Now the University of Pittsburgh’s Alumni Hall, this grand temple was designed by Benno Janssen, who gave us many other Pittsburgh monuments, including the Pittsburgh Athletic Association next door.
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Katsafanas Coffee Sign
The Katsafanas Coffee Co. has been gone for many years, but this sign still looks fresh on its old building on North Avenue.
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Sidewalks of Beech Avenue
Allegheny West is one of Pittsburgh’s most pleasant neighborhoods, and Beech Avenue may be the most delightful residential street in the whole city. The street is only two blocks long, but you would be hard pressed to find a better collection of domestic architecture on any street in the city. Add shady trees, a magnificent Gothic church at one end, and literary associations (Gertrude Stein was born here, and Mary Roberts Rinehart lived here when she wrote her most famous novel), and you can see why old Pa Pitt loves this street.
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Tympanum on the People’s Savings Bank
John Massey Rhind, the famous sculptor who did the four representatives of the Noble Quartet outside the Carnegie and the Robert Burns statue outside Phipps Conservatory, contributed decorative reliefs to the 1901 People’s Savings Bank tower on Fourth Avenue. This one is over the Wood Street entrance.
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Pittsburgh Athletic Association
The Pittsburgh Athletic Association, built in 1911, is Pittsburgh’s grandest clubhouse. (Not the richest, of course: that honor belongs to the Duquesne Club, the focus of all money and power in the city.) The architect was Benno Janssen, who was quite successful in Pittsburgh in the early 1900s. The club itself went bankrupt in 2017, but was able to make a deal to sell the building to investors who will allow them to occupy part of it. Now the building is getting a renovation.
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Terraced Streets on the South Side Slopes
Some neighborhoods are so steep that the only way to build a street parallel to the slope is to do it in two parts. These two streets on the South Side Slopes are on the list of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historic landmarks, but they are not the only terraced streets in the city. The same thing happens in Beechview, for example, another neighborhood laid out in defiance of topography. Above is Stella Street; below, Shelly Street.
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Bellefield Towers
This curious combination of structures always reminds old Pa Pitt of a corner in some European city ravaged by the Second World War: the tower is all that remains of the Gothic church that once stood here, and the rest has been replaced by an office building that has no architectural connection with it whatsoever, but is just gracious enough to make reluctant room for it.
The old Bellefield Presbyterian Church actually predated the Oakland neighborhood. It was built in 1889 in Bellefield, a rural town that had grown into a suburb or exurb of Pittsburgh. Bellefield’s name is remembered in Bellefield Avenue, though almost all remnants of the place have been obliterated by the one force more destructive to old buildings than war, which is prosperity.
Here is a long article (PDF format) on the church and its neighborhood by James D. Van Trump, the architectural historian to whom we owe the preservation of much of what we have succeeded in preserving. The article includes a picture of the church in 1890; note the cable-car tracks on the street in front of it.
The article was written while the church was still standing. “What the Bellefield Church has meant to the Oakland area during the last one hundred years we have seen,” it concludes. “The history of Bellefield’s future has yet to be written. Its congregation feels that if the contribution of the Bellefield Church to the Oakland area is commensurate with that of the past its future would seem to be assured.”
Well, it’s sort of still there. The congregation was merged in 1967 with First United Presbyterian a short distance down Fifth, and the merged church was renamed Bellefield Presbyterian. In 1985 the old building was sold and demolished for the current undistinguished occupant of the site.
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Birmingham Bridge
This is a lot of bridge for its location. It was originally meant to carry an expressway that would connect Oakland with the South Hills, merrily destroying huge tracts of city along the way. Fortunately this is the only part of it that was built. In the picture below you can see, in the lower right corner, the stub of an entrance ramp that was never completed.
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Greeley Street
It is utterly absurd that anyone would think of running a street up into this deep and narrow ravine cut into the South Side Slopes; but this is Pittsburgh, and we make absurd adaptations to an absurd topography. How long before those enthusiastic wild grapes swallow those helpless little frame houses?
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Allegheny City Stables
The Allegheny City Stables were built in 1896. If you enlarge the photo (click on it), you can just make out the old sign over the main door:
D.P.W. 8th DIV.
BUREAU OF HIGHWAYS & SEWERSIt’s right across North Avenue from Allegheny West, then the richest neighborhood in Allegheny. Perhaps this was one of the encroachments that induced Allegheny West society to move in a body to Sewickley Heights, where their descendants still live today.
Now, 123 years later, Allegheny West is once again the finest neighborhood on the North Side, and its desirability is spilling across North Avenue. The stable is being renovated and turned into loft apartments, like every other old industrial building.
(And if you notice a familiar picture at the Wikipedia article, it’s because Father Pitt added it himself to show the current state of the building.)
