At the west end of Holden Street we find this row of Renaissance apartment buildings with corner balconies; their exteriors have not been modified much since they were built, although the railings have been replaced in the first-floor balconies, and the last of those balconies has been filled in. The front doors are accented by segmental pediments (pediments with rounded rather than triangular tops) and columns with “modern Ionic” capitals (Ionic capitals where the curly volutes project from the four corners).
We presume that the Elmont has its name inscribed below the pediment like the others, but a fabric awning obscures it.
These two matching apartment buildings on Craig Street were built between 1903 and 1910; although they seem to be known only by their numbers today, on our 1923 map they are marked as “Beverly” and “Bayard.” They once stood at the end of a row of similarly sized apartment buildings, but the others have been replaced by bigger apartment blocks. Those bays must make the front apartments very bright and cheerful on a sunny afternoon.
This is our only major building by the modernist icon I. M. Pei, and it was one of his earlier works. Though this picture was taken in May of 2000 (with an Argus A camera), the building had not changed much since it was put up in 1964. Since 2000 it has acquired a new name, City View Apartments, and a coat of brownish-grey paint (we have a more recent picture of the building here).
St. Francis Central Hospital, at the right of the picture, has been replaced by a hotel.
“I bestride the narrow street like a colossus,” said the East Mall Apartments. They were put up literally on top of Penn Avenue, with a narrow passage for a trickle of traffic, in 1970. The architect was Tasso Katselas, early in his decades-long reign as the leading architect of giant public works in Pittsburgh, and to be fair to him he gave the city just what it thought it wanted: a skyscraper warehouse for poor people. In fact Katselas didn’t like what the city was doing to East Liberty at all, according to this interesting article about his career. But it was good money for an architect.
“Urban renewal” was all the rage in the 1960s and into the 1970s, and it was pushed with evangelical ardor. But it was never quite clear what “urban renewal” was supposed to be. Often it was a combination of suburbanization and Bauhausization. The things that were distinctive about city neighborhoods—concentrated commercial districts, rowhouses, churches and schools and backstreet groceries just down the street—had to give way to shopping centers, suburban-style tract homes, and modernist towers-in-a-park. One after another, these projects crippled or killed the neighborhoods they were inflicted on, but the urban-renewal evangelists were sure that the next one would be a howling success.
East Liberty was subjected to a particularly strong dose of urban renewal. Penn Avenue, the commercial spine of the neighborhood that had been known as the “second downtown” of Pittsburgh, was closed to vehicles and made into a pedestrian mall. Traffic was diverted to “Penn Circle,” an orbital boulevard made by widening and consolidating peripheral streets and blowing up whatever didn’t fit with the new vision of East Liberty. And apartment towers like this one went up to house people displaced from their neighborhoods by urban renewal. Three of them were designed by Tasso Katselas—this one and the even taller Penn Circle and Liberty Park apartments. Of the three, this was the one that sealed the urban-renewal project, because this was the one that defiantly went up right on top of Penn Avenue, as a guarantee that the main boulevard of the business district would never again carry substantial vehicular traffic. (An artist friend of Father Pitt’s, noting the odd flared buttresses that flanked the narrow passage for vehicles, described the building as “lifting its skirts for cars to go under.”)
Pedestrianization projects in the United States have seldom succeeded. Old Pa Pitt would love to see most of Pittsburgh closed to automobile traffic, but he recognizes that the rest of the world does not share his prejudices against motor vehicles. Keeping them away keeps their drivers away, and businesses flounder. Urban planners figured that out after a few decades’ worth of failures, and modern urban planning—finally—tends in the direction of emphasizing rather than destroying what is unique about city neighborhoods. Not coincidentally, suburbanites are moving back into the city.
Father Pitt took this picture in about 2001. The East Mall Apartments were blown to bits in 2005 in a controlled demolition, and traffic was allowed to flow on Penn Avenue once more without going through somebody’s basement. That same year, Tasso Katselas retired from active architecture, although he still served his firm as a consultant. As of this writing, Mr. Katselas is still alive at the age of 94 or 95, having survived a good bit longer than several of his buildings.
Do we miss those buildings? Not much; they represent an embarrassing failure in the history of our urban planning. But in his modernist idiom, Tasso Katselas did develop a distinctive style. The classic modernists like Mies van der Rohe insisted on simple lines and flat slabs of identical windows. But Katselas from the beginning preferred a much more cluttered aesthetic. He sometimes seemed like a child playing with blocks, deliberately misaligning them just to see what would happen, as we see here in the staggered façade of the East Mall Apartments. We should also mention that he had a strong understanding of what was practical in a public building. His terminal for the Pittsburgh International Airport is a masterpiece of practical design: everything was thought through with the paramount object of making the functions of an airport work as well as they possibly could. That kind of practical thinking was rare among modernist architects, and Father Pitt praises Katselas unreservedly for it, even if the buildings give old Pa Pitt the visual impression of dance music that you can’t dance to.
The western end of Bayard Manor faces Craig Street. This is the commercial front of the building, since Craig Street is a retail district. The building has a residential front on Bayard Street, which matches the style of this end but does not even hint at sordid commerce. Father Pitt also has perhaps the only picture on the Internet of the entire Bayard Street front of Bayard Manor.
Here is another example of the odd whimsies that sometimes pop up as small apartment buildings. This is the storybook-cottage style that was popular for single-family houses in the 1920s and 1930s built up into a storybook castle. But the most remarkable thing about it is the deliberately random decorative brickwork. It reminds old Pa Pitt of something Frank Gehry would do.
This extreme randomness would probably not hold up the whole wall, so it is used only in the sort-of-half-timbered section above the entrance. But the rest of the brickwork was made as cartoonishly irregular as possible.
Some bricklayer had a lot of fun—or a lot of under-his-breath cursing—with this assignment. We note, however, that the balcony railings have been repaired. Perhaps they were originally wood, or perhaps the irregular brickwork proved less than sound.
A good apartment-building design makes its residents feel better off than they are. Here you can imagine yourself walking into a stately English home by Robert Adam, even if your portion of it is only a studio apartment.
Academy Avenue in Mount Lebanon, just off the Uptown business district, is a street of small to medium-sized apartment buildings, giving way to single-family houses as the street gets farther from Washington Road.
The King Edward Apartments are actually two buildings—a larger one at the corner of Craig and Bayard Streets, and a smaller one behind it on Bayard Street. Both of them have some interesting ornamental features.
Old Pa Pitt’s obsession with small apartment buildings continues. This one is on Broadway in Beechview. It seems to have been originally meant as an imitation of a Georgian mansion of the sort found in Annapolis or Williamsburg. It looks as though smaller windows have been installed, and the semicircle of bricks at the top of the central stairs might have been a “Palladian” window. In spite of alterations and repairs, though, it remains a pleasing and distinctive building.
