This building now houses the Wood Street station on the ground floor (and below, of course) and the Wood Street Galleries, a free museum of installation art, on the upper floors. It was put up for the Monongahela National Bank, and the architect was Edward Stotz, who also gave us Schenley High School—another triangular classical building. It makes one wonder whether Mr. Stotz printed “Specialist in Triangles” on his business cards.
The elevator towers at the corners are later additions. They make a mess of the carefully worked out proportions of the building—Father Pitt thinks they make the whole structure look a bit like a fat rabbit—but at least they are done with similar materials.
Father Pitt has just published this article on his Pittsburgh Cemeteries site, but he thought it might also be of interest to students of local history in general.
“Pastor Russell,” as his followers called him, founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and the International Bible Students Association, the organization that—after various schisms and defections—came to be known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was born in Allegheny (now the North Side), and when he died he was buried in what is now (after a number of changes of ownership) the Rosemont, Mt. Hope, & Evergreen United Cemeteries in Ross Township.
His fairly modest grave monument includes a photograph of Pastor Russell, lovingly preserved (and perhaps replaced more than once over the years).
Note the inscription identifying Pastor Russell as the Laodicean Messenger, or “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans,” as the King James Bible translates it (Revelation 3:14). Russell’s followers believed that he himself was that angel or messenger.
Russell died in 1916. In 1921, some of his followers erected a showier monument in the form of a pyramid. One of Russell’s odd beliefs was that the Great Pyramid in Egypt was designed by God himself as a prophecy in stone. Like most such prophecies, it was meant to be uninterpretable until the correct clever interpreter came along—in this case, Pastor Russell.
This is actually one of the few cemetery pyramids in the Pittsburgh area whose proportions are Egyptian rather than classical Roman. It is meant to have the same proportions as the Great Pyramid, and in particular the capstone is carefully proportioned to match the Great Pyramid’s capstone, which in Pastor Russell’s interpretation represents the Christ.
The pyramid was meant as a marker not only for Russell, but for a number of other members of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, who owned this plot in the cemetery. A few names are inscribed in the open Bibles on the four sides of the pyramid, but most of the blank space was never used. It seems that the separate ownership of this plot has been preserved through the various changes of ownership the rest of the cemetery has gone through.
The adorability meter just broke, shattered into atoms by readings it was never meant to handle. This little fawn was resting against a monument in the Rosemont, Mt. Hope, & Evergreen United Cemeteries. Deer love cemeteries, both because there is practically unlimited forage and because no one ever molests them there.
Three of our greatest Art Deco buildings are lined up in a row on Grant Street: the Koppers Tower, the Gulf Tower, and this magnificent deco-fascist composition by the Cleveland architects Walker and Weeks. This image is put together from six separate photographs, so it is huge if you click on it; there are some small stitching errors, but overall it looks very much like the architects’ original rendering.
Abandoned for some time because it would have been too costly to restore for use by students, this magnificent building by Edward Stotz may soon be luxury apartments for yuppies. Here we see it as it was when it was newly built in 1916, from the Year Book of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club.
Rear.
Main Entrance Hall.
Would you like to build your own Schenley High School? Here are the original plans:
The old Frick Environmental Center in Squirrel Hill burned in 2002. It has taken this long to replace it, but we have every reason to believe that our patience will be rewarded. The new building is designed to meet the standards of the Living Building Challenge, providing its own heat, power, and water.
