Now known as the Brass Building, this is a well-preserved example of high-class industrial architecture from the turn of the twentieth century.
By good luck, space was available when the building was converted for an addition to house elevators and stairwells.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Strip was a chaotic and lively mess of huge industries, small business, and rowhouses. Few of the houses remain; here is one of the surviving rows. These are what old Pa Pitt calls Baltimore-style rowhouses: a row where the houses are all put up as more or less one building, flush up against the sidewalk, with only a set of steps to the front door to separate them from the city outside. These were built as rental houses, probably in the 1890s or very early 1900s; they were still all under the same ownership in 1923, according to old maps. At first they had small back yards on the alley in the rear, but by 1910 those back yards had been filled in with tiny alley houses, which are still there today, and some day when it isn’t so cold old Pa Pitt will walk around to the alley and get their picture, too.
Surprisingly, all the houses in the original group survive. The house on the right end had its front completely rebuilt about ten years ago; the fourth house from the left has had a “picture window” installed in the parlor. The rest of the houses look more or less the way they have always looked.
This was a warehouse, with offices and showrooms, built in 1907 for a company that sold a wide variety of products, from ball-bearing grinders to home appliances. (Note, by the way, that its owners were among the many stubborn Pittsburghers who kept the H at the end of the city’s name through the dark days when it was officially banned.) Its 1913 catalogue is more than two thousand pages, and the title page shows us why so much effort went into making this industrial building attractive: because it had to look good in the engraving.
This picture—which is probably the architects’ rendering, since the same picture shows up in other sources even before the building was completed—shows the building before it was expanded. The architects were the William G. Wilkins Co., designers of numerous warehouses and industrial buildings in Pittsburgh, including the Frick & Lindsey Co. warehouse, now the Andy Warhol Museum. The addition to the left of the building was built in 1919 or 1920; the same architects supervised it, so it matches the rest very neatly. William Glyde Wilkins was an engineer; to do the architecting in his firm, he had the very capable Joseph F. Kuntz, who loved terra-cotta decoration.
One important line the company sold was the Gainaday brand of home appliances. In the early part of the twentieth century, middle-class families were learning to live without servants. It meant the housewife had to do the work previously done by maids and housekeepers. But this was the mechanical age: a machine could take the place of a servant. It was so efficient, in fact, that you could gain a day over the course of your week of housewifely duties.
The building was promoted as a “model warehouse,” a shining example of what could be done with this sort of building, and Pittsburgh’s Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, the biggest name in toilets (which later merged with American Radiator to form American-Standard), took out a full-page ad in a journal of the toilet trade to boast that the plumbing fixtures were all Standard brand.
The magazine Rock Products for November 22, 1907, gave a detailed description of the building as it was going up, with—once again—the same illustration.
The immense building now being erected by the Pittsburg Gage and Supply Company at Thirtieth Street and Liberty Avenue, Pittsburg, Pa., is constructed of steel, brick and concrete fireproofing, equipped with automatic sprinklers throughout, and when completed will be the largest, most modern and thoroughly equipped supply house in the world.
For the concrete work Lehigh Portland cement was used throughout. The W. G. Wilkins Company, Westinghouse Building, were the architects, and the George Hogg Company the contractors.
The first floor will be used as a general salesroom; the second floor will be taken up by the offices and shipping departments of the company. All the other floors and the basement will be used as storage space for their mammoth stock. A notable feature of the main building is the central_tower rising more than forty feet above the roof. In this tower will be located water tanks holding 65,000 gallons, which will be used for the house supply and the automatic sprinkler system.
In connection with the building there is being erected a six-story fireproof building, in which will be manufactured the Pittsburg steam specialties. It will also contain a thoroughly modern brass foundry and pipe shop. Electric cranes are to be used throughout, and all machinery, elevators, etc., will be electric-motor-driven.
A joint siding of the Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Ohio and Pittsburg Junction railroads will afford excellent shipping facilities. Adjoining this siding they are constructing a large iron, steel and pipe warehouse, in which will be carried the largest stock in Pittsburg, if not in the Central States. Adjoining this building there is a vacant frontage of almost 100 feet, which will be used for storage and switching purposes.
The present stores and warehouses of the Pittsburg Gage and Supply Company are located at 309-321 Water Street, and its manufacturing plant at Thirty-first Street. The officers are: W. L. Rodgers, president; J. Lee Rodgers, secretary; R. F. Ramsey, treasurer; A. F. Maxwell, assistant treasurer; M. R. Porter, sales manager, and H. E. Haller, superintendent.
Frederick Sauer designed St. Stanislaus Kostka, which was built in 1891. The church presides dramatically over the broad plaza of Smallman Street. It used to look out on a sea of railroad tracks, but its view improved considerably when the Pennsylvania Railroad built its colossal Produce Terminal.
It is probable that the rectory, done in a matching style, was also designed by Sauer. The glass blocks are not an improvement, but they have kept the building standing and in use.
Three of the modest commercial buildings typical of the Strip. The Penn Avenue business district grew up when the Strip was a clutter of miscellaneous industry and working-class housing; the same buildings, and others filled in on the same scale, turned into wholesale food businesses when food became the main focus of the neighborhood. In spite of the way the Strip has grown in the past two decades, Penn Avenue has changed remarkably little. Businesses come and go, but many of the old standby food dealers have been here for decades—two kinds of Sunseris, Stamoolis Brothers, Wholey’s, Sam Bok, Labad’s, and so on.
In the 1800s, the produce industry was concentrated on Liberty Avenue downtown, and a railroad ran right down the middle of the street to serve the wholesalers.
Gradually the business moved to the Strip, and in 1906 the tracks in Liberty Avenue were torn up. For a while the produce auctions were conducted in the open air straight from the freight cars, and a 1923 map shows the “produce yard” in the middle of the sea of tracks that built up in the Strip:
In 1926, the railroad built a colossal terminal for the produce business. The Fruit Auction & Sales Building at the northeast end (above) had two tall floors; from there the Produce Terminal stretched five blocks, a quarter-mile long, making a dramatic open plaza of Smallman Street.
After sitting mostly vacant for a while, the building was renovated at a cost of more than $50 million and reopened as a shopping, eating, and entertainment center called “The Terminal.”
In the old days, many streets in Pittsburgh had trains running right down the street—even Liberty Avenue downtown. Railroad Street in the Strip is one of the few streets left with an active railroad. From this long-lens picture, we can see that the idea of “gauge” in tracklaying allows for a good bit of literal wiggle room.
By state law, streetcars in Pennsylvania were not allowed to use standard-gauge track, because legislators very sensibly worried that some backroom deal between the transit company and the railroad would suddenly have freight trains rolling down residential streets everywhere. Even now, the streetcars in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia run on “Pennsylvania broad gauge.”
This large apartment development between Railroad Street and the Allegheny opened in 2016. WTW Architects were the architects of record, and this is a good example of the type of patchwork-quilt architecture that has been fashionable in the last decade or two. On the one hand old Pa Pitt thinks these buildings are much more interesting than the plain brick boxes that were fashionable after the Second World War. On the other hand, bricks last, whereas Father Pitt fears some of these other materials will begin to look a bit scraggly in about fifteen years.
Almost all the decorative effect of this building is achieved by arranging bricks in different ways. The original windows in the upper floors also have a part to play in the rhythm of the design: it would not be nearly as effective if they were replaced with single panes of plate glass.
