On the National Register of Historic Places as an outstanding example of modernism, this 1957 building by the Pittsburgh firm Dowler & Dowler (that’s Press C. Dowler and William C. Dowler) has been turned into luxury apartments, like everything else downtown. It also houses the City Charter High School.
Mission Street on the South Side Slopes looking westward toward St. Josaphat Church. The crowds of frame houses practically right against the street are typical of the neighborhood. By the standards of the Slopes, however, this is a luxuriously broad street.
This building is remarkably well preserved mostly because it belonged to a company that stayed in the same business until 2005 without ever outgrowing its limited premises. The Hipwell Maufacturing Company’s most famous products were metal HIPCO flashlights, the kind that used to be ubiquitous before plastics took over. But the company (according to this page) was an important innovator in the electrical business, inventing the single-cell batteries that power our flashlights and digital cameras and toys and a thousand other things we never think of until we have to buy batteries again. It was also involved in the early stages of telephones and electric toy trains.
Today the building is lovingly preserved as—what else?—loft apartments, as well as a banquet hall called HIP at the Flashlight Factory.
A commenter below tells us that these posters were actually made up for the movie Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, based on the famous August Wilson play. Living in Hollywood-on-the-Mon sometimes makes it hard to tell fantasy from reality.
Butter-and-Eggs or Toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) is a kind of wild snapdragon that came from Europe as an ornamental and made itself weedily at home. These plants were growing out of sidewalk cracks on the South Side Slopes. Note the two different color phases: one with bright orange centers, the other a more uniform primrose yellow.
This seems to have been the masterpiece of its architects, the Chicago firm of Egan & Prindeville; indeed, the only other work of theirs mentioned in their Wikipedia article is a cathedral in San Francisco that burned in 1962. If they have to be remembered for only one work, though, this is one to be proud of. It was built in 1906, but—like all great cathedrals—it is really only beginning to take shape more than a century later. It takes a heap of liturgy to make a church a cathedral, and chapels and decorations continue to be added by successive bishops.
The Rectory is designed in a matching but more restrained Gothic style.
Addendum: According to the article “Designing in God’s Name: Architect Carlton Strong,” the rectory (built in 1926–1927) was designed by Thomas Carlton Strong, who also designed Sacred Heart Church in Shadyside.
This fine old firehouse on Arch Street, a city-designated historic structure, is exactly what you think of when you think of a firehouse. It’s been empty for some time, but its Central Northside neighborhood is growing more and more fashionable among restoration fanatics, and scaffolding inside suggests that the old firehouse will not be empty much longer.
Map The firehouse is on the southeast corner of Arch Street and Jacksonia Street. Behind it is the aptly named Fireman Way.
A woman feeds geese from the bridge over Lake Elizabeth in West Park. The old city of Allegheny was laid out with green space all the way around the town center—green space that mostly survives (though the southern section of it was long ago sacrificed to the railroad) as some of our most inviting urban parkland.
Love-in-a-Mist, prized for its blue flowers that seem to float in an airy cloud of foliage, grows seedpods that are almost as decorative as the flowers. Children are delighted by the rattling of the seeds in the puffy pods, which make good additions to dried bouquets. The view above is from directly over a pod, showing its hexamerous symmetry.
The cluster of buildings by Charles Z. Klauder at the heart of the University of Pittsburgh is one of America’s great architectural treasures. This chapel comes from the very end of the era in which architecture could be thought of in terms of the ages rather than this decade. Klauder—who died just before the chapel opened—seems as comfortable with his French Gothic idiom as if he had grown up in France in the late Middle Ages.
This remarkable little church is actually the only National Historic Landmark on the North Side, and it well deserves the honor. H. H. Richardson put a lot of imagination into making a small church something unique. Note especially the decorative brickwork.
The immense roof proved heavier than even the great Richardson had calculated. The walls of the church bowed outward under the weight very early. Engineers called in to inspect the damage found that the walls had reached a stable position: they would stay that way forever if the congregation didn’t mind. And so they have stayed for more than a century.
