa Pitt enjoys attempting the impossible once in a while, so here you go. The architect was Raymond Marlier, who also designed several of the buildings at Kennywood. (Kennywood, Western Psych—pretty much the same thing.) The building was completed in 1940.
Below, we see a side view made possible by the demolition of two Brutalist buildings on O’Hara Street. It shows how much Pitt has added to the original building. The whole thing is now called Thomas Detre Hall.
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The Mall, Carnegie Mellon University
Many styles of buildings have been put up on the campus since Henry Hornbostel laid out the original plan for Carnegie Tech, but it’s remarkable how much the original Hornbostel plan has been respected. The campus is still built around these broad open green spaces, with the various buildings kept within matching heights and setbacks, even when they are in wildly different styles.
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A Second Empire Remnant, Oakland/Shadyside
The ground floor has changed significantly, but the rest of this building is a well-preserved remnant of the times when this part of the East End was a quiet exurb of dignified gentlemen’s houses. It seems to have been built in the 1870s or early 1880s, and may always have been a corner store, since—unlike its neighbors—it was built right against the streets. Today it is the last building of its time left on Fifth Avenue for blocks in either direction, a curious anomaly among the high-rise apartments, office blocks, and monumental landmarks. It sits on the corner of Neville Street, technically in Shadyside but culturally more part of Oakland (Neville Street is the neighborhood border on city planning maps).
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King Edward Annex, Oakland
Since we mentioned the smaller King Edward Annex a couple of days ago when we looked at the old King Edward Apartments, here it is. The city’s architectural inventory (PDF) dates it at about 1925 (Update: This is a little too early; see below), which seems plausible. It looks a bit worn, and the top of the building is definitely not the way the architect imagined it. But it still has a restrained dignity, especially if we ignore the missing cornice. Old Pa Pitt has a suspicion that average Americans simply don’t see the tops of buildings, so when they are mutilated no one but Father Pitt notices.
Addendum: The King Edward Annex was built in about 1927; the architects were Hannah and Sterling. Source: The Charette, Vol. 7, No. 2 (February 1927): “209. Architect: Hannah & Sterling, 209-9th Street, Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner Arthur McSorley. Title: Apartment House. Owner now taking bids. Location: Melwood Street, Pittsburgh. Approximate size: 28 apartments; four stories, fireproof. Cubage: 300.000 ft.”
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Old King Edward and His Jesters
There are two apartment buildings called King Edward in Oakland (plus a small “annex” on Melwood Avenue). The more visible one, the King Edward Apartments on Craig Street at Bayard, was built in 1929. The original King Edward, built in 1914, is behind on Melwood Avenue at Bayard Street. It seems much more staid than its larger neighbor, until we look closer and discover that it is festooned with these grotesque faces.
Addendum: The architect was H. G. Hodgkins, who also designed Hampton Hall, another Merrie England fantasy.
