Spring Garden is a very old neighborhood, with some houses that go back to its roots as a valley farming community. This house, with its generous balcony and huge Italianate windows, caught old Pa Pitt’s eye, and by good luck the owners happened to be coming home and started a neighborly conversation. According to them, the house began as a barn in the 1860s; the foundation and some undetermined part of the barn are built into the house as it stands.
The lush plantings of begonias and impatiens were just about at their peak when Father Pitt took these pictures.
The little rowhouses on Pierce Street were built as rental properties for Andrew W. Mellon, who was not too rich to squeeze a few pennies out of working-class tenants. The houses had a fine location right next to the Roup station on the main commuter-rail line to the east, and they are still right next to its successor, the Negley station on the East Busway. Old Pa Pitt visited them on an August evening, and the fact that these pictures are appearing only now shows how backed up we sometimes get around here. We have some history of the Pierce Street rowhouses in an earlier article.
Pierce Street is unusual in Pittsburgh; it looks more like a street in Baltimore, with an entire block of identical houses all built more or less as one building, their fronts right against the sidewalk.
A few of the houses on one side of the street have disappeared, replaced by parking lot; but the streetscape is still intact enough to show us what it originally looked like.
It appears that most of the houses are in the hands of the same owner and kept up beautifully with identical stoop plantings.
Not all of them, however; a couple are still obviously in private hands and were not repointed when the rest of the houses were restored.
This corner house was left isolated when a few houses to the left were demolished.
Ol’ Ptolemy had heard of that weird theory that the earth moved around the sun instead of vice-versa, but he rejected it as unnecessarily counterintuitive. Hs sure did know his stars, though.
For half a century a trip to Buhl Planetarium was one the most enduring childhood memories of anyone who grew up in Pittsburgh. The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was most famous for its star shows—with its massive Zeiss projector, it was touted as the most sophisticated planetarium in the world—but it had many other scientific exhibits as well.
The building was designed by Ingham & Boyd, who specialized in educational buildings—Ingham & Boyd, and later Ingham, Boyd & Pratt, had the franchise for all the school buildings in Mount Lebanon for decades, and designed numerous others in the city and suburbs. Their style for institutional buildings was purely classical into the 1930s, and then began to take on an Art Deco hue. But they kept their classical mania for symmetry, and the front of Buhl Planetarium is typically symmetrical.
The building is decorated with extraordinary sculptures by Sidney Waugh, whose Art Deco sensibilities perfectly complement the Deco classicism of the architecture. He has made use of the symmetry of the building to arrange his sculptures as complementary pairs. Over the entrance are the bronzes Primitive Science and Modern Science, and Waugh shows them as engaged in the same intellectual enterprise. Instead of placing the modern scientist in a superior position, Waugh has the American Indian scientist and the lab-coated scientist at exactly the same height and scale admiring each other’s work as intellectual equals. In the most literal sense, they see eye to eye.
Note the three inventions Waugh has chosen to represent the accomplishments of pre-Columbian American thought: smoke signals, which created long-distance communication; the bow and arrow, which were developed to a high degree of accuracy; and snowshoes, an invention that was unique to North America.
The modern scientist has his globe, his microscope, and his test tube. He looks across the ages at the American Indian and sees a peer who knew his onions.
On the front wall of the building are two allegorical stone reliefs: “The Heavens” and “The Earth,” again facing each other at the same scale.
Finally, the exit doors from the planetarium have small reliefs of “Night” and “Day.” Here old Pa Pitt must confess that he failed to capture “Day”; it was obscured by leafy trees when he visited, and perhaps he will be able to get a picture when the leaves come down in a month or so.
When the Buhl Planetarium merged with the Carnegie, the result was the Carnegie Science Center—now Kamin Science Center—which brought a much larger science museum to the North Side, including a new higher-tech Buhl Planetarium. But after a few years of mostly lying fallow, the Buhl Planetarium building was taken over by the Children’s Museum and resumed its mission of educating children by delighting them.
A simple and tasteful honor roll with the names of neighborhood residents who served in the Second World War. A narrow addendum at the bottom remembers veterans of World War I and the wars in Korea and Vietnam as well. If you enlarge the picture, all the names will be legible; old Pa Pitt makes it his practice to record every name on a monument like this, because accidents happen to memorials.
The French Moderns exhibit at the Frick Art Museum is closing this weekend. You can still get there if you hurry. As we mentioned the last time we visited, the show includes a few of the Academic painters against whom the “moderns” rebelled, and we begin with a couple of them.
The Elder Sister (reduction), by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (c. 1864).
Even though this is a small canvas, you know it’s Bouguereau from across the room.
The Carpet Merchant of Cairo, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1869).Young Women of Sparta, by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1868–1870).
Corot is a sort of bridge between traditional styles and Impressionism.
Still Life with Fan, by Georges Lemmen (c. 1907–1908).Portrait of a Lady, by Giovanni Boldoni (1912).The Critic, by Lajos Tihanyi (1916).Woman in an Armchair, by Henri Matisse (1916–1917).Comments
If you look closely, you can see that there is a seam right down the middle of the Isabella Street face of this building. It was put up in two stages: the left half in 1906, the right half after 1910.
Kerr & Snodgrass were wholesale wallpaper dealers—obviously very successful ones. They commissioned William J. Shaw of Bellevue to design this building, and it was announced in the Gazette for October 15, 1905, with a reproduction of Shaw’s rendering.1 (Note that the building grew a ninth floor by the time it was actually constructed; apparently Kerr & Snodgrass could hardly keep up with their own prosperity.) The rendering shows the front on Isabella Street and the side along Vulcan Way. According to the news story, this building was to be very similar to the one on the other side of Vulcan Way, which has since disappeared, replaced by a bigger building.
This building has prospered with the rise of the North Shore as a desirable address; it is now known as Four North Shore Center. Its next-door neighbor on Sandusky Street is the Andy Warhol Museum.
Kerr & Snodgrass were willing to spend more than usual for a mere warehouse: the two lower floors are stone, not brick, and festooned with fine carved decorations.
Utility companies that wanted to infect neighborhoods with their frightful new technologies learned to turn to architects to send a message of polite respectability. The Duquesne Light Company still uses this little substation off Craig Street.
Homestead Park was originally a suburb of Homestead in Mifflin Township; it later became the upper part of Munhall Borough. This school (now just called Park Elementary School) has been built in multiple stages. The largest part, built in 1928, was designed by Adam G. Wickerham of Homestead,1 who combined enough traditional decoration to please conservative tastes with some interestingly modern ideas, like the stark second-floor cutout above the Cambria Street entrance.
A blank wall is enlivened by a bit of decorative brickery that must have been fun to plan, perhaps with the aid of children’s blocks.
The Main Street end of the school is earlier; it is probably the “addition” designed by Ulysses J. Lincoln Peoples in 1919.2
There is also a modernist section of the school, probably built in the 1960s, that old Pa Pitt didn’t capture, because he was stopping very briefly on his way from here to there. Maybe next time.
