Father Pitt

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The Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal

The flag on top of the cupola shows us that what today’s designers call “Photoshopping” has a long history reaching far back into the analogue era.

The Wabash Terminal was a magnificent folly, like the railroad it represented. The building was designed to say that Jay Gould’s new railroad, a competitor to the well-established Pennsylvania Railroad, was here to stay. It opened in 1904, and the railroad went bankrupt four years later.

The Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway had to perform enormous feats of engineering just to get into Pittsburgh. The Wabash Tunnel, now a little-used automobile highway, led to a new bridge across the Monongahela. All the land downtown was already taken up, so the Wabash had to make an elevated freight yard, which cost fabulous amounts of money.

The building itself was designed by Theodore C. Link (whose famous St. Louis Union Station still stands), and it was as extravagant as the rest of the enterprise. These pictures were published in The Builder for November of 1904, a Pittsburgh-based architectural magazine. They show us that the terminal building was up to the same extravagant standard as the rest of the operation. Carved decorations were provided to a lavish extent by Achille Giammartini, Pittsburgh’s best decorative sculptor.

After its railroad went bankrupt, the Wabash terminal still served passengers on some lines until 1931. It was converted to offices after that. Disastrous fires gutted it shortly after the Second World War, and it sat as a looming wreck until 1953, when it was demolished to make way for new buildings at Gateway Center.

This doorway shows us some of Mr. Giammartini’s work.

December 4, 2024
The Pleasure Bar, Bloomfield

Old Pa Pitt does not know what was here before the Pleasure Bar, but whatever it was had only a seventeen-year life—the building was put up in 1924, and the Pleasure Bar has been here since 1941. It’s an elaborate building for its size, with a curious mixture of classical and Art Nouveau detailing, and the inset balconies are unusual.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 4, 2024
Houses on Bausman Street, Knoxville

For two blocks, Bausman Street in Knoxville is lined with these houses, which are modest in their dimensions but unusually fine in their design. There are four basic shapes, which repeat in the same order on both sides of the street.

The houses were built for the Knoxville Land Improvement Company as a speculative venture. Father Pitt has not yet discovered who the architect was, but the developers got their money’s worth from these designs.

Knoxville is a bit tattered around the edges at the moment, and a few of these houses have been lost to the ravages of time and poverty—two forces whose destructive power is surpassed only by the even more destructive force of prosperity. The remaining houses ought to be preserved as a document of the best early-twentieth-century styles in middle-class housing, and because, as a streetscape, they are a work of art.

Sony Alpha 3000.

December 3, 2024
The Princess Ann, Mount Lebanon

These splendid marquees with their Art Nouveau lettering in glass welcome us to the Princess Ann, an apartment building in the Colonial Heights plan in Mount Lebanon. Many of the external details of the building are beautifully preserved and maintained, including the art glass on the marquees and in the stairwells.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 3, 2024
Back Slopes of Mount Washington

This is the kind of view that makes Pittsburgh unique among American cities. The pictures were taken from the intersection of Cederhurst Street and Estella Avenue in Beltzhoover.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 2, 2024
Bookstore After Dark

The White Whale bookstore in Bloomfield. This is Father Pitt’s attempt at applying the principles of De Stijl to photography.

December 2, 2024
Row of Duplexes on Meadowcroft Avenue, Mount Lebanon

Here is another urban development that sat isolated in the hinterlands for some time after it was built.

Hopkins plat map, from Pittsburgh Historic Maps.

Streets had been laid out and land had been divided into lots all over Mount Lebanon, but these duplex houses on the old Schaffer estate were the first buildings to go up for blocks around. Old farmhouses were still standing nearby. At that time the street was called Schaffer Place, but it and Marion Avenue to the south were later renamed Meadowcroft Avenue as an extension of Meadowcroft Avenue across Beverly Road.

The architect who designed these buildings was not content to stamp out the same box ten times and call it a day. The designs are varied within a common theme, making an interesting streetscape that forms a community while giving residents a sense that their own homes are distinct.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 1, 2024
Bethel Baptist Church (Zion Christian Church), Carrick

Now Zion Christian Church. The cornerstone tells us that the congregation was founded in 1908, and its first building was at the corner of Birmingham Avenue and Hays Avenue (now Amanda Street)—a small frame chapel that must have quickly become woefully overcrowded, since this building many times the size was constructed less than twenty years later.

Plat map showing the original location of Bethel Baptist.

“The membership is 381, as compared with a membership of 30 in 1908,” says the Gazette Times of February 18, 1925, when the plans for the new building were announced.

Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, February 18, 1925

The architect was Walter H. Gould, “a member of the church,” and so far this is the only building attributed to him that Father Pitt knows about. However, it is an accomplished if not breathtakingly original design, so there must be other Gould buildings lurking about, probably in the South Hills neighborhoods. Comparing the published rendering above with the church as it stands today shows us that the tower grew about a floor’s worth of height between conception and construction—a rare example, perhaps, of an architect being told that his original design was not ambitious enough.

“By spirit and faith and the help of God.”

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

December 1, 2024
A Banquet at the Hotel Henry

From The Builder, October, 1904, p. 17.

The Hotel Henry was on Fifth Avenue; it was replaced in 1951 by the Mellon Bank Building (525 Fifth Avenue). Here we see a huge banquet for the newspapermen of Pittsburgh in 1904, which incidentally gives us a look at the posh appointments of the banquet hall.

Hotel Henry logo from a fragment of plate

Hotel Henry at some time around 1900, from the Historic Pittsburgh site. Note that the offices of the Leader are two doors up from the hotel; those reporters didn’t have far to walk for dinner.

November 30, 2024
North Hills Estates, Ross Township

North Hills Estates is a suburban plan in Ross Township just north of West View. It was laid out in 1929, and most of the central part was built up in the 1930s—a period when, surprisingly enough, there was quite a bit of house construction going on in the suburbs. For those who had money, it was considered more economical during the Depression to build a new house, what with the low cost of labor and materials, than to buy an existing one. Thousands of houses sat empty, repossessed by lenders, but meanwhile new suburbs like North Hills Estates filled up with beautiful homes.

This is another article for people who like to scroll through dozens of house designs and marvel at the variety of styles, and at the high quality of almost all the designs.
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November 30, 2024