Ornamental details on a row of commercial buildings on Carson Street.
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Victorian Commercial Buildings on the Boulevard of the Allies
Among the few human-sized buildings left in the area, these two at the corner of Stanwix Street are dwarfed by the skyscrapers around them. The large windows suggest workshops of some sort on the upper floors; the tasteful ornamentation suggests prosperity.
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B. M. Kramer & Co. Building
Note that this picture is more than 13 megabytes if you enlarge it. Old Pa Pitt can only say this is not bad for a first try. He has always admired this little masterpiece of industrial architecture (which surprisingly still houses a pipe, valve, and fittings company), and set himself the task of getting a picture of the Sidney Street face, which covers the entire block between 20th Street and 21st Street on the South Side. The evening sun was not kind to him, so he may try again on a cloudy day; but this is still the only picture of the whole Sidney Street face on the entire Internet, so Father Pitt gives himself credit for that much. Below, a more conventional (and much easier) view from the corner of 20th and Sidney Streets, with the usual utility cables.
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Unloading at Cape Town, by Edward Trumbull
“A series of unusually artistic mural paintings by Trumbull always interests visitors to ‘The Home of the 57,’ ” says a 1924 Heinz advertisement in The Delineator. For many years the Heinz factory tour was one of Pittsburgh’s chief attractions, and Edward Trumbull’s murals in the headquarters building were much admired. The tour is no longer offered, but this advertisement reproduces one of Trumbull’s famous murals: “Scene at Capetown, South Africa. A symbol of Heinz world-wide distribution.”
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United Steelworkers Building from the Boulevard of the Allies
Architects Curtis and Davis enlivened what would have been a simple square box with a distinctive diamond-grid facing that continues down into the pillars at ground level.
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The Modern Bathroom, by Edward Trumbull
Edward Trumbull is remembered primarily for his murals today. He did a number of famous ones for Pittsburgh; his work can still be seen on the ceiling of the Supreme Court Room in the City-County Building. (His most famous work in Pittsburgh, the ceiling of the Grant Building lobby, was either covered or destroyed—we hope the former—in the ill-conceived 1980s redesign of that lobby.)
Trumbull lived in Pittsburgh for a couple of years and continued to work for many prominent Pittsburghers for years afterward. Here we have an illustration he made for a 1924 advertisement for “Standard” plumbing fixtures. The Standard Sanitary Mfg. Co. of Pittsburgh had a lot to do with the shape of the modern bathroom. It later merged with American Radiator to form American-Standard, which still dominates the toilet trade today.
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Royal York Apartments
This splendid apartment house on Bigelow Boulevard is a feast of Art Deco details; in fact, in a city that never adopted Art Deco as enthusiastically as many of its rivals, this is one of the most remarkable Art Deco buildings. Like many other apartment blocks in Oakland, it required some cleverness from the architect to adapt it to an unpromisingly irregular site.
Addendum: According to a city survey of historic buildings, the architect was Edward Stanton, and the building was put up in 1937.
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Two Different Interpretations of Tudor in Oakland
The apartment building above, which faces Centre Avenue, is arranged as a kind of Tudor Renaissance palace. In defiance of its sloping site, it is a perfect rectangle arranged around an open courtyard. One can imagine Queen Elizabeth building herself a palace on this pattern.
Almost adjacent—in fact, directly adjacent in the rear parts—is the Schenley Arms, which sits in the narrow angle between Centre Avenue and Bigelow Boulevard.
Where the (unnamed, at least on its face) apartment building above is in the style of a Tudor palace, this is deliberately arranged in the ramshackle fashion of an old English inn. The deliberately haphazard shape takes advantage of a very irregular lot and gives the building an entirely different appearance from different angles.
Neither one of these buildings is a very accurate representation of real Tudor architecture: they are mostly put together from standard parts with Tudor accents added. But the Tudor accents are valuable. Especially in the Schenley Arms, they give the building an architectural reason for being an absurd mishmash of odd angles: it looks as though the building was supposed to be that way, rather than forced into its absurd shape by the constraints of an absurd property.
Update: Note the comment below identifying Edward Crump, Jr., as having designed and built the Schenley Arms. The other building, which was named the Pennsylvanian, was designed, constructed, financed, and managed by architect Daniel A. Crone, according to his biography in Pittsburgh of Today (1931).
One response
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Reflections in PPG Place
Artsy if not artistic pictures of PPG Place reflecting PPG Place and nearby buildings.
