Father Pitt

Tag: Art Deco

Allegheny High School

Allegheny High School, now the Allegheny Traditional Academy, has a complicated architectural history involving two notable architects at three very different times.

From Art work of Pittsburgh, part 3 (Chicago: W. H. Parish, 1893), with thanks to “Camerafiend” for making the picture available.

The original 1893 Allegheny High School on this site was designed by Frederick Osterling in his most florid Richardsonian Romanesque manner. This building no longer exists, but the photograph above gives us a good notion of the impression it made. The huge entrance arch is particularly striking, and particularly Osterling; compare it with the Third Avenue entrance of the Times Building, also by Osterling.

In 1904, the school needed a major addition. Again Osterling was called on, but by this time Richardsonian Romanesque had passed out of fashion, and Osterling’s own tastes had changed. The Allegheny High School Annex still stands, and Osterling pulled off a remarkable feat: he made a building in modified Georgian style that matched current classical tastes while still being a good fit with, and echoing the lines of, the original Romanesque school.

The carved ornaments on the original school were executed by Achille Giammartini, and we would guess that he was brought back for the work on the Annex as well.

A war memorial on the front of the Annex. Twenty-two names are inscribed. Everyone who went to Allegheny High in those years knew someone who was killed in the Great War.

By the 1930s, the school was too small again. The original school was torn down, and Marion Steen, house architect for Pittsburgh Public Schools (and son of the Pittsburgh titan James T. Steen) designed a new Art Deco palace nothing like the remaining Annex. The two buildings do not clash, however, because there are very few vantage points from which we can see both at once.

The auditorium has three exits, each one with one of the three traditional masks of Greek drama above it: Comedy, Meh, and Tragedy.

The pictures of the masks were taken in 2014 with a Kodak EasyShare Z1485.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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May 8, 2025
Federal Reserve Bank

Now the Drury Plaza Hotel, this is a splendid example of the far Art Deco end of the style old Pa Pitt calls American Fascist. The original 1931 building, above, was designed by the Cleveland firm of Walker & Weeks, with Hornbostel & Wood as “consulting architects.” It is never clear in the career of Henry Hornbostel how far his “consulting” went: on the City-County Building, for example, “consulting” meant that Hornbostel actually came up with the design, but Edward Lee was given the credit for it; we would not know that Hornbostel drew the plans if Lee himself had not told us.

At any rate, the lively design almost seems like a rebuke to the sternly Fascist Federal Courthouse across the street, which was built at about the same time.

The aluminum sculpture and ornament is by Henry Hering.

An addition in a similar style looks cheap beside the original; perhaps it would have been better just to admit that the original could not be duplicated and to build the addition in a different style.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

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April 15, 2025
Pythian Temple, Hill District

This is the most important remaining work of Louis Bellinger, who for his entire career was the only Black architect in Western Pennsylvania. It was built as the Pythian Temple, an exceptionally grand lodge house. It opened in 1928; but after less than ten years it was sold and became a movie theater, the New Granada, with the ground floor redesigned in streamlined Art Deco by Marks & Kann. Both as a lodge and as a theater it was one of the great jazz venues of all time, and the roster of stars who performed here is long and dazzling—Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and our own Lena Horne, just to name four.

After half a century of vacancy and multiple schemes for restoration, the New Granada is finally getting the love it deserves. It will have performance spaces and offices, and the whole block has been redeveloped with colorful new apartments and restored older buildings.

Except for the ground floor, the building still stands very much as Bellinger designed it. Shields and helmets in terra cotta remind us of the building’s Knights of Pythias origins.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

In seventeen and a half years of writing about Pittsburgh, few things have made old Pa Pitt happier than seeing the progress on this building. It will stand for years as a tribute to a neglected architect, to the history of the Hill, and to the great legacy of jazz in Pittsburgh.

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April 9, 2025
Entrance to the Koppers Building

This is the lushest Art Deco of all our Art Deco skyscrapers. Graham, Anderson, Probst & White were the architects. The firm was one of the successors to Daniel Burnham’s practice, although Burnham would hardly have recognized the world of skyscraper design by 1929, when this building opened.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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April 7, 2025
Dormont Recreation Center

Built in the 1920s in a strikingly modernistic style, the Dormont Recreation Center still serves the citizens of the borough who come every summer for one of the area’s most popular swimming pools, which first opened in 1920.

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February 28, 2025
Annunciation School, Perry South

Benno Janssen and Edward J. Hergenroeder were the architects of this school, which seems to show the economy of line old Pa Pitt associates with Janssen. Hergenroeder would go on to design many Catholic schools, as well as the convent around the corner from this one (which we’ll be seeing soon).

The parish school closed years ago, but the building has found another use, so it is occupied and well maintained.

Among the decorations are several inscriptions, most of them not from Catholic sources.

“Knowledge is that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.” —Addison.

The side entrance on Arvada Way.

“The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation.” —Shakespeare.

Terra-cotta figures of children enjoying their childhood decorate the side walls of the school.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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February 26, 2025
Allegheny General Hospital

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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January 25, 2025
Haller Baking Company, Emsworth

Built in about 1933, the Haller Baking Company was designed in an up-to-the-minute Art Deco style by Paul Scheuneman. You can see a picture of the building as it originally appeared at the Avonworth Historical Society. “Oven to Home” was the company’s slogan: it delivered bread, cakes, and other baked goods straight to your house. In the 1950s the building was turned into a furniture store, with glassy additions in front that were later bricked in when it became an office.

Father Pitt does not know the origin of this stylish compass rose. It does not look new, but it is not in the photographs of the bakery or the furniture store that replaced it.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

There’s not much to see in the rear of the building, but old Pa Pitt climbed the hill to document it anyway, just for the sake of completeness.

December 16, 2024
A Little Bank in the McKees Rocks Bottoms

This little building, unless Father Pitt’s correspondents and his own conclusions are mistaken, was the Bottoms branch of the First National Bank of McKees Rocks, and it was a late work of the firm of Alden, Harlow & Jones. Whether the identification is correct or not, however, it is a fine piece of work, and another demonstration of the remarkable architectural riches of the McKees Rocks Bottoms.

The beehive, symbolic of industry and thrift, would be a good emblem for a bank. It is a bit odd for the business that has occupied the building for decades now, which is an undertaker’s establishment.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

December 12, 2024
G. C. Murphy Building

Part of the flamboyantly Art Deco G. C. Murphy building, which with this addition grew into “the world’s largest variety store,” as it still called itself in the 1990s before it shrank and the whole chain eventually collapsed under the ownership of Meshulam Riklis. The building was designed by Harold E. Crosby.

The terra-cotta decorations were originally brightly colored. In the photograph above, we have boosted the color to make the remaining colors evident.

November 8, 2024