Father Pitt

Would you like to see a random article?
Of course you would.

Engine Company No. 1

A very firehousey-looking firehouse, still in use by city emergency services. According to a city architectural survey, this was built in about 1900 and designed by city architect William Y. Brady. The details are unusual; the style is more or less classical, but instead of Doric or Ionic pilasters, we get unexpected obelisks in relief.

It is interesting to compare this engine house to the one up the street. That one is also attributed to Brady by the city architectural survey, but Father Pitt, on good evidence, attributes it to Charles Bickel. The styles are quite different. It is possible that Brady supervised some alterations to the Bickel firehouse, and that record confused the surveyors.

One response

February 4, 2024
Second Empire House, Allegheny West

One of the grandest of the Second Empire houses in Allegheny West, this one has an elaborate cornice with delightfully folksy wood-carving.

February 3, 2024
Browsing Goose

February 2, 2024
Calvary Methodist Church at Night

Calvary Methodist Church in Allegheny West is floodlit at night, and old Pa Pitt stopped the other night to get a few pictures. The design of this church is credited to Vrydaugh & Shepherd with T. B. Wolfe. Vrydaugh & Wolfe would soon become a partnership designing a number of fine churches and millionaires’ mansions. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened to Shepherd.

These pictures were all taken hand-held with very slow shutter speeds. Photographers will tell you that you cannot take a sharp hand-held picture at 1/10 of a second. What they mean is that you cannot reliably take a sharp picture. With digital photography, where individual pictures cost nothing, what you can do is take a dozen or two pictures and hope that one of them will be sharp.

February 2, 2024
33rd Street Tunnel, South Side

To the south, at the base of the steep South Side Slopes, was a small but crowded neighborhood of workmen and their families. To the north was a huge steel mill, a railroad roundhouse and shops, and a big brewery. In between was a railroad yard with more than twenty tracks to cross. How would the workmen get to work without getting run over by switching locomotives every day? The answer was to extend 33rd Street from the Slopes to the Flats as a pedestrian tunnel under the main line, followed by a long pedestrian bridge over the railroad yards.

Hopkins real-estate plat map from 1923, showing the 33rd Street bridge and tunnel.

The bridge and the railroad yard are gone now; the tunnel remains, but since it goes nowhere it is blocked. The tunnel entrance is still attractive in its stony simplicity.

February 1, 2024
Cathedral of Learning

January 31, 2024
Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building

Good, even lighting on a cloudy day gives us a good perspective view of this building, considered a minor classic of the modernist genre. It was put up in 1956; the architects were Dowler & Dowler. The senior partner, Press C. Dowler, had an extraordinarily long and prosperous career; he worked in every style from late-Victorian Romanesque to pure modernism like this. While other architects languished in the Depression, Press C. Dowler got consistent work from the telephone company, in addition to designing large school projects for the City of Pittsburgh and other municipalities; he continued doing work for schools and Bell well after the Second World War. The other Dowler was his son William.

We also have a full elevation of the Stanwix Street front.

January 31, 2024
St. James Street, Shadyside

We should have put a utility-cable trigger warning at the top of this article, but too late now. The block of St. James Street between Ellsworth Avenue and Pembroke Place is lined with fine houses in an interesting variety of styles, and here are some of them.

It is well known that old Pa Pitt loves good chimney pots, and these are just right for this house.

January 30, 2024
Salvation Army Building

Thomas Pringle, architect of some of our prominent churches, designed this nine-storey Deco Gothic building for the Salvation Army almost as if it were a skyscraper church, complete with his usual corner tower. Today it is a hotel.

January 29, 2024
Lebanon Hills in the Rain

Last week we saw Mission Hills in the snow. The next plan down the way, Lebanon Hills, was laid out shortly after Mission Hills, and we see it here in the weather nature granted us when we happened to be there. The parts closer to Washington Road have, like Mission Hills, an extraordinarily broad assortment of housing styles; the parts farther east are mostly postwar construction. Here is a large album of some of the more interesting houses.

In order to avoid weighing down the front page, we’ll put the rest of these pictures below the fold, to use a metaphor derived from “newspapers,” an extinct form of communication some of Father Pitt’s older readers may remember.
(more…)

January 28, 2024