Two of our most prominent Art Deco buildings, as seen from Spring Hill (so the lines will be a little wavy if you enlarge the picture, owing to the mile and a half of intervening atmosphere).
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Gulf and Koppers Buildings
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City-County Building and Grant Building
Early-morning views of the City-County Building and the Grant Building, both designed by Henry Hornbostel, from northward on Grant Street.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Spring Garden School
An Art Deco school with no sharp corners. Everything is rounded, and stop for a moment to think what talented bricklayers we had in those days. The school was built beginning in 1938 and opened at the end of 1939. Marion Steen was the supervising architect for the Board of Public Education, so the design was probably his, although Steen hired Edward Weber to design some of the schools built in the same period. The bidding was handled through the Board, so the architect is not mentioned in the usual advertisements.
The school is still in use by the city school system, now as the Spring Garden Early Childhood Center.
The original iron fence still surrounds the property.
The shallow metal awning over the auditorium is decorated with a very Deco wave pattern. It gives the auditorium the proper theatrical atmosphere.
Matching brick gateposts are topped with stone caps that bear the same Deco wave ornament.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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North Catholic High School, Troy Hill
The main building of North Catholic was put up in 1939. The architect was Edward J. Hergenroeder, a disciple of Benno Janssen, who became one of the favorite architects for Catholic institutions around Pittsburgh in the middle twentieth century.
From Janssen, Hergenroeder seems to have learned the art of making every line count. His style departed from the master’s, however, toward the modernistic, whereas Janssen retired to Charlottesville, the land of his favorite architect Thomas Jefferson, before he was forced to come to terms with modernism altogether.
The school has been given up by the Catholics, but fortunately was taken over and is well maintained as the Provident Charter School.
Charles Bradley Warren did the reliefs on the school. This one, Pursuit of Knowledge, shows us monks performing all kinds of scientific experiments and passing their knowledge on to children. (The same relief is reversed on the other end of the building, so that the monks are always gazing out from the top of the bluff at the vast panorama of the Allegheny valley before them.)
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. A smaller relief shows a monk cultivating a bonsai Tree of Knowledge with an open Bible in his lap.
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Buhl Planetarium, North Side
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.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Allegheny County Airport
It is almost impossible to take an ugly picture of the terminal at Allegheny County Airport. It was designed by Stanley Roush, the king of public works in Allegheny County. The airport engineer was G. Brooks Ross, shown here hard at work on his plans.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 28, 1929. When it opened in 1931, the Allegheny County Municipal Airport was at least arguably the largest and most sophisticated airport in the world. When we consider that 1931 was only four years after Lindbergh’s flight, and that the site and general size of the airport had been decided on in 1928, we realize what a huge gamble this airport was: the future of air travel was unknown, and it required far-sighted faith to believe that an airport of this size would be required in years to come. (Even now a 737 can land here if it’s necessary.) It also required quite a bit of complicated financial trickery from the Republican majority on County Council and their allies, as Post-Gazette cartoonist Cy Hungerford points out.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 1931. Under the old county charter, County Council had two members from the majority party and one from the minority party. Everything was done behind the sputtering Democrat’s back, and he found out about it in the papers like the rest of us as the cost of the Municipal Airport went up and up. This, by the way, was one of the last great projects of the Allegheny County Republican machine, before the Democratic tide swept in with Franklin Roosevelt.
The faith was more than justified. By the end of the Second World War, air traffic had increased to such an extent that an even larger airport was needed; and County Airport had already filled its site to the practical limit. Thus Greater Pitt was built out in the western suburbs, and all the scheduled commercial flights moved there. But County Airport, much closer to downtown, remained the favorite airport for private and corporate planes. Today it is still the fifth-busiest airport in Pennsylvania, with about 160 flights a day.
And that is the almost unique combination of needs that pickled this airport in the 1930s. (We say almost unique because Cincinnati’s municipal airport of the same era has survived for the same reasons.) Greater Pitt has been rebuilt twice since it opened in 1952, because the needs of commercial air traffic keep changing. But this airport has remained exactly the right size for the traffic it handles. The striking Art Deco terminal is such a perfect period piece that it often plays The Airport in movies set in the 1930s; except for covering the inscription with a suitable city name (and carefully framing to cut out the more recent control tower), the building is ready for filming.
No current pictures can convey how carefully this airport was designed to make its impression from the air, but fortunately we have this 1941 postcard. Not only was the air traveler supposed to be impressed by the magnificent portal to Pittsburgh, but the design was also—in the days when all air navigation was visual—extraordinarily helpful to pilots. The broad boulevard that leads to the terminal was a fat arrow pointing due north toward the airport. The directions were immediately obvious. For pure decoration, the zigzag patterns of the terminal were echoed in a semicircle of pavement behind the building—now, alas, plain asphalt. Today, the view from above is a cluttered mess, because the airport grew more buildings and the area around it suburbanized. But when it opened in 1931, the airport was a beautiful abstract design from the air, complete with a huge identifying label in the airfield.
Now let’s step inside the terminal and wander around for a bit.
We have dozens of pictures to show you, so to avoid weighing down the front page too much, we’ll put the rest behind this link. -
Presbyterian Hospital, Oakland
In spite of the ever-growing number of additions that obscure more and more of it, the original Presbyterian Hospital building is still a commanding presence in Oakland. It was built in 1926; the architect was E. P. Mellon, who flourished with his family connections: Presbyterian Hospital had strong ties to the Mellon family.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Chrysler Sales and Service Building, Friendship
Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens. Albert Kahn, “the architect of Detroit,” designed this showroom and garage, which was built in 1934. Its streamlined modernity would have been a good match for the Airflow models Chrysler introduced that year. In its current incarnation, it looks comfortable with the streamlined Aldi logo.
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Webster Hall, Oakland
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Seen here from up the street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Craig Street.
We have more pictures of Webster Hall, including some of the decorative details.
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Moderne Storefront in East Liberty
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. The glass front with a semicircular end was very popular in the era of streamlined midcentury modernity. This storefront, which has been vacant since Anthon’s moved out, preserves its moderne look almost perfectly, and we hope the next tenants will appreciate it.
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