A few months ago Father Pitt published a view of the front of the old Presbyterian Hospital on the North Side, which is where Presby lived before it moved to Oakland to become the nucleus of the medical-industrial complex there. Since he was walking by the building again the other day, old Pa Pitt thought he would add a few more details.
Taken in January, 2025, with a Kodak EasyShare Z1285.
After Presby moved out, this site was used as Divine Providence Hospital for many years. The last we heard, the building was mostly vacant, but was being considered for conversion to “affordable” apartments.
We can just make out the ghosts of letters spelling out “DIVINE PROVIDENCE HOSPITAL.”
If we cannot find a use for a building, Mother Nature will.
The Hall of Architecture in the Carnegie gives us a whirlwind tour of Western architectural history from Egypt to the Renaissance, through the medium of life-size plaster casts. Above, the sphinx on the Votive Column of the Naxians at Delphi. It originally stood on a column more than thirty feet high, and the Carnegie’s cast is elevated to give viewers an approximation of the angle at which the sculpture was meant to be seen.
Maximilian Nirdlinger, who rests near the top of Father Pitt’s list of architects whose names are most fun to say, designed this striking house, which is unique in a row that otherwise consists mostly of Pittsburgh Foursquares. Nirdlinger was one of the giants of the first half of the twentieth century in Pittsburgh. He was a pupil of the Philadelphia titan Frank Furness, but left the master to come to Pittsburgh in 1899. By the early 1900s, he had his own practice.1 He quickly caught the eye of the fashionable set: four of the original houses in Schenley Farms, for example, were designed by Nirdlinger.
Nirdlinger worked in many different styles: he could give you a Renaissance palace or a Tudor mansion with equal flair. For this Art Nouveau cottage, designed in 1916 for C. R. Caldwell, he seems to have taken a lot of hints from those German art magazines that circulated among our architects before the First World War.
Much of our information on Nirdlinger comes from “Maximilian Nirdlinger: Architect, Interrupted,” by Angelique Bamberger, in Western Pennsylvania History, Winter 2023-24. ↩︎
Andrew Peebles was the architect of St. Peter’s, which was dedicated in 1874. In 1876, it became the cathedral of the new Roman Catholic Diocese of Allegheny, carved out of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, which was left with all the debt while the new Diocese of Allegheny took all the rich churches. That went about as well as you might expect, and in 1877 the Diocese of Allegheny was suppressed and its territory reabsorbed by Pittsburgh. But a church never quite gets over being a cathedral.
In 1886, a fire ravaged the building and left nothing but the walls standing. Fortunately Peebles’ original plans were saved, and so the restoration, which took a year and a half, was done to the original design.
The rectory was built with a stone front to match the church, but the rest of the house is brick.
More of the Victorian business district of Bloomfield, from the age when it was a very German neighborhood. We begin with a building we have seen before, which has just finished a renovation and is ready for another century and a quarter of use. The tall third floor, as old Pa Pitt remarked before, looks like an assembly room of some sort.
The rest of these buildings all date from the 1890s.
The date stone gives us the date 1890 and the name of the owner, P. Biedenbach.
Two of a row of modest houses with storefronts put up in the 1890s.
A building that preserves its corner entrance, though not the original treatment of it.
Elaborate brickwork distinguishes this building from its neighbors.
Father Pitt will not claim that this is the earliest daylily in Pittsburgh. But it blooms about this time every year, as the tulips and trilliums are fading, and when very few other daylilies are to be seen. Most daylilies bloom in June and afterward. This one was an unnamed hybrid seedling planted many years ago; it has since formed a big clump.
Samuel T. McClarren, a very successful Victorian architect and a resident of nearby Thornburg, designed this landmark building, which was put up in 1896.
A small alteration to the front gives us an example of how important the little details are to the appearance of a building. The arched windows in the top floor have been shortened, as we can see by the slightly different shade of brick where they have been filled in. The original design would have created a single broad stripe from the arches at the top to the storefront below. Interrupting that composition makes the building look awkward and top-heavy. The ground floor has also been altered in a way that obscures the vigor of the design. Once we have said that, however, we should acknowledge that the building is generally in a good state of preservation and praise the Historical Society of Carnegie for keeping it up.
This building has a very difficult lot to deal with, and the architect must have found it an interesting challenge. First, the lot is a triangle. A kind of turret blunts the odd angle on the Main Street end and turns it from a bug into a feature.
The second challenge is that one long side of the lot is smack up against Chartiers Creek, a minor river that is placid most of the time but can be a raging torrent when storms make it angry. The foundations would have had to take all the moods of the river into account, and the fact that the building has stood through disastrous floods suggests that Mr. McClarren knew what he was up to.
A view from across Chartiers Creek shows us the sharp point of the triangle in the rear.
