Now part of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which began in just part of this building and has gradually expanded to take over all of it, and Buhl Planetarium, and part of the old Carnegie Free Library, in addition to its own new buildings in between. This was one of the buildings scheduled to be demolished for the “urban renewal” of Allegheny Center, but the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation scored a major victory in preserving it, and then kept its headquarters here for a while before the redevelopment of Station Square.
The building was put up in 1897, after the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 had created a sudden mania for pristine white classical buildings. The architect was listed as William Martin Aiken, Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury, and a building this size might well have had his personal supervision.
Many buildings have blank faces around the back where no one is expected to go, but this is a building designed to be seen from every angle.
Ol’ Ptolemy had heard of that weird theory that the earth moved around the sun instead of vice-versa, but he rejected it as unnecessarily counterintuitive. Hs sure did know his stars, though.
For half a century a trip to Buhl Planetarium was one the most enduring childhood memories of anyone who grew up in Pittsburgh. The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was most famous for its star shows—with its massive Zeiss projector, it was touted as the most sophisticated planetarium in the world—but it had many other scientific exhibits as well.
The building was designed by Ingham & Boyd, who specialized in educational buildings—Ingham & Boyd, and later Ingham, Boyd & Pratt, had the franchise for all the school buildings in Mount Lebanon for decades, and designed numerous others in the city and suburbs. Their style for institutional buildings was purely classical into the 1930s, and then began to take on an Art Deco hue. But they kept their classical mania for symmetry, and the front of Buhl Planetarium is typically symmetrical.
The building is decorated with extraordinary sculptures by Sidney Waugh, whose Art Deco sensibilities perfectly complement the Deco classicism of the architecture. He has made use of the symmetry of the building to arrange his sculptures as complementary pairs. Over the entrance are the bronzes Primitive Science and Modern Science, and Waugh shows them as engaged in the same intellectual enterprise. Instead of placing the modern scientist in a superior position, Waugh has the American Indian scientist and the lab-coated scientist at exactly the same height and scale admiring each other’s work as intellectual equals. In the most literal sense, they see eye to eye.
Note the three inventions Waugh has chosen to represent the accomplishments of pre-Columbian American thought: smoke signals, which created long-distance communication; the bow and arrow, which were developed to a high degree of accuracy; and snowshoes, an invention that was unique to North America.
The modern scientist has his globe, his microscope, and his test tube. He looks across the ages at the American Indian and sees a peer who knew his onions.
On the front wall of the building are two allegorical stone reliefs: “The Heavens” and “The Earth,” again facing each other at the same scale.
Finally, the exit doors from the planetarium have small reliefs of “Night” and “Day.” Here old Pa Pitt must confess that he failed to capture “Day”; it was obscured by leafy trees when he visited, and perhaps he will be able to get a picture when the leaves come down in a month or so.
When the Buhl Planetarium merged with the Carnegie, the result was the Carnegie Science Center—now Kamin Science Center—which brought a much larger science museum to the North Side, including a new higher-tech Buhl Planetarium. But after a few years of mostly lying fallow, the Buhl Planetarium building was taken over by the Children’s Museum and resumed its mission of educating children by delighting them.
George H. Schwan was the architect of this parish house,1 built in 1906 for Christ Episcopal Church. Like the First United Presbyterian Community House next door, it somehow survived when its church was demolished for “urban renewal” in Allegheny Center.
Record & Guide, September 27, 1905, p. 629. “Architect George Schwan, 326 Fourth avenue, has prepared plans for a brick parish house to be erected on Union avenue, Allegheny, for Christ Episcopal congregation, at a cost of about $30,000.” Ultimately the building was faced with stone and probably cost a good bit more. ↩︎
At least fifteen churches were destroyed to make way for the redevelopment of Allegheny Center. It was one of the most audacious applications of the ideas of Le Corbusier ever attempted: an entire city center destroyed and rebuilt to modern taste, with only a few isolated landmarks left as museum pieces. The fact that only one of them (St. Peter’s) was a church may tell us something about the assumptions of twentieth-century urban planners.
Oddly, this building, which originally belonged to the First United Presbyterian Church of Allegheny, was one of the few buildings the demolishers left, even though the church next to it was destroyed. It was built in 1916; the architect was R. Maurice Trimble. It now belongs to the Allegheny Center Alliance Church.
The parapet with a rounded crest at the top of the building is a favorite Trimble detail; we see a similar treatment, for example, on the Allegheny YMCA, built ten years later.
Smithmeyer & Pelz designed Andrew Carnegie’s first library donation—though, as the people of Braddock are proud to point out, it was the second Carnegie Library to open, since the smaller Braddock library took less time to build. The same architects had designed the Library of Congress, which turned into a quagmire from which they had a hard time extricating their careers intact. (The library part was a piece of cake; it was the Congress part that was impossible to manage.) Unlike the classical Washington library, though, this one was done in a Romanesque style, which architects seem to have instinctively hit on as more suitable for muscular industrial Pittsburgh.
After the library was damaged by a lightning strike, the Carnegie Library moved out and built a smaller branch library northward on Federal Street. This building now is the Museum Lab of the Children’s Museum.
This very Miesian building was designed in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s firm after Mr. Mies had died, which, as old Pa Pitt has said before, explains how the architect, Bruno P. Conterato, got away with making it a white box on stilts instead of a black box on stilts. Since IBM left, it has been known as Four Allegheny Center.
The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was the big science museum on the North Side before it merged with the Carnegie and moved into the Science Center.
For a while the Art Deco classical building, designed by Ingham & Boyd,1 was sparsely used for classes and other activities, but after the Carnegie moved everything into the Science Center, the Children’s Museum took over the building for a huge expansion.
The Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, Andrew Carnegie’s first donation (and the second one to open, after Braddock), set the pattern for many of the larger libraries to come: it included not only a library but also a music hall, so that the building gave the people of the city a palace of culture. This is the first Carnegie Hall ever: the one in Braddock was a later addition to the library. The architects of this building were Smithmeyer & Pelz, who had earned their library-drawing credentials by winning the competition to design the Library of Congress. First Smithmeyer and then Pelz would later be thrown off the Library of Congress job, because it’s hard to work on a huge government project that’s eagerly watched by every newspaper in the nation and supervised by the entire United States Congress. They probably found it much easier to deal with Mr. Carnegie. Nevertheless, all Mr. Carnegie’s other libraries in Pittsburgh were designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, or just Alden & Harlow, who became his preferred firm and knew exactly what he wanted.
The music hall is now in use as the Hazlett Theater.
The main library was damaged years ago by a lightning strike, which provoked the library to move out to a new building on Federal Street; but the Children‘s Museum has taken over and restored this historic building and uses it as the Museum Lab.
The Allegheny Post Office was built in 1897 under the reign of William Martin Aiken as Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury. In 1967, the post office moved out, and the building was scheduled for demolition to complete the modernist paradise of Allegheny Center. However, the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation scraped up the money and rescued it, using it as a Landmarks Museum for a while. Later, when the PHLF moved to Station Square, the building became the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which has since gradually expanded to take over all three of the historic buildings left from the old center of Allegheny—the Post Office, Buhl Planetarium, and the Carnegie Free Library.
“Blue-hour” pictures are very fashionable these days. Old Pa Pitt can do them, too, but only a few at a time, because twilight refuses to stand still and have its picture taken for hours on end.
