The main building of North Catholic was put up in 1939. The architect was Edward J. Hergenroeder, a disciple of Benno Janssen, who became one of the favorite architects for Catholic institutions around Pittsburgh in the middle twentieth century.
From Janssen, Hergenroeder seems to have learned the art of making every line count. His style departed from the master’s, however, toward the modernistic, whereas Janssen retired to Charlottesville, the land of his favorite architect Thomas Jefferson, before he was forced to come to terms with modernism altogether.
The school has been given up by the Catholics, but fortunately was taken over and is well maintained as the Provident Charter School.
Charles Bradley Warren did the reliefs on the school. This one, Pursuit of Knowledge, shows us monks performing all kinds of scientific experiments and passing their knowledge on to children. (The same relief is reversed on the other end of the building, so that the monks are always gazing out from the top of the bluff at the vast panorama of the Allegheny valley before them.)
Ol’ Ptolemy had heard of that weird theory that the earth moved around the sun instead of vice-versa, but he rejected it as unnecessarily counterintuitive. Hs sure did know his stars, though.
For half a century a trip to Buhl Planetarium was one the most enduring childhood memories of anyone who grew up in Pittsburgh. The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was most famous for its star shows—with its massive Zeiss projector, it was touted as the most sophisticated planetarium in the world—but it had many other scientific exhibits as well.
The building was designed by Ingham & Boyd, who specialized in educational buildings—Ingham & Boyd, and later Ingham, Boyd & Pratt, had the franchise for all the school buildings in Mount Lebanon for decades, and designed numerous others in the city and suburbs. Their style for institutional buildings was purely classical into the 1930s, and then began to take on an Art Deco hue. But they kept their classical mania for symmetry, and the front of Buhl Planetarium is typically symmetrical.
The building is decorated with extraordinary sculptures by Sidney Waugh, whose Art Deco sensibilities perfectly complement the Deco classicism of the architecture. He has made use of the symmetry of the building to arrange his sculptures as complementary pairs. Over the entrance are the bronzes Primitive Science and Modern Science, and Waugh shows them as engaged in the same intellectual enterprise. Instead of placing the modern scientist in a superior position, Waugh has the American Indian scientist and the lab-coated scientist at exactly the same height and scale admiring each other’s work as intellectual equals. In the most literal sense, they see eye to eye.
Note the three inventions Waugh has chosen to represent the accomplishments of pre-Columbian American thought: smoke signals, which created long-distance communication; the bow and arrow, which were developed to a high degree of accuracy; and snowshoes, an invention that was unique to North America.
The modern scientist has his globe, his microscope, and his test tube. He looks across the ages at the American Indian and sees a peer who knew his onions.
On the front wall of the building are two allegorical stone reliefs: “The Heavens” and “The Earth,” again facing each other at the same scale.
Finally, the exit doors from the planetarium have small reliefs of “Night” and “Day.” Here old Pa Pitt must confess that he failed to capture “Day”; it was obscured by leafy trees when he visited, and perhaps he will be able to get a picture when the leaves come down in a month or so.
When the Buhl Planetarium merged with the Carnegie, the result was the Carnegie Science Center—now Kamin Science Center—which brought a much larger science museum to the North Side, including a new higher-tech Buhl Planetarium. But after a few years of mostly lying fallow, the Buhl Planetarium building was taken over by the Children’s Museum and resumed its mission of educating children by delighting them.
Heinz Chapel, built over five years from 1933 to 1938, is one of the complex of three great Charles Z. Klauder buildings at the center of the University of Pittsburgh, along with the Cathedral of Learning and the Stephen Foster Memorial. A while ago old Pa Pitt picked out some of the details with a long lens.
The decorations include the arms of various colleges and universities.
The north end of the Sixteenth Street or David McCullough Bridge, as seen from a vacant lot in Schweitzerloch. Below, one of the armillary sculptures by Leo Lentelli.
The other day old Pa Pitt went lion-hunting on Fourth Avenue. It’s a good game to play with children or out-of-town visitors: walk down Fourth Avenue and see how many lions you can count. They’ll have fun noticing the wide variety of carved lions, but they’ll also be noticing details of the architecture around them, which can start interesting conversations. We begin with the famous Dollar Bank lions—actually painstakingly accurate hand-carved duplicates of the originals, which were the work of Max Kohler. The originals were moved inside the bank, where they will be protected from weather and accidents.
These lions decorate the Fourth Avenue front of the Colonial Trust Company building, now part of Point Park University.
A lion on the front of the Keystone Bank Building.
Very Romanesque lions on the Peoples Savings Bank Building.
Now, when we come to the Arrott Building, we have to suspend the game, because…
…there are, by Father Pitt’s estimate, more than 200 lions on the Arrott Building.
Rutan & Russell designed this palatial waterworks, built in 1910,1 which stands in a little enclave of the city of Pittsburgh on the north shore of the Allegheny just outside Aspinwall. It is decorated with elaborate grotesque heads and other classical effusions.
Frank Vittor was the sculptor of this memorial, in which Victory is striding forward with a laurel crown to honor the people of Braddock who served in the First World War. It was installed in front of the Braddock library in 1923, and from this angle it looks almost brand new.
The base of the monument had six bronze panels with the names of all who served, including this dedication panel with the names of the dead.
These pictures are very large, so all the names will be legible if you enlarge the photograph.
We suppose the names between Hurley and Marx were melted down into cheap booze. Old Pa Pitt has always wondered what scrap-metal dealers think when a man in a battered pickup truck rolls up with a big chunk of names in bronze. Apparently they think, “Well, he certainly must have come by this honestly.”
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.”
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.
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.
Here is the artist’s mark in the bronze: “DANIEL C. FRENCH Sc.” (for “Sculpsit”) “1903.”
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.
Of all the hundreds of lions on buildings downtown, the Romanesque lions that guard the county courthouse are the most distinctive. They used to be at street level, but the lowering of the Hump, the awkward hill that used to make navigating downtown even more difficult than it is now, left them stranded far above pedestrians’ heads.
It is greatly to the honor of Pittsburgh as a cultural center that two of our most prominent bridges are named for famous writers. The Sixteenth Street Bridge, built in 1923, was named in 2013 for David McCullough, a writer who made history interesting to thousands who thought they weren’t interested in history. (The other one is the Ninth Street Bridge, named for Rachel Carson.) The architectural parts were designed by Warren & Wetmore, the same firm that designed Grand Central Station in New York.
