There were two large Presbyterian churches around the corner from each other in Bellevue, both called Bellevue Presbyterian. The other one was the United Presbyterian congregation, and old Pa Pitt will pause for a moment to let the laugh track do its job. The church we see here was later called Northminster Presbyterian, and it is now home to the New Life Community Church.
Of course, in the glory days of steel and coal, the building was not quite so pale, as we see in this old postcard:
Now Thackeray Hall of the University of Pittsburgh. The architect was Abram Garfield, son of our martyred president. This section on University Place is the older part of the building; a larger addition was built on Thackeray Avenue in 1925.
Mr. Garfield would not have approved of those asymmetrical doors on his rigorously symmetrical Renaissance palace. Is Pitt really so strapped for cash that these are the best the university can do?
Here we see how the older building connects to the carefully matched 1925 addition (on the left), with a new entrance at the seam between the buildings.
This little library was the second of Carnegie’s branch libraries, after the one in Lawrenceville; like all the original branch libraries, it was designed by Alden & Harlow.
A. F. Link designed this Romanesque school in 1912, a little more than a decade before he designed the magnificent church beside it. This design already shows Link’s trademark habit of abstracting and modernizing historic forms: here he combines a hint of Romanesque with some very Jugendstil abstract patterns in the brickwork.
Fortunately the building has been sold to Yeshiva Schools, so it will not be abandoned to rot the way so many Catholic schools have been.
What do St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Mary of the Mount, St. Stephen’s in Hazelwood, a chicken coop turned into an apartment building in Aspinwall, and an empty restaurant on the South Side have in common? The buildings were all designed by Frederick Sauer, who was a genius at ecclesiastical architecture but had to make most of his living designing houses and small commercial buildings for the middle classes. This building was put up in about 1911,1 and we can’t say that it’s a work of towering genius. But Sauer does manage to filter the expected Pittsburghish details through an angular modernism that gives the building a distinctive style. This is how a good architect makes a good living: by taking small jobs as well as big ones, and doing good work for all his clients.
Here is how the Land Trust Company building (later the Commercial National Bank) looked in 1905:
And here is how it looks today:
Much better, isn’t it?
Update: Thanks to our correspondent David Schwing, we know that the architects were Link, Weber & Bowers, an all-star firm of local ecclesiastical architects.1 The article follows as it was originally published.
This is about as perfect as an Art Deco storefront can get. What is especially cheering is that the ground floor is a new construction, using modern stock materials to create a storefront that matches the spirit of the rest of the building. Until a little more than twelve years ago, the ground floor had been bricked up in an unsympathetic fashion, as you can see in a 2008 image from Google Maps.
Father Pitt does not know what the initial K stands for at the top of the façade, and would be delighted to be informed. (Update: K is for H. S. Kossler, who commissioned the building.)
This was one of the original houses put up in 1906 by the developers of Schenley Farms. The architects were Billquist & Lee. Billquist is Thorsten E. Billquist, the architect who designed the Allegheny Observatory. Lee is Edward B. Lee, who left Billquist in 19101 to found his own practice and flourished as a designer of theaters and clubs, and as architect of record for the City-County Building (though Lee later said he had only executed drawings from designs by Henry Hornbostel).
We have a good number of houses from a century and a half or more ago, but very few public buildings remain in Pittsburgh from the Civil War era. Here is one. This Odd Fellows Hall was built in 1865, when the West End was Temperanceville. It seems to have been extended by one bay on the right not long after it was built.
It seems to old Pa Pitt that this ought to be one of our high preservation priorities. It is nearly unique in being a secular public building from the middle nineteenth century; Pittsburgh’s prosperity and rapid growth meant that most others were replaced by bigger ones around the turn of the twentieth century. It is also in very good historical shape: aside from the mutilated ground floor, it is in very close to original condition. But it is in a neglected neighborhood where it could not yet be turned into profitable loft apartments, in spite of ongoing efforts to turn the West End into an artsy village.
This building inspires Father Pitt to imitate the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and classify our vulnerable landmarks in six categories: Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Demolished. We shall call this building Vulnerable, because it is a large building in a neglected neighborhood, on a street where a majority of the buildings have been demolished.
The design of the House Building, with its unusual middle section, is explained by the fact that the upper six floors were added some time after the lower seven were put up. This rendering shows the cornice and parapet at the top, without which the building looks a little too casual.
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