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Construction in Beechview
A while ago we mentioned that this building on Broadway in Beechview was undergoing a long-delayed restoration. Now, as the few Red Line riders who look up from their phone screens may have noticed, an addition is going up next to it, bringing an honest-to-goodness construction crane into Beechview for the first time in decades.
Kodak EasyShare Z981.
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Brick Queen Anne in Shadyside
A house in a dignified version of the Queen Anne style, but still with plenty of picturesque details, which take on added picturesqueness in sunset light.
The elaborate woodwork and shingles in the gables have been preserved.
A pattern of stock terra-cotta tiles set in the wall may have taken the place of a filled-in window.
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Apartment Entrances on Bayard Street, Oakland
Designers of apartment buildings often put a lot of effort into the entrances, because the entrance is what sells the idea of the building. You are, after all, trying to make prospective tenants think this is where they want to live. You will walk through these doors, a good entrance says, and you will feel like a duke walking into his palace. In one short stretch of Bayard Street this morning, we collected several artistic entrances, beginning with the Adrian above, at which no duke would turn up his nose.
The Aberdeen is almost as splendid, an effect slightly diminished by installing stock doors at the entrance and balcony.
There are two King Edward Apartments (plus an annex around the corner); this is the older of the two.
The later King Edward is covered with terra cotta, and its bronze doors are themselves works of art.
Bayard Manor has the kind of late-Gothic entrance that would make you feel you had done your best if you were expecting a visit from Queen Elizabeth I.
The D’Arlington is an interesting combination of classical and Prairie Style, with both baroque and abstractly geometric ornaments coexisting comfortably at the entrance.
Kodak EasyShare Z981. Finally, a later building that does not quite succeed in competing with its neighbors, but still provides a respectable-looking entry.
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J. D. Thompson Building
This building on Wood Street, right across from the subway station, was probably put up in the 1880s; it appears on an 1890 map as belonging to Jonathan D. Thompson, and in 1923 still belonged to J. D. Thompson. The elaborate stone front is liberally decorated with incised patterns. We would call the style Italianate; the architect probably thought of it as Italian Renaissance.
Update: Note the comment from “Camerafiend” below, which gives us news clippings to show us that this building was designed by E. M. Butz and built in 1874. E. M. Butz is perhaps most famous as the architect of the Western Penitentiary.
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First Christian Church, Carnegie
Update: Thanks to our correspondent David Schwing, we know the story of this church better. It was a Shingle-style frame church dedicated at the end of 1896.1 In 1953, it was “Perma-Stoned,”2 so that the end result is an odd mixture of Shingle-style forms—like the flared roof—and 1950s aesthetics.
The original text of the article follows.
Father Pitt is not quite sure what to call this style: maybe arts-and-crafts Mediterranean.
The corner-tower entrance is typical of Pittsburgh churches, but the stone porch is not.
The arches and spindly columns of the belfry are the touch that says “Mediterranean” to old Pa Pitt.
Olympus E20-N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. From this angle we can see that the building has the usual Pittsburgh problems to solve: the lot gains almost two floors’ worth of height from lower to upper corner.
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Bernard Gloeckler Co. Warehouse (Pennrose Building), Strip District
One of the few first-generation skyscrapers outside downtown, this was originally the warehouse for the Bernard Gloeckler Company, a prosperous dealer in “butchers’ supplies & tools, store fixtures, refrigerators, etc.,” according to a 1913 city directory (where the name is spelled Gloekler; we have also seen Glockler and Gleckler). It was later called the Pennrose Building, and of course it has been adapted as luxury apartments. It was built in 1906; the architects were the Philadelphia firm of Ballinger & Perrot.1
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The building was reinforced concrete throughout, and Ballinger & Perrot literally wrote the book on reinforced concrete: Inspector’s Handbook of Reinforced Concrete, by Walter F. Ballinger and Emile G. Perrot (New York: The Engineering News Publishing Co.; London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1909).
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Wilkinsburg Station
Designed by Walter H. Cookson, this station—one of the grandest of our suburban stations—was built in 1916. The last train left in 1975. After sitting abandoned for decades, the station has finally been restored to very nearly its original appearance.
The baggage area on the lower level.
Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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Sixteenth Street Bridge
It is greatly to the honor of Pittsburgh as a cultural center that two of our most prominent bridges are named for famous writers. The Sixteenth Street Bridge, built in 1923, was named in 2013 for David McCullough, a writer who made history interesting to thousands who thought they weren’t interested in history. (The other one is the Ninth Street Bridge, named for Rachel Carson.) The architectural parts were designed by Warren & Wetmore, the same firm that designed Grand Central Station in New York.
The armillary spheres with horses were the work of sculptor Leo Lentilli, who was inspired by the Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde in Paris.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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The Morrowfield, Squirrel Hill
The Morrowfield is that big building that looms ahead as you approach the Squirrel Hill Tunnel on the Parkway from downtown Pittsburgh. It was built in 1924 as part of a huge development promoted by developer Thomas Watkins as “a city set on a hill,” and most of the buildings—including this one—were designed by the architect J. E. Dwyer, originally from Ellicott City, who built himself a house right next to the site and spent years supervising construction projects.
In this map from “A City That Is Set on a Hill,” Building Age, December, 1923, p. 36, the big rectangle marked “148 FAMILY APARTMENT” would become the Morrowfield.
The same article printed the architect’s elevation of the new apartment building, spread across two pages. We have taken some pains to restore it to legibility.
“Utilizing the Street Grade in Hillside Apartments,” Building Age, October, 1924. The building went up at a breakneck pace, with crews doing everything all at once. It was finished in less than a year. Below, “Steel work in the early stages showing the brick filler walls being laid before the concrete work was begun, to rush the job along.”
By the time the October, 1924, issue of Building Age came out (from which the pictures of the construction above were taken), the whole project was complete, and this photograph of the building from a distance was taken in time to make it into the magazine.
The entrance is liberally decorated with polychrome terra cotta.
The building of this project was watched nationally, because it was unusual to place such a large building on such a difficult lot. The architect’s elevation shows the slope of Murray Avenue along the front; here we can see that Morrowfield Avenue, on the right-hand side (in terms of the elevation), slopes upward even more dramatically. Then the street behind, Alderson Street, slopes upward again, so that the ground-floor entrances on Alderson Street are three floors up from the main entrance on Murray Avenue.
From that same article in Building Age:
The Morrowfield Apartments presents an interesting study in the effective utilization of exceptional grades. The front elevation faces a western street that is 30 feet lower than the street level in the rear, and a grade running north and south affects the building lengthwise as well as in depth.
The consequence is that the apartment is partly seven and partly eight stories high in front, and only five stories in the rear. What is really the fourth story when seen from the south elevation, is the first when seen from the rear, and the occupants of the fourth story front are therefore enabled to reach their apartments without the use of stairs or elevator by simply coming in the other street.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
