Father Pitt

Category: South Side

Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse & Transfer Company, South Side

Now called “The Highline,” the Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse and Transfer Company was one of the largest commercial buildings in the world when it was finished in 1906. The architect was the prolific Charles Bickel, who gave us a very respectable version of Romanesque-classical commercial architecture on a huge scale.

The building was planned in 1898, but it took several years of wrangling and special legislation to clear three city blocks and rearrange the streets to accommodate the enormous structure. Its most distinctive feature is a street, Terminal Way, that runs right down the middle of the building at the third-floor level: as you can see above, it has now been remade into a pleasant outdoor pedestrian space. You can’t tell from the picture above, but there is more building underneath the street.

The bridge coming out across the railroad tracks is the continuation of Terminal Way, which comes right to the edge of the Monongahela, where the power plant for the complex was built.

The reason for the complex is more obvious from this angle. Railroad cars came right into the building on the lowest level to unload.

It also had access to the river, and road access to Carson Street at the other end. Every form of transportation came together here for exchange and distribution.

McKean Street separates the main part of the complex from the Carson Street side; Terminal Way passes over it on a bridge.

The Fourth Street side shows us the full height of the building. Fourth Street itself is still Belgian block.

A view over the McKean Street bridge and down Terminal Way from the Carson Street end.

This absurdly narrow building is on the Carson Street side of the complex; it has usually housed a small restaurant of some sort. One suspects that this was the result of some kind of political wrangling that ended in a ridiculously small space on this side of Terminal Way between Carson and McKean Streets.

The power plant for the complex, seen above from the Terminal Way bridge across the railroad. It could use some taking care of right now.

This view of the complex from the hill above Carson Street was published in 1911 as an advertisement for cork from the Armstrong Cork Company.

July 30, 2023
Chimney Pots

A chimney on a house on 11th Street, South Side.

July 27, 2023
More Views of the Gimbels Warehouse, South Side

More views of the old Gimbels warehouse on the South Side, now called 2100 Wharton Street. We have a couple of other angles here.

The building covers almost the entire block, but leaves a narrow space for one row of old houses at the eastern end on 22nd Street.

July 26, 2023
South Vocational High School, South Side

The South Vocational High School was designed by Marion M. Steen, who gave us many impressive schools around here. His father, James T. Steen, was a distinguished architect as well; Marion followed in his father’s classicist footsteps, but gradually adopted more and more Moderne mannerisms until he became one of our leading Art Deco architects. This school was a kind of vocational annex for the South High School across the street. Construction began in 1939, and it opened in 1940, just in time to be adapted to round-the-clock wartime training for mechanical trades.

This is Steen’s most aggressively modern design. He seems to have imagined a building that would look like a cross between school and factory.

This composite picture is huge: if you click on it, expect more than 18 megabytes of data.

Here is the Sarah Street front. As in all Steen’s other schools, the decorative details are imaginative and appropriate. These suggest a new world of technological wonder.

Now let’s walk around to the Tenth Street entrance, where we’ll find a remarkable decorative aluminum panel in the transom.

And…wait a minute…is that an inscription in…

…cuneiform?

Yes, it is a cuneiform character. It represents the Sumerian or Akkadian word for “to sow” or “to cultivate,” which is very appropriate over the door of a school.

We have many public buildings with inscriptions in Latin. But is this the only school in North America with a cuneiform inscription over the entrance? Father Pitt would love to have any others pointed out to him.

Do not suppose, by the way, that old Pa Pitt is fluent in Akkadian, much as he would like to be able to read the adventures of Gilgamesh without a translation. It was, however, easy to trace the character and feed it into an image search, and although Google did not come up with the exact character at the top of the list, it took only a bit of scrolling to find the character we were looking for. Father Pitt wishes he could say he had thought of that solution to the problem himself, but, having recognized that this was a cuneiform character, he got no further until a cleverer friend suggested the way forward.

The building is in use as the Pittsburgh Online Academy (which needs a building for some reason; perhaps our school board has only a fuzzy notion of what “online” means), so for the moment it is well kept and externally in original condition.

July 23, 2023
Seventeenth Ward World War I Memorial, South Side

This little memorial sits at the corner of Carson and Tenth Streets, the intersection that is more or less the gateway to the South Side proper. Most people pass by without noticing it, so old Pa Pitt decided to document it in detail.

Frank Aretz, best known for his ecclesiastical art, did the small Art Deco relief, according to a plaque installed by the city on this memorial. The architect was Stanley Roush, the king of public works in Pittsburgh in the 1920s and 1930s. Donatelli Granite, still in the memorial business, did the stonework.

The left and right steles bear the names of battlefields where Americans fought.

Many war memorials display the names of those who served, but this one sealed the names in stone for future generations to discover.

The relief has been eroding and perhaps vandalized, but the streamlined Art Deco style is still distinctive.

July 22, 2023
The Birmingham Bridge and the Expressways That Never Were

The Birmingham Bridge is a generous bridge for the traffic it carries, isn’t it? And why are there these strange wings sticking out at the southern end?

The answer is that the Birmingham Bridge was built in the 1970s as part of a vast network of expressways that would bring Pittsburgh into the automobile age at last, by destroying much of the city and making it easier for suburban drivers to get to major destinations. There was to be an interchange at the southern end of the bridge, with exit and entrance ramps connecting to the bleak expressway-blighted streets below.

Almost all that ever came of the plan was the Birmingham Bridge; the fates had mercy on the city and scuttled the rest of the network. But the stubs of those interchange ramps are still there to remind us how close we came to making Pittsburgh the Los Angeles of the East.

July 18, 2023
Pittsburgh Mercantile Company, South Side

Designed by Rutan & Russell, the Pittsburgh Mercantile Company was definitely not a company store, because those had been made illegal in Pennsylvania. Instead, it was a separate company that happened to have exactly the same officers as Jones & Laughlin, which ran the steel plant across the street, and that happened to accept the scrip in which the steelworkers were paid.

So it was a company store, but technically legal.

The words “company store” probably conjure up images of bleak little Soviet-style general stores, but this was obviously nothing like that image. It was a fantastic palace of every kind of merchandise, and the architectural decoration was obviously meant to send the message that there was no reason to object to the company-store system, because what else on the South Side could begin to equal this experience?

We have a large number of pictures if you care to see more.
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July 15, 2023
One Block of Sidney Street on the South Side

The 2100 block of Sidney Street has some of the finest high-Victorian houses on the South Side, and several of them have unusual decorative details worth a closer examination. Old Pa Pitt took an evening stroll down Sidney Street the other day and, as always, came back with a few pictures. We’ll start with No. 2109. Note the multiple shapes of roof slates, the woodwork in the dormers, and the rusticated lintels in the picture above.

Since we have fifteen pictures, we’ll put the rest below the fold to avoid slowing down the main page for a week.
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July 8, 2023
Tiny Rowhouses on the South Side

These tiny houses at the corner of 24th Street and Carey Way were probably built as rental properties, meant to be the cheapest possible construction that could still be rented as a “house” rather than a tenement. They are what old Pa Pitt might call Baltimore-style rowhouses, where the whole row was built as one building, although in Baltimore the building would typically cover a whole block. The ones on 24th street were built between 1903 and 1910; the ones around the corner on Carey Way were built between 1910 and 1923. Yet we notice that, in those days, even these utilitarian shoeboxes for poor millworkers were not allowed to show their faces in public without a proper ornamental cornice.

This is also an excellent view of a typical Pittsburgh system of utility cables.

July 6, 2023
Lean-To House on Sarah Street, South Side

This is an odd anomaly in a block of some of the finest houses on the South Side: a substantial brick house built as a kind of lean-to parasite on the house next door.

No. 2317 is set far back from the street, with a shaded porch—the only porch on the block—almost like a country house in the city. It clings dependently to the side of No. 2315 next door.

What was the reason for this unusual construction? Old maps may give us a clue. Both houses appear first on the 1890 layer of the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, so they were built between 1882 and 1890. The larger one is marked as owned by a Wm. J. Early, and the set-back lean-to house by Annie E. Early. We can speculate that Mr. Early built a large main house for his own family, and a smaller one for a female relative—perhaps a widowed mother.

July 4, 2023