The Maul Building, built in 1910, was designed by the William G. Wilkins Company, the same architects who did the Frick & Lindsay building (now the Andy Warhol Museum). Both buildings are faced with terra cotta, and both lost their cornices—the one on the Andy Warhol Museum has been carefully reconstructed from pictures, but the one here is just missing. The rest of the decorations, though, are still splendid.
This started out as a fine Romanesque design for an industrial building; it sprouted more and more haphazard additions, and became something more like a European castle with its layers of contradictory history. Today, after an adventurous history of abandonment and adaptation, it is called “The Brew House” and is filled with lofts and artists’ studios.
Built in 1907 (or 1911, depending on our source), this central section has not changed much except for the new windows too small for the openings. The architect was John T. Comès, famous for Romanesque churches like St. Augustine’s in Lawrenceville and St. Leo’s in Marshall-Shadeland. Here he gave the Sisters of St. Joseph a kind of Mediterranean Romanesque tower with a billboard on top. It was later encrusted with featureless modern buildings all around it, and the whole complex is now retirement apartments under the name “Carson Towers.”
This PDF has a picture of the original building. The caption that says “The sculpture over the front door is the only part of the original facade still visible on the building that is now Carson Towers” is obviously wrong; as even a quick glance will show us, almost nothing except the windows and the cornice (cornices often go missing, and somewhere there must be a huge cornice graveyard) has changed about this façade.
Scratch any major street and you’ll find streetcar tracks, as we see here on Carson Street on the South Side, currently under construction.
Some architectural historians say that about Carson Street on the South Side, and it certainly has a lot of distinguished Victorian commercial architecture. Here’s an album from a stroll down Carson Street on a rainy evening.
A modest but distinguished row of Second Empire houses on 22nd Street. Note the patterns in the roof tiles.
This modest but tastefully classical bank was built in 1902. Notice how the front composition of larger arch flanked by two smaller arches is rhythmically repeated on the side.
In Pittsburgh, a “rowhouse” is generally any house that shares a wall with its neighbors. But there are rowhouses in a stricter sense: rows of houses built all at once, as more or less one building divided into individual residences. One such row is in the 1800 block of Carey Way, a row of modest Italianate alley houses all put up at once. If he had to guess, old Pa Pitt would date it to the 1870s. One of its remarkable features is its breezeway. Most breezeways in Pittsburgh are narrow passages between houses, but this row has one breezeway in the middle big enough to drive a wagon through. That is probably the point: it leads to a courtyard from which deliveries of coal and other staples could be made to the backs of all the houses. Under separate ownership, the houses have ceased to be entirely identical, but their common origin is still apparent.
Note the fine ironwork decorations.
Here are two very similar churches in the same block of Bingham Street, both from the 1850s, and both built with the sanctuary on the upper floor. In the middle 1800s, this was a common adaptation for churches in crowded neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and adjacent boroughs (Birmingham was still independent until 1872). Built on tiny lots, they needed space for Sunday-school rooms and social halls, but the sanctuary obviously needed a high ceiling or it would look and feel absurd. Thus the ground floor was left for the smaller rooms.
The church above was the Bingham United Methodist Church (built 1859), now the City Theatre. It is a generic church-shaped church with vaguely classical details, including rounded arches in the windows. The same shape could be given details in any style; the church below is the First Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church of Birmingham (built 1854), with a very similar outline, but Gothic pointed arches in the windows. The windows along the sides are simple rectangles, and old Pa Pitt suspects that the 14th Street end was Gothicized at some time in the later 1800s.
The name “First Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church of Birmingham” is too long to fit on a date stone.
Boston ivy is eagerly devouring the entrance, so it is hard to see that this arch is also pointed.
When this article appeared, Joseph Moore commented:
Are those really the main doors for the Presbyterian Church? Very plain – look more like a loading doc than the entrance to a church, even a Calvinist one. The United Methodist Church has the architectural articulation one would expect for the main doors for a church.
We replied:
The main entrance might have been on the long side on Bingham Street, where the garage door is now. On the other hand, the Gothic arch with columns on the end (and the very interesting woodwork on the doors) does suggest that someone intended it as a main entrance. On the third hand, one would expect more natural light in a main entrance, which would probably have led into a foyer with a stairway (or a pair of stairways, as in the South Side Presbyterian Church). And on the fourth hand, it is possible that windows flanking the entrance have been bricked up. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to persuade himself that the brickwork is all original, and he has not been able to persuade himself that it is not. And on the fifth hand (we might as well be an octopus by now), Father Pitt has not been inside this building; it is possible that the whole front is a stairwell, in which case the large Gothic windows would provide ample light.
This was one of the small number of articles that did not survive the transition between servers, so it had to be reconstructed and the comments copied by brute force.
