A lot of things have happened to this building over the years: the windows have been replaced with the wrong size, and the ground-floor storefront has been heavily altered. But the changes are mostly superficial, and might easily be undone. The building still carries an ornate crest with the date 1889 and the initials of the original owner: A. Rosenhild.
This little house is one of the few survivors from the days when much of Carson Street in East Birmingham was residential. It preserves most of its fine mid-Victorian Italianate detail, so it is worth a closer look than most pedestrians on the busy sidewalk of Carson Street usually give it.
One unfortunate change is the entrance. Instead of double doors with an art-glass transom, we have a stock door from the home center and pieces of plywood around it. But the elaborate woodwork surrounding the entrance is still intact.
It is typical of Italianate houses that the downstairs windows are very tall. This is the bright and cheerful branch of Victorian domestic architecture.
The windowsills rest on ornate iron brackets.
According to a Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1924, this warehouse was built in 1917 with fireproof construction, brick curtain walls, concrete floors and roof. It belonged to Swift & Co., a wholesale meat dealer; later it seems to have passed to a produce dealer, and that 1924 Sanborn map has “Produce W. Ho.” neatly pasted over whatever was marked on the outline of the building before.
After eight years with no advertising, the colossal Duquesne Brewery Clock is back in the beer business for the first time in a quarter-century—advertising what was once a runner-up rival to Duke.
These two very similar buildings are some of the most splendid Second Empire architecture in Pittsburgh. The Second Empire style is so called from its popularity during the Second French Empire: that is, the reign of Napoleon III. The most distinguishing mark of the style is the mansard roof, which supposedly became popular in Paris because buildings were taxed by the number of floors, but the attic didn’t count as a floor—thus you could have a floor’s worth of free space under a mansard roof. In its other details, the Second Empire style is a species of Renaissance revival closely related to the Italianate style that overlapped it in fashion.
A blowing engine from a blast furnace, on display at Station Square, silhouetted against the skyscrapers that such machines made possible.
The preservation of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie station complex as “Station Square” showed Pittsburgh that historic preservation could be good business. As “the Freight House Shops,” the freight house was a successful shopping arcade for many years. But all the shopping arcades, and many of the indoor shopping malls, have collapsed in the past decade or two as shopping habits changed. Now shoppers demand stores and restaurants with individual external entrances. But the shopping arcade saved the building; and now, though other uses have been found for most of the space (a large part of it has been turned into a rock-climbing gym, because where would you find rocks in the wild in Pittsburgh?), the building itself is in no danger of demolition.
A Christmas tree at Station Square.
The central warehouse for the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad’s freight depot, now converted to offices and other uses and known as Commerce Court. These two pictures were taken just about a year apart, but nothing significant changed during that time. While he was donating the newer one to Wikimedia Commons, old Pa Pitt ran across the older one and realized he had never published it here.
