Henry Gilchrist designed many fashionable mansions for the rich and the upper middle classes. This 1904 Tudor house on Callowhill Street is typical of the “English style” of the time, but the details of the half-timbering are unusually rich. The house is very similar, but not identical, to one Gilchrist designed two years later in Schenley Farms. In this house, though, the small-paned Tudor windows have been preserved, and they add to the picturesque old-English effect.1
This HDR picture of the house, made up of three different exposures, looks a bit artificial but brings out the details in the woodwork.
Source for the attribution: Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, August 31, 1904, p. 563. “Mr. E. E. Arensburg will erect a dwelling on Callowhill street, from plans prepared by Architect H. D. Gilchrist, Frick Building.” Confirmed by a 1923 plat map, where the house belongs to “M. Arnesburg” (note spelling). ↩︎
Following the example of Montreal, Pittsburgh had each of its subway stations decorated by a different artist. The neon installation in Steel Plaza, called “River of Light,” is by Jane Haskell.
The style of the station itself combines Brutalism with Postmodernism.
Paul Irwin designed this house for R. P. McAllister; it was built in about 1920. (Father Pitt knows this information because the owners of the house helpfully inscribed it on a bronze plaque around the corner at the delivery entrance.) Though it is eclectic in its influences, everything works in harmony, from the Georgian front door to the Japanese eyebrow in the roofline to the surprising outbreaks of half-timbering in the rear.
The destruction of the Lower Hill and the destruction of central Allegheny were the two great urban-renewal catastrophes in Pittsburgh’s history. A century ago, the Lower Hill was the classic American melting pot, where black and white, Christian and Jewish, and every other kind of people all lived together in a crowded but lively neighborhood. That made it a slum, according to middle-twentieth-century definitions. When “slum clearance” became an urban-planning buzzword, the Lower Hill was the prime target.
Many of the synagogues had moved to Squirrel Hill and other neighborhoods in the East End by that time. The Beth Hamedrash Hagodol congregation had not. It had stayed in its 1892 building right next to Epiphany School, where downtown workers could easily walk to prayers.
From a Hopkins plat map at Pittsburgh Historic Maps. At this time the congregation was known as B’nai Israel.
When the Lower Hill was demolished (except for Epiphany Church and School, which we’ll be seeing shortly), the old synagogue was one of the buildings in the way. But the congregation didn’t give up. It built a new synagogue just around the corner on Colwell Street, taking the elaborate Torah ark from the old building.
The new synagogue lasted for about forty years, but then it, too, found itself in the way. It was torn down when the new arena was built.
Still the congregation didn’t give up. Architect Harry Levine remodeled an abandoned building into a new synagogue, and in 2010 the congregation, after meeting in borrowed space at Duquesne University for a couple of years, moved into its current home on Fifth Avenue at Diamond Street. Here it is still convenient for downtown worshipers, and here it stands, a block away from its Lower Hill location, an indomitable survivor.
The late Franklin Toker believed that these houses were probably designed by Frederick Scheibler. He was following the original scholars of Frederick Scheibler, Shear and Schmertz, who brought poor old Scheibler out of obscurity in his old age in time to see himself hailed as a prophet of modern architecture.
Father Pitt hates to contradict Dr. Toker, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Pittsburgh architecture was probably unmatched; but Toker has been wrong before. Martin Aurand, whose biography of Scheibler will probably remain the definitive one for generations to come, lists these houses under the “misattributions.”
Old Pa Pitt himself is of the Aurand opinion, and in fact Father Pitt has probable grounds for attributing these houses—without, however, claiming complete certainty—to Benno Janssen. His reason is that there is a very similar terrace in Oakland (368–376 McKee Place) that is almost certainly by Janssen & Abbott. Father Pitt hopes to have pictures of those houses soon; meanwhile, you can take his word for it—or look them up on Google Street View—that it would be odd if one of these terraces were by Janssen & Abbott and the other by Scheibler.
These houses are yet another clever answer to the question of how to design a terrace of relatively inexpensive houses so that they are architecturally attractive and distinctive—so that, in other words, they make potential tenants think they’re getting something special. Compare them, for example, to the row just next door to the left, which was built on a lower budget to a much more ordinary design.
Built in 1931, Laughlin Hall was designed by E. P. Mellon, an architect of conservative but refined taste who prospered through his connection to the Mellon family. (E. P. stood for Edward Purcell, but he seems to have been known by his initials.) The Mellons were big patrons of the Pennsylvania College for Women, Chatham’s predecessor, and Uncle Andy himself had his house nearby.
Do you know what happens if you walk into the projects with a camera?
Well, people walking past smile and say “good morning,” because this is Pittsburgh, and that’s what we do.
At Wikimedia Commons, where Father Pitt donates all his pictures, another Commons user asked him as a favor to get some pictures of the Bedford Dwellings, because they are scheduled to be demolished when their replacements are finished, and there were no current pictures of them in Commons. So of course old Pa Pitt was out there the very next morning, because these are historic buildings whose memory should not be lost.
Suburbanites seem to be terrified of the “projects”—the public-housing developments for poor people in the city. Old Pa Pitt is not going to tell you that the projects are dens of luxurious living, or that it is always an easy thing to raise a family there. But these buildings are better maintained than many suburban apartment complexes, and they are filled with people who care about their community and try to be good neighbors to one another.
The Bedford Dwellings, built in 1939, were one of several New Deal housing projects in Pittsburgh. The architects were an all-star cast (and Father Pitt has no idea how they sorted out the work among themselves): Raymond Marlier, who designed Western Psych and several buildings at Kennywood; Bernard Prack, an expert in large industrial projects and worker housing; Edward B. Lee, architect of several tony clubs and the Chamber of Commerce Building downtown; and the venerable William Boyd, who was already architecting when the others were in kneepants. For this project they adopted a modernist simplicity that, in Father Pitt’s opinion, makes the development look like a barracks. But many expensive suburban apartment complexes adopted the same look at the same time.
The idea behind the projects was to get poor people out of the awful “slums” and into decent housing, which would give them an opportunity to improve themselves.
Now, in old Pa Pitt’s opinion, much of the thought behind the projects was misguided. The slums they replaced might have been unsanitary and crowded, but they were alive. They had corner stores and bars and synagogues and churches and all the things that make a neighborhood a neighborhood. In contrast, the projects were just warehouses for people. They did have a community center and a recreation area, but they organized the life out of the community.
Before we think bad thoughts about the planners, the architects, and everyone else involved, let us recall that this was the modernist ideal for everyone. It was not just that the poor should be warehoused in barracks. Le Corbusier proposed leveling the whole city of Paris and installing everybody in identical apartment towers—and Le Corbusier was and still is the idol of the modernists. These housing projects, as we mentioned, are hard to distinguish from many profit-making suburban apartment complexes of the same era.
In other words, the people who planned the Bedford Dwellings were trying, in good faith, to give people who were otherwise too poor to afford decent housing the best modern thought could offer them. The poor were to be upgraded to the living standards of the modern middle class.
Most of the buildings are apartments; a few are rows of small townhouses like these.
Nor were the housing projects built to weed out undesirable races. In fact, the projects were integrated from the beginning.
In The Negro Ghetto, a 1967 book by Robert Clifton (New York: Russell & Russell), the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh was singled out as an organization with enlightened ideas.
Whenever there is an activity sponsored by the Authority, it must be open to all ethnic groups, and whenever an activity is sponsored by a municipal or community agency, the Authority also insists that there be no racial segregation. [Page 184.]
Public-housing projects in Pittsburgh were never segregated deliberately. The administrator of the Housing Authority (quoted in that same book) explained the policy thus:
The general policy concerning occupancy is that the Housing Authority of the city of Pittsburgh will not, except for extremely compelling reasons, or reasons outside its own control, change the racial proportions of the large community in which any project may be built. However, the radius of such a community, and, therefore, the number of inhabitants that should be considered have never been precisely defined. [Page 185.]
By 1967 the Hill was mostly Black, and therefore the population of the Bedford Dwellings was also mostly Black—but not exclusively. Other projects in the city had populations that reflected the neighborhoods around them, so that some were majority Black and others majority White, and at least one almost precisely fifty-fifty. Not one of the eight major projects in the city was racially monolithic.
But what of the Bedford Dwellings’ effect on the neighborhood? Well, they killed it. The Engineering News-Record for October 25, 1951, reported that more than 7,800 buildings had been demolished in Pittsburgh in the previous fifteen years. “The peak year was 1939, when 1,208 buildings were torn down, 670 of them to make way for the first three public housing projects, Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village Nos. 1 and 2.”
In the National Association of Housing Officials’ Housing Yearbook for 1939, we read, “Some three months were required to relocate the families from the Bedford site. Of the 160 families removed, 83 per cent were Negroes.” So 160 families—which could easily add up to a thousand people—had three months to pack up their entire lives and get out of their vanishing neighborhood.
Ideas have changed, and Father Pitt thinks they have changed for the better. These days, planners try to integrate their low-income housing projects into the neighborhoods by creating urban streetscapes, by fitting the architecture with the buildings around it, and by breaking down the barriers that isolate and define the “projects.”
One thing hasn’t changed. The decisions are still being made by middle-class bureaucrats who know what’s good for poor people. They probably have better ideas than they had in the 1930s, but no one says, “Let’s ask the residents what they think we should do, and then do that.” There will be community meetings and surveys and all that kind of thing, and residents will spend hours making their views heard, and in the end the people who know best will do what they know is best.
But let us remember the Bedford Dwellings with an honest appreciation of their faults and their virtues. They made an urban neighborhood into a sterile suburb. But they also formed a community. They kept their promise of decent, sanitary housing for people who needed it. In spite of their historic importance, Father Pitt is willing to agree that it is time to let them go. But if they were not all good, they were not all bad, either. Let these pictures remain as a memorial to the Bedford Dwellings as they were when they were in good shape and still inhabited, and to the generations of people who lived their lives there, and even to the middle-class bureaucrats who honestly wanted everybody to have a chance at a decent home and worked hard to make that possible.
