We have seen this statue before, on the war memorial in Coraopolis. Here the doughboy is missing his bayonet, but otherwise the statue is identical, doubtless cast from the same mold. The three-sided base carries the township honor roll in bronze; and, following his usual practice, Father Pitt records all the names in high enough resolution to be easily legible.
The statue of Edward Bigelow by Giuseppe Moretti, with the Cathedral of Learning in the background.
The Western Theological Seminary (now West Hall of the Community College of Allegheny County) was built in 1914. It was designed by Thomas Hannah, but so far old Pa Pitt has not found the name of the sculptor who decorated the entrance with these delightful grotesques.
Henry Hornbostel designed the front of the Fine Arts Building with niches that display all styles of architectural decoration, and more practically give students a place to sit between classes. The niches have continued to accumulate sculpture in styles from all over the world. The whimsical figures in the Gothic niche may have been done by Achille Giammartini.
In the classical niche, the three orders of Greek architecture: Corinthian, Doric, Ionic, demonstrated with correct proportions.
Father Pitt is fairly certain that the ornamental stonecarving on the Maginn Building was done by Achille Giammartini, Pittsburgh’s master of Romanesque whimsies. The style is Giammartini’s, and the building was designed by Charles Bickel, who is known to have brought in Giammartini for the German National Bank (now the Granite Building) around the corner, as we see in this advertisement:
But, you say, speculation is not enough for you. You want the artist’s signature. Well, to old Pa Pitt, this looks like a signature:
In fact, Father Pitt has formed the hypothesis that Giammartini littered the city with self-caricatures in Romanesque grotesque. Several other buildings bear carved faces similar to these two in the corners of the arch on the seventh floor of the Maginn Building.
The rest of the ornaments are also in Giammartini’s trademark style: lush Romanesque foliage with slightly cartoonish faces peering out from the leaves.
The Times Building, designed by Frederick Osterling in his Richardsonian Romanesque period, is a block deep, so it has fronts on both Fourth Avenue and Third Avenue. The Fourth Avenue front is narrower; the Third Avenue front has one more bay, and a single grand arch in the middle. The decorative carving is probably by Achille Giammartini, who is known to have worked with Osterling on the Marine Bank and the Bell Telephone Building, and all his trademark whimsy is on display here.
This building, put up in 1930–1931, was a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and the Clevelanders Walker & Weeks were the architects—but with Henry Hornbostel and Eric Fisher Wood as “consulting architects.”1 Old Pa Pitt doesn’t know exactly how far the consulting went. At any rate, the architects chose sculptor Henry Hering, who had done several prominent decorations in Cleveland, to create the cast-aluminum reliefs for this building. The picture below is from 2015, but it will serve to show the placement of the reliefs:
The three main figures are obviously allegorical; they seem to represent industry, agriculture, and the professions.
The Liberty Avenue face of this building has been modernized and remodernized so many times that no one would take it for anything remarkably old. But it is actually one of the very few commercial buildings remaining downtown from the Civil War era. It was built in about 1865 for Arbuckle & Company, a dealer in coffee and sugar in the days when Liberty Avenue was the wholesale food district, with a railroad running right down the middle to bring the food in at its freshest. And if you will come around the back with us, you will see one of Pittsburgh’s odd little hidden treasures.
The short alley behind the building is still called Coffey Way, and the back of the Arbuckle building shows the very old bricks we might expect. And among those bricks, in an alley that hardly anyone even knows about, we find “some of the oldest surviving architectural sculpture in the city,” according to Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture by Marilyn Evert.
These medallions are obviously meant to represent specific figures, but no one is quite sure which specific figures. This one has been identified as George Washington or Colonel Bouquet (the one who built the blockhouse).
This keen-eyed lady has been identified as Jane Grey Swisshelm or Mary Croghan Schenley.
This is probably an allegorical head of Liberty, although it has also been identified as an “Indian head” of the sort common on nineteenth-century coins.
This one is very likely to be Abraham Lincoln, but “very likely” is the most certainty we can summon up. It could also be John Arbuckle himself, the head of the firm, who appears in a later photograph with a beard and distinctively hollow cheeks. We note that this is the only one of the faces turned left instead of right; if you like to find symbolism in things like that, go ahead.
John Arbuckle, incidentally, was the inventor of processes for preserving coffee and automating its packaging, so we may regard him as the founder of coffee as a mass-produced consumer product. This little alley, therefore, ought to be on every coffee-lover’s pilgrimage list.
Originally the First United Presbyterian Church, this congregation merged with the Bellefield Presbyterian Church down the street, which sold its building (of which only the tower remains) and moved here, with the compensation that this church was renamed Bellefield Presbyterian. The building, designed by William Boyd and built in 1896, is festooned with a riot of carved Romanesque ornaments.
Each one of these cherubs has a different face and different ornamental carving surrounding it.
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