This house has a sign in front identifying it as “Graswick” and telling us that it was built in 1873. This spares old Pa Pitt a lot of research, and he suggests that all owners of historic houses should imitate the owners of this one. It is perched on the side of a steep hill, and it has a magnificent view straight down High Street to the town and the Pine Creek valley below.
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This beautiful building has a long and varied history. It seems to have been built a little before 1910 by a dry-cleaning company. After a while the East Liberty Chamber of Commerce moved in to preside over the slow decline of East Liberty. In 2001, when the East Liberty revival was barely beginning, the Werner Building became a performance-art space. Now, with East Liberty booming, it’s a profitable property.
The metalwork on top supported a billboard where artists spelled out messages, but in 2018 one artist posted a message so offensive that the building’s owner had it removed and shut down the billboard scheme. What was this offensive message? “THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE.” That was all. Father Pitt can only say that, if you are offended by the idea that there are Black people in the future, then you can go off and get yourself your own future, because old Pa Pitt does not want to be part of it.
The whole building is lavishly festooned with terra cotta and stained glass.
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With the approach ramps to the 62nd Street Bridge in the foreground.
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Edward B. Lee was the architect of the Liberty Theater—or Theatre, as theatrical people often insist on spelling it—when it was built in 1912. These pictures were published in The Brickbuilder in 1913, so they show the theater as it was when it was new. Either the theater failed or the owners decided it would be more profitable as an office building, because only seven years later, in 1920, it was remodeled into the Baum Building, and it still stands today.
The shell and outlines are the same, but quite a bit was changed externally. Old Pa Pitt suspects that Lee was the architect of these changes, too, and they were accomplished so elegantly that we would never know the building had not been planned that way from the beginning.
These small drawings (orchestra, first balcony, second balcony) show the aggressive adaptations Mr. Lee had to make to the irregular shape of the lot—a common difficulty for buildings on the southeast side of Liberty Avenue, where the two grids of the irrationally rationalistic eighteenth-century street plan collide.
Detail over the entrance. These decorations disappeared when the building was converted to offices.
Corner detail. The cornice and pilasters survive, but the elaborate terra-cotta decoration between the pilasters vanished in 1920.
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It is sad to report that the last Lutheran congregation in Sharpsburg has thrown in the towel. (There were once three Lutheran churches: this English one and two German ones.) The good news, however, is that Sharpsburg is becoming a trendier neighborhood, and it will be worth adapting this distinctive building to some other use. It is a sort of Jacobean Gothic with more than a whiff of Art Nouveau.
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This block-long palace is a startlingly imposing building to run across in the residential back streets of Shadyside. The dwellers in the houses surrounding it must feel a glow of confidence knowing they are well protected should the Prussians invade. The building was designed by the W. G. Wilkins Company, also responsible for the Maul Building and the Frick & Lindsay Company Building (now the Andy Warhol Museum). It opened in 1916.
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Seen from the Birmingham Bridge, this row of Italianate storefronts retains most of its Victorian magnificence, although the newer windows blight the one on the end.
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An old firehouse converted to a commercial building on Main Street in Sharpsburg. It still has its bell.
Sharpsburg, including St. Mary’s Church, reflected in the windows.
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In 1956, twenty years after Charles Z. Klauder’s Cathedral of Learning opened, Clapp Hall opened its doors. It was designed by Trautwein & Howard, the successors to Mr. Klauder, but it was no longer possible to make an academic building in the ornate Gothic style that had been Klauder’s specialty. Instead, the architects gave us a restrained late-Art-Deco modernist Gothic that fits well with Klauder’s buildings but doesn’t embarrass postwar sensibilities too badly. The entrance is at an angle to the rest of the building so that the Cathedral of Learning is perfectly framed in the doorway as you walk out.
Below, three views of the Fifth Avenue side:
The Tennyson Avenue side has a similar face:
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