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Carrick Municipal Building
Carrick became a borough in 1904, and for this little all-in-one borough building hired the big-deal architect Edward Stotz.1 It must have created an impression of prosperity when it was built in 1905, and it still looks solid and respectable today, one year short of a century after the people of Carrick voted for the borough to be annexed by the city of Pittsburgh in 1926. It has been converted into a retail store, and the huge second-floor window makes an excellent display for the current tenant.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The building originally had an elaborate baroque crest that has been shorn off. We can see it in this picture, where the municipal building appears behind the Carrick Hotel:
Found at the Carrick-Overbrook Wiki.
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Highland House, Highland Park
Designed by Tasso Katselas, this 22-storey apartment tower opened in 1962. It has reverted to its original name, Highland House, after some years as “the Park Lane.”
Many projects for skyscraper apartments or hotels were proposed for Highland Park, but this is the only one that ever succeeded. “A dramatic use of the Miesian glass cage formula applied to a 22 story apartment house” was how James D. Van Trump described it in “The Stones of Pittsburgh.” “Located on the edge of Highland Park it seems to float above a nearby reservoir.”
Miesian is a good term for it: the building adopts the colonnade of stilts that became the signature of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Many imitators of Mies seem to lose courage and make the peripteral colonnade a narrow and useless space; see, for example, the Westinghouse Building. Katselas, on the other hand, if anything exaggerated the width of the porch, so that the ground floor is reduced to a little entrance cage, leaving a big broad outdoor space under the shelter of twenty-one floors of steel and glass.
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Garrison Foundry Administration Building, South Side
Longfellow, Alden & Harlow were the architects of this elegant little building in a simplified Renaissance style, which was finished in 1895. It does its best to convince us that the men who run the foundry are civilized people, in spite of the soot that surrounds them. The larger shop building behind it, built in 1901, was designed by Alden & Harlow, after the firm had decided to divide up the work, with Longfellow remaining in Boston and Alden & Harlow taking all the Pittsburgh jobs.
These buildings sat derelict and open to the weather for years, but have been cleaned up and put back together very neatly.
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. Map.
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Federal Reserve Bank
Now the Drury Plaza Hotel, this is a splendid example of the far Art Deco end of the style old Pa Pitt calls American Fascist. The original 1931 building, above, was designed by the Cleveland firm of Walker & Weeks, with Hornbostel & Wood as “consulting architects.” It is never clear in the career of Henry Hornbostel how far his “consulting” went: on the City-County Building, for example, “consulting” meant that Hornbostel actually came up with the design, but Edward Lee was given the credit for it; we would not know that Hornbostel drew the plans if Lee himself had not told us.
At any rate, the lively design almost seems like a rebuke to the sternly Fascist Federal Courthouse across the street, which was built at about the same time.
The aluminum sculpture and ornament is by Henry Hering.
An addition in a similar style looks cheap beside the original; perhaps it would have been better just to admit that the original could not be duplicated and to build the addition in a different style.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
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Kissner Building, Dutchtown
A storefront with living quarters upstairs in a slightly prickly Victorian style. The upraised arm on the corner makes it look as though the building is trying to hail a streetcar.
The inscription has been obliterated, which is not playing fair. But the building appears on a 1901 plat map as belonging to someone named Kissner; it was probably built in the 1890s.
Nikon COOLPIX P100; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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Peoples-Pittsburgh Trust Co., Squirrel Hill
You could count on architect Press C. Dowler for the bankiest-looking banks. The correct Ionic front of this one looks almost exactly the way he drew it, as we can see from the architect’s rendering that was published in the Press on February 8, 1931.
It seems to old Pa Pitt that the mark of a Dowler bank is correct classical detail combined with a lack of fussiness. There is never too much detail. But he takes the details seriously. In other buildings he was already adopting Art Deco and modernist styles, but a bank needed to look traditional and timeless—especially in the Depression. For other Dowler bank designs, see the Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company and the Braddock National Bank.
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Federal Building
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Altenhof & Bown, a Pittsburgh firm that also designed the State Office Building, were the architects of what is now officially called the William S. Moorhead Federal Building. It’s a good example of mid-century modern architecture—distinctive in its vertical-blind curtain of aluminum panels, yet somehow easy to ignore.
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