Father Pitt

Category: South Side

  • St. Adalbert’s and Its Polish Village

    Front of St. Adalbert’s Church

    Except for the inevitable distortion of the towers, this is a very accurate rendition of the front of St. Adalbert’s on the South Side. (The distortion is the result of using many photographs to construct what amounts to an impossibly wide-angled rectilinear lens to get the whole front across a very narrow street.) Built in 1889, this church served generations of Polish Catholics, and still serves the congregation of Mary, Queen of Peace parish. The architect does not seem to be known, but old Pa Pitt would be delighted to be informed if anyone does know who it was.

    Inscription from Psalm 83

    Psalm 83:5 in the Vulgate numbering (Psalm 84:4 in Protestant and more recent Catholic versions): “Blessed are they that dwell in thy house, O Lord: they shall praise thee for ever and ever.”

    Inscription

    Father Pitt does not know much Polish, but this inscription honors the efforts of Fr. Wladislaw Miskiewicz, parish priest.

    15th Street

    The church dominates the back end of 15th Street, one of those absurdly narrow streets in old Birmingham. This is the view from the steps up to the 15th Street pedestrian overpass that leads across the railroad tracks to the Slopes. This end of 15th Street was a whole village of Polish Catholic institutions.

    Convent

    St. Adalbert’s convent.

    Rectory

    The rectory.

    St. Adalbert’s School

    The Polish school.

    Inscription
    Date stone

    We also saw the mid-twentieth-century auditorium, now being turned into condominiums.

  • Civil-War-Era Survivors on Carson Street

    1905 East Carson Stree

    Carson Street is famous for its Victorian commercial buildings, but here and there among the Victorian masterpieces, and the later fillers, are a few that we might call pre-Victorian. Even though they were built during the long reign of Queen Victoria across the sea, these buildings betray little of the style that we think of as Victorian. They are hardly architecture at all. They are built in the simple vernacular style that was current for decades in the early and middle nineteenth century—and had indeed been inherited from the eighteenth. They are identical to houses of the same era, except with the front of the first floor modified into a storefront.

    Here are two of them. Both of them have been through various alterations over the years, but they are easily recognized by their peaked roofs with narrow projecting dormers, making them look almost like a child’s drawing of a house. From our 1872 map, it seems fairly certain that both of them were here in 1872, when East Birmingham was taken into the city of Pittsburgh; they probably date from the period of rapid development in East Birmingham during and right after the Civil War.

    1819 East Carson Street

  • Making Lemonade on the South Side

    “When life hands you lemons,” as the old saying goes, and here is an example of someone making pretty good lemonade out of some very unpromising lemons.

    Three years ago the old St. Adalbert’s Auditorium looked like this.

    Decaying St. Adalbert’s Auditorium

    Obviously it had been abandoned, and desultory attempts at maintenance had ground to a halt. This in spite of the fact that the church right next door was still active, and indeed still is today.

    A different angle

    But now the same developer who converted St. Casimir’s to condominiums has taken this building in hand, turning it into fairly expensive condominiums under the name “The Auditorium.”

    The Auditorium

    A sign in front tells us that nine out of fourteen units have already been sold. Considering that the building was a gymnasium, auditorium, and fallout shelter built in the most undistinguished modernist style, this is a very good outcome for a building that had been a festering eyesore in the neighborhood.

  • A Walk on the South Side with a Black-and-White Camera

    Corner of 16th and Sarah Streets
    Corner of 16th and Sarah Streets.

    It was not really a black-and-white camera; it was old Pa Pitt’s nineteen-year-old Samsung Digimax V4, a strange beast that was made for photography enthusiasts who wanted something that would fit in the pocket but still had most of the options of a sophisticated enthusiast’s camera. Father Pitt has set the user options to black-and-white. There is no good reason for doing so: obviously the camera collects color data and throws the colors away, and the colors could just as well be thrown away in software after returning from the expedition. But knowing that the picture must be black and white forces one to think in terms of forms rather than colors. So here are half a dozen pictures from a walk through the South Side Flats.

    Building on 17th Street
    Building on 17th Street, probably from the 1920s.
    Entrance to St. Adalbert’s
    The entrance to St. Adalbert’s Church.
    St. Adalbert’s Rectory
    St. Adalbert’s rectory.
    Rowhouses
    Rowhouses on Sarah Street.
    Front steps
    Front steps.

  • Ripley & Co. Glass Works, South Side

    Ripley & Co. Glass Works

    These buildings were put up in the 1880s, with additions in the 1890s; they later became part of the United States Glass Co. More recently the South Side was associated with steel, but in 1872, when the Birminghams, South Pittsburgh, and Ormsby were taken into the city, glass was at least as important. Just looking at the 1872 map, we find—

    Knox Kim & Co. Glass Works
    Est. of Wm. McCully Glass Works
    Pittsburgh Glass Works
    Bakewell, Pears & Co. Glass Works
    Whitehouse Flint Glass Works
    Doyle & Co. Glass Works
    Adams & Co. Glass Works
    Tremont Glass Works
    C. Ihmsen & Sons Glass Works
    McKee & Bro. Glass Works
    Bryce, Walker & Co. Glass Works
    Sl. McKee & Co. Glass Works
    A. King Glass Works

    We have probably missed a few, but the list is quite enough to show us that glass was a big deal on the South Side. Of all the old glass factories, this is probably the only one left in such a splendidly original state, if any of the others remain at all.

  • Civil-War-Era Houses on 15th Street, South Side

    Buildings on 15th Street

    These three buildings date from before 1872, since they appear on our 1872 map. The two exceptionally large houses on the left look like Civil War engravings of street scenes. Some of the details, like the gutters, have changed, but the overall appearance is very 1860s. The smaller frame house on the right has suffered every external indignity a house can suffer, but the simple shape with narrow projecting dormer still says middle 1800s.

  • Row of Houses on 13th Street, South Side

    Row from before 1872

    From both the old maps and the style it seems fairly certain that this row of four identical houses dates from before 1872. On the whole they are very well preserved, with a few alterations, but nothing to change the essentials.

    Houses on 13th Street

    The larger house on the end probably dates from before 1872 as well, although it looks newer than its neighbors; its original front is mostly intact, but it has sprouted an ugly third floor that could be removed or rebuilt by some future owner.

  • South Side Market House

    South Side Market House

    Charles Bickel designed this Romanesque market house in the middle of Bedford Square, which is one of our most charming urban spaces in the southern half and blighted by parking lots in the northern half. It was built with a pair of towers in 1893; it burned to a shell in 1915, and was rebuilt without the towers. It is now a center for “healthy active living” for old folks like Pa Pitt, though most of the old folks he runs into are considerably younger than his 264 years.

    North face

    The north face has suffered a few alterations in the fenestration (a fancy architectural term for “where the windows go”), but still makes an interesting picture with the Belgian block of Twelfth Street leading toward it.

  • Oliver Bathhouse, South Side

    Oliver Bathhouse
    Tenth Street front.

    Known as the South Side Baths when it was built, this was donated by steel baron and real-estate magnate Henry W. Oliver, who in 1903 gave the city land and money for a neighborhood bathhouse to be free to the people forever. In those days, many poor families—including the ones who worked for Oliver—lived in tenements where they had no access to bathing. (Even the Bedford School across the street from this bathhouse had outside privies until 1912.) Oliver might not raise his workmen’s salaries, but he was willing to make the men smell better.

    Bingham Street side
    Bingham Street side.

    To design the bathhouse, Oliver chose the most prestigious architect in the country: Daniel Burnham. Then, in 1904, Oliver died, and his gift spent almost a decade in limbo. The project was finally revived in 1913, by which time Burnham had died as well. The plans were taken over by MacClure & Spahr, an excellent Pittsburgh firm responsible for the Diamond Building and the Union National Building. No one seems to know how much they relied on Burnham’s drawings, but the Tudor Gothic style of the building (it was finished in 1915) is certainly in line with other MacClure & Spahr projects, like the chapel for the Homewood Cemetery. Even MacClure & Spahr’s early sketches show a quite different building, so it is probably safest to assume that little of Burnham remains here.

    Bath House – South Side Pittsburgh Pa.
    For the Henry W. Oliver Estate
    MacClure & Spahr – Architects – Pittsburgh Pa.
    —
    When we compare this to the building as it stands, it looks as though the Oliver estate told the architects that this version was not expensive enough. “Try again,” the estate must have said, “but this time spend more money.”

    There was a fad for building public baths in Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, and on Saturday nights workers and their families would line up around the block to get into the bathhouses and wash off the grime of the week. Gradually, indoor plumbing became a feature of even the most notorious slum tenements, and all but one of the bathhouses closed. The Oliver Bathhouse, given to the people in perpetuity, remains. It has been saved by its indoor swimming pool, the only city pool open during the winter.

    Classical dolphin

    Nothing says “water” like a classical dolphin.

    Another dolphin

  • Frame Houses of the Civil War Era

    Frame houses on 24th Street

    It is remarkable how unremarkable these two tiny houses on 24th Street are. The one on the left has had its parlor windows replaced with the usual mid-twentieth-century picture window, but most of the rest of the detail is intact; the one on the right probably looks not much different from the day it was built. And it was built at about the time of the Civil War or right after. These two houses appear on maps all the way back to 1872, the earliest detailed map of the area Father Pitt has been able to find. Brick houses from that time are common, but tiny frame houses like these seldom survive with original (or equivalent) wooden siding, which is almost always replaced with one of the Four Horsemen: aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Perma-Stone. If old Pa Pitt were dictator (and let it be known that if chosen dictator he would not serve), he would make these two houses a preservation priority.

    In the picture below, note the size of the houses relative to the cars parked in front of them.

    Frame houses