Category: South Side

  • A Rare Survivor on the South Side

    Father Pitt was out for a walk yesterday and suddenly realized that he had spotted an odd anomaly: a country I-house with a neat little yard and a fence and gate—but that’s the top of the Birmingham Bridge right behind it. A little research confirmed what he suspected. This old house is a rare, and maybe even unique, survivor from the time before this part of the South Side was urbanized. It appears on the 1872 layer at the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, where it is an isolated house along the river in a section the urban sprawl has not reached yet. It belonged to Mrs. Sarah M. Phillips, whose property went all the way back to the river, the banks of which were as yet unencumbered by railroad tracks. The house has been much altered externally, with fake siding and new windows with fake shutters, but the shape (as viewed by satellite) is the same today as on the 1872 map.

  • A Bit of Good News on the South Side

    Woodcarvong over the door

    The big blue “CONDEMNATION” sticker appeared on a fine Italianate rowhouse in the 1100 block of Sarah Street a while ago, and old Pa Pitt decided to document the house before it vanished. You can imagine how delighted he was to find that the blue sticker is gone and the house is under renovation, with new windows installed already.

    House at 1107 Sarah

    Nothing can stop a contractor from installing Georgian-style fake “multipane” windows, which contractors think of as the mark of quality, even when they are completely inappropriate for the style of the house, and even when the “panes” are false divisions made by laying a cartoon grid over a single sheet of glass. But at least these windows are the right size for the holes, and therefore no lasting damage has been done. Father Pitt would guess that a house like this originally had two-over-two windows: see, for comparison, this house of similar age Uptown.

    Woodwork

    The woodwork is a bit tattered, but we hope it can be preserved.

    Woodwork

    This transom is crying out for an address in stained glass. Emerald Art Glass is only a dozen blocks away.

    Dormer
    Breezeway

    Of course Father Pitt could not leave without documenting this fine breezeway.

    Front door

    Like the windows, the front door is a standard model that fits properly and could be replaced with a more appropriate style later by a more ambitious owner.

  • Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse & Transfer Company, South Side

    Terminal Way

    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.

    Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse & Transfer Company from the river side

    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.

    Track No. 5

    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

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

    Fourth Street

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

    Terminal Way

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

    Narrow outbuilding

    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.

    Power plant

    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.

    Power plant
    Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse & Transfer Company

    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.

  • Chimney Pots

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

  • More Views of the Gimbels Warehouse, South Side

    Entrance to 2100 Wharton Street

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

    Gimbels warehouse
    Another view
    Eastern end of the Gimbels warehouse

    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.

  • South Vocational High School, South Side

    Inscription

    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.

    Sarah Street front of the South Vocational High School
    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.

    Sarah Street entrance and window
    Sarah Street entrance
    Window
    Corner view

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

    Tenth Street entrance

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

    Transom

    …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.

    Apin

    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.

  • Seventeenth Ward World War I Memorial, South Side

    Relief

    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.

    Seventeenth Ward War Memorial
    Inscription
    Inscription

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

    Inscription
    Inscription

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

    Face of the relief

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

    Bust of the relief
    Seventeenth Ward War Memorial
  • The Birmingham Bridge and the Expressways That Never Were

    Birmingham Bridge

    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?

    Stub of an exit ramp
    Closer view of the stub
    Standing on the stub

    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.

    Birmingham Bridge
  • Pittsburgh Mercantile Company, South Side

    Heads on the Pittsburgh Mercantile Company Building

    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?

    The building

    We have a large number of pictures if you care to see more.

    (more…)
  • One Block of Sidney Street on the South Side

    2109 Sidney Street

    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.

    (more…)