Webster Hall was designed by Henry Hornbostel, Pittsburgh’s favorite architect in the early twentieth century. It was built as a luxury hotel [Update: in fact it was originally bachelor apartments, but that venture soon failed, and it was converted to a hotel] in 1926, and we can see Hornbostel moving from his flamboyant classical style (as exemplified in the City-County Building) to a sort of restrained Art Deco.
This view of Pittsburgh appeared in A Pictorial Description of the United States, an expensive book published in 1851. Father Pitt has not seen it before. Every once in a while he runs across what we may describe as an undiscovered historical image of the city, which he will publish here for your enlightenment.
Although the original caption describes the image as a view “from the northwest,” it appears to be from the southwest, on the south bank of the Ohio just downstream from the Point. This book has trouble with directions: it lists Washington (Pennsylvania) as twenty miles north of Pittsburgh.
“This is the greatest manufacturing town of the west,” says the book, “and has furnished a large proportion of the steamboats which navigate the Mississippi and its branches. It occupies a low point of land, at the junction of the Allegany and Monongahela rivers, whose united stream is named the Ohio. It is three hundred miles west from Philadelphia, eleven hundred from New Orleans, by land, and over two thousand by water, yet has almost daily communication with it by steamboats. A part of the city now covers Ayres’ hill, and part of the sides of two other eminences; while four small towns, Allegany, Sligo, Manchester, and Birmingham, at short distances, occupy points on the banks.
“A bridge of eight arches, and fifteen hundred feet long, crosses the Monongahela, erected in 1818, at an expense of one hundred thousand dollars; while four bridges cross the Allegany, as well as the noble aqueduct of the Pennsylvania Canal. The city contains about seventy churches, and the population, in 1850, was 80,000.”
Note that the great fire of 1845, which destroyed the original Monongahela bridge, is not mentioned, although the population figure for 1850 is given. Consider for a moment what a crowded place the city was when 80,000 people lived in the area now occupied solely by downtown, with only a few straggling up the Hill.
The rest of the description is worth reading to get a notion of what Pittsburgh was like, or what people in Boston (where the book was published) thought Pittsburgh was like, in the middle of the 1800s.
The Arrott Building is the most lavishly ornamented of the Fourth Avenue bank towers. The ornaments near the top may be best appreciated from another one of the Fourth Avenue bank towers—or with a very long lens from the street.
The ubiquitous Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) is very decorative in flower, but its seed heads are also picturesque in their way. The umbel of flowers closes up into a something very like a bird’s nest, where hundreds of bristly seeds develop to produce the Queen Anne’s Lace for the year after next (it’s a biennial, so it flowers the second year).
Morning glories (Ipomoea purpurea) came here as ornamental garden flowers and have happily adapted to the life of a weed. They are, however, one of our most beautiful weeds, and not many of us resent them. These were blooming in Beechview at the end of August.
Alden and Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects, designed this branch library, as they did many others. This one opened in 1909.
For years this building has been hidden behind a garish modernist façade. Renovation work shows us a modest mid-nineteenth-century building typical of old Birmingham, the narrow-streeted section of the South Side up to 17th Street.
Update: The building has been restored to something more like its original appearance.
The Duquesne Club around the corner may be the center of power in Pittsburgh, but this more modest club also possesses some influence. The Alcoa Building (a bit of it is visible in the left background) actually has a notch cut out of it to avoid demolishing any of the club. The club seems to have been made from late-nineteenth-century rowhouses (back when there were still such things downtown), remodeled into a luxurious club in the 1930s.
The aptly named Triangle Building fills the small triangle of space left over from the awkward intersection of Liberty Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Smithfield Street. It was originally known, it seems, as the McCance Block.
View of the Great Fire of Pittsburgh, by William C. Wall (1846)
In 1845 a catastrophic fire swept through the booming Western city of Pittsburgh. Much of the city was destroyed, including the covered wooden Monongahela bridge, where the Smithfield Street Bridge is now. William C. Wall, a local painter of some skill, saw an artistic and financial opportunity and painted small views of the destruction, which seem to have been reproduced as prints (prints of great catastrophes being very popular among some of the more morose and sentimental Victorians). The next year he created a larger painting with a view of the fire; though he obviously did not have the fire in front of him as he painted, he seems to have depicted fairly accurately the extent of the conflagration—note the area to the west of the bridge that was spared the flames, an area that included the Burke Building, which still stands today.
These three paintings hang together in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s gallery of “European and American Art ca. 1820-1860.” Finding that there seemed to be no good reproductions of them on the Internet, old Pa Pitt took these, which give a fair impression of the pictures as they appear on the wall.
Pittsburgh After the Fire from Birmingham, by William C. Wall (1845)
Pittsburgh After the Fire from Boyd’s Hill, by William C. Wall (1845)
