Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman, a firm that began in Butler and grew to be an international architectural titan, would become famous in the middle 1980s for postmodernist buildings like Liberty Center. This building, however, is prepostmodernist. It opened in 1981, and it is a straightforward modernist box with a Miesian look. Although it doesn’t arrest our attention the way some of the firm’s later projects do, it was a harbinger of Renaissance II, the building boom of the 1980s that remodeled Pittsburgh with a postmodernist skyline.
“No woman has a right to draw like that,” said her friend Edgar Degas when he saw this painting—a compliment Mary Cassatt remembered for years. Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny (now the North Side of Pittsburgh) and grew up there. She studied art in Philadelphia for a while, but spent most of her life in France after that—although it is to the honor of Pittsburgh’s cultured citizens that, when she had to come back to America for a while, one of the first people to recognize Cassatt’s talent and give her a professional commission was Michael Domenec, the Roman Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh.
This painting is one of the treasures of the Carnegie Museum of Art, whose collection of Impressionists is worth traveling a long way to see.
Craftsman meets Colonial in an attractive double duplex whose details are exceptionally well preserved—notably the showy carved brackets and the windows.
A small church that still belongs to Lutherans, now as Holy Cross Evangelical Lutheran Chapel (a Missouri Synod congregation). It is an exception to the general rule that Lutherans did not build corner-tower auditorium churches; the shape of the tiny lot dictated the shape of the church. The slope dictated that the sanctuary would be on the second floor if you enter from the front, but the ground floor if you enter from the back.
THE GLADSTONE SCHOOL O. M. Topp, Architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [1916]VIEW SHOWING PORTION NOW FINISHED THE GLADSTONE SCHOOL O. M. Topp, Architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [1916]PLAN SHOWING THE COMPLETED BUILDING THE GLADSTONE SCHOOL O. M. Topp, Architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [1916]
After sitting vacant for two decades, the main part of the school has been restored as apartments, much to the delight of nearby residents. One neighbor on the same street told old Pa Pitt he had been a student at the school, and was very happy to see the building taken care of once again—and happy to see someone documenting it with a camera.
If you visit, don’t forget to look up at the downspouts.
The population of the neighborhood rapidly grew, and an annex was added in 1926, connected to the main school by a pedestrian bridge. Restoration of the annex is still in progress.
A typical FDR-era public building, put up in 1940 in the modernized hybrid of Art Deco and classical style that old Pa Pitt likes to call American Fascist.
