A window by Louis Comfort Tiffany, donated to the Pennsylvania Female College (now Chatham) in 1888. The figure is taken from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling: the Erythraean Sibyl, “here transformed into a symbol for women’s education,” as a plaque nearby says. This was an early work of Tiffany’s, believed to be his earliest in the Pittsburgh area. It was put away in about 1930 and sat in storage for seventy years, because who needed a window by Tiffany? In 2000 it was finally brought out of storage—old Pa Pitt imagines a janitor starting the ball rolling by saying, “Hey, can we get this thing out of the way?”—and restored for a place in the science building.
Note that Shakespeare’s name appears twice in the pantheon of great figures every young lady should know. No one else gets that honor, and—though Shakespeare certainly is worth twice as much as any of the others to an English-speaking college student—one wonders who specified the duplication, or even whether it was intentional.
A pair of Romanesque houses, mostly brick but with a splendid stone front. The decorations are extraordinarily fine, and Father Pitt suspects that they were by the extraordinary Achille Giammartini, who lived a few blocks away and was responsible for much of the ornamental stonecarving on the North Side.
Above, the First Avenue subway station (which is an elevated station, but it’s on the part of the line we call the “subway”) from First Avenue. Below, a CAF 4300-series Blue Line car comes in from the Panhandle Bridge.
Another of the millionaires’ mansions that have become part of Chatham University. Built in 1911 or 1912 for steel executive James C. Rea, the Julia and James Rea House is now a student dormitory. Students tell us the rooms are “quirky” in a good way, with high ceilings and odd protrusions, because the house was divided with minimal disruption to the original architecture.
Sharpsburg had three Lutheran churches within three blocks. One was English (that one is still going), and two were German, and the two German ones have a curiously intertwined history. Father Pitt will try to piece it together, but anyone from Sharpsburg who can correct his reconstruction is earnestly requested to do so.
The First German Evangelical Lutheran Church (above), which looks like a building from the 1870s or so, was founded by German-speaking immigrants in 1863: Sharpsburg had a large German community in the 1800s. (Old Pa Pitt apologizes, by the way, for the more than usually lush growth of utility cables in these pictures: Sharpsburg is like that.)
The tower originally had a steeple, now vanished, as steeples often do.
The pastor or council of First German alienated a number of members by “enforcement of rules pertaining to association with fraternal organizations.” In 1888, the discontented members left to form their own congregation, St. John’s. They ended up building a fine Romanesque church just a block away from the church they had left.
This has the look of a we’ll-show-them building: it probably dates from the early 1890s, and it was in the most fashionable style the congregation could afford. The tower is quite tall, and originally supported a tall steeple that was hit by lightning and removed in 1930.
The entrance arch is designed to be impressive.
St. John’s had a troubled history. “In the 1930s the Evangelical Church merged with the Reformed Church, and when the recommended type service of the joint church was adopted by St. John’s, we lost members who opposed the change in services.” A church founded by members who walked out of another church may perhaps expect some of them to keep up the old tradition. In the 1936 flood, the church was badly damaged; it suffered a fire in 1956, a month after expensive redecorations. By the time the church closed, it was a member of the United Churches of Christ.
The original First German is also gone now; it closed about fifteen years ago. Now that the congregations are gone, the buildings can be friendly; they both belong to the Sharpsburg Family Worship Center, an Assemblies of God congregation.
This Renaissance house in Shadyside is now a residence for first-year students at Carnegie Mellon. The round dormer is unusual, but there was a brief fad for them around the turn of the twentieth century: see also the J. J. Matthews House.
Addendum: The architect was Frederick Osterling. This is the sole survivor of a row of three houses Osterling designed; this one was for James H. Hammond. See Works of F. J. Osterling by J. Franklin Nelson, 1904.
The seven-storey building at the corner of Ross Street and Third Avenue was the home of the W. W. McBride Paper Company. Multiple layers of painted signs make it hard to read any one of them, but the name “W. W. McBride” is clear enough.
The Century Cyclopedia of History and Biography of Pennsylvania (1904) has an extensive biography of William Wilson McBride, and we quote the part that has to do with the firm and the building:
In 1890 Mr. McBride bought a half interest in the well-established paper business of Morrison, Cass & Company, of Pittsburg, which owned large paper mills at Tyrone, Pennsylvania. The other half interest was retained by John Cooper, of Pittsburgh, who had been a member of the original firm, and the business was carried on under the name of Cooper & McBride. After four years Mr. McBride bought out his partner and became the sole proprietor, operating under the title of W. W. McBride & Company. In June, 1902, the business was incorporated as the W. W. McBride Paper Company. During 1901 he built a fine seven-story brick building at the corner of Ross Street and Third Avenue, containing the offices, sales department, and storage rooms.
By 1923, according to the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, the McBride Building had become the Bowman Building, so these signs must all date from before that time.
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