Father Pitt

Tag: Banks

  • A Stroll on Mill Street in Coraopolis

    Mill Street
    Kodak Pony 135 with Kentmere Pan 100 film (monobath developed).

    The main business streets of Coraopolis are Fifth Avenue, Fourth Avenue, and Mill Street, a very narrow street that crosses the other two. (There is also a Main Street in Coraopolis, but, in Pittsburghish fashion, it is not the main street.) Let’s take a stroll down Mill Street together. We’ll take two cameras with us, one digital and the other loaded with black-and-white film.

    Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    We’ll start at the Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company building, a splendid bank designed by Press C. Dowler, who gave us a number of grand classical banks. Right across Fifth Avenue is…

    Ohio Valley Trust Company

    …another grand classical bank, the Ohio Valley Trust Company. This one is still in use as a bank.

    Ohio Valley Trust Company entrance
    Office entrance

    This plain but dignified doorway leads to the upstairs offices, which were a prestigious address for local businessmen. The architect W. E. Laughner had his office here.

    Building at 5th Avenue and Mill Street

    Across the street is a substantial commercial block with a corner entrance.

    Looking down Mill Street
    412 Mill Street

    Now we come to a building with tangled layers of history, but enough remains to show us the style of the original.

    412 Mill Street
    Bricked-in arch

    This bricked-in arch has a terra-cotta head for a keystone. Note that the original building was faced with Roman brick—the long, narrow bricks you see outside the arch—and not just Roman, but yellow Kittanning Roman brick.

    Ornamental head
    408 Mill Street

    This building next door used similar Kittanning Roman brick. The storefront has been altered, but long enough ago that it has an inset entrance to keep the door from hitting pedestrians in the face.

    Hotel Helm

    At the intersection with Fourth Avenue we meet the old Hotel Helm,1 with its distinctive shingled turret. It probably bore a cap when it was built.

    From here Mill Street leads past the train station and the Fingeret building, both of which we’ve seen before. At Second Avenue—as far as we’ll go for now—we come to…

    127 Mill Street

    …the Hotel Belvedere, which was probably a cheaper place to stay than the Hotel Helm. It still preserves its shingled gable, though the rest has been sheathed in three colors of fake siding.

    1. Some of our information comes from 1924 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps at the Library of Congress. ↩︎

  • The Imperial Bank

    The Imperial Bank of Imperial, Pennsylvania

    The bank for the little mining town of Imperial occupied a building that accomplished its architectural mission perfectly. It was small, but it gave the impression of being respectable and substantial—a place where your money would be safe.

    Front of the bank
    Inscription: The Imperial Bank
    Front entrance
    The Imperial Bank
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company

    Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company

    Press C. Dowler, prolific architect of schools, banks, and telephone exchanges, designed this solid-looking classical bank, and the Pittsburgh Daily Post tells us that the opening (October 10, 1021) was a gala occasion.

    Newspaper article about the opening of the bank
    Front of the bank

    The building no longer houses a bank, but almost nothing about the exterior has changed since that opening day, except that the big windows may not originally have been filled in with glass block.

    Side of the building

    A look down the Mill Street side of the bank, with the Ohio Valley Trust Company building in the background.

    Basement entrance

    Mill Street does not meet Fifth Avenue at exactly a right angle, which leaves room for this curious triangular pit with a basement entrance.

    Lantern

    A lantern on the front of the building.

    Bank in the sunshine

    A picture on a sunny day.

    Cameras: Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Ohio Valley Trust Company, Coraopolis

    Ohio Valley Trust Company

    A small but very rich classical bank still in use as a bank.

    Corner entrance
    Clock with zodiac

    The clock suggests that the bankers will consult an astrologer before investing your money.

    Ionic capital
    Trust

    Stock-photo sites will charge you good money for patently metaphorical pictures like these. Yet old Pa Pitt gives them to you for free, released with a CC0 public-domain donation, so there are no restrictions on what you can do with them.

    Trust
    Ohio Valley Trust Company

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285 (HDR stacks of three photographs); Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Mellon Bank, Squirrel Hill

    Mellon Bank

    One of several round banks Mellon Bank built in the modernist era. It is still a bank, now belonging to Citizens Bank, Mellon’s successor in retail banking.

    Roofline
    Canon PowerShot A540.

    We also have a less abstract picture of the whole building.

  • National Bank of Western Pennsylvania

    National Bank of Western Pennsylvania

    The Penn Avenue front is now a restaurant, but it would not be hard to guess from the Ninth Street side that this used to be a bank: the National Bank of Western Pennsylvania.

    National Bank of Western Pennsylvania

  • First National Bank, Verona

    First National Bank of Verona

    A rich-looking little bank dripping with terra-cotta ornaments on the façade. It later became the headquarters of the Pan-Icarian Brotherhood, a fraternal society whose membership “is open to anyone over 18 years of age (or their spouse) whose ancestry can be traced to the eastern Aegean Greek islands of Icaria or Fournoi.” These two islands made up an independent country, the Free State of Icaria, for a few months in 1912—which, by an odd coincidence, is the year this bank was built. The Pan-Icarian Brotherhood was founded in Verona; it now has a number of other chapters around the country.

    1893—The First National Bank—1912
    Cartouche
    Bracket
    Frieze
    Pan-Icarian Brotherhood

    Map showing the location of the building.

    Cameras: Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Bank in Dormont

    Bank in Dormont

    This building originally housed a bank, and was still a PNC branch until a few years ago. It was built in 1926, and it straddles the line between classical and Art Deco.

    Front of the building
    Lion ornament

    You know it’s a bank because it has a vomiting lion at the top of the building.

    Perspective view

    As with many banks, the elaborate stone front hides a building mostly clad in cheaper and more prosaic brick.

  • Reliefs by Henry Hering on the Federal Reserve Bank Building

    Eagle by Henry Hering

    This building, put up in 1930–1931, was a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and the Clevelanders Walker & Weeks were the architects—but with Henry Hornbostel and Eric Fisher Wood as “consulting architects.”1 Old Pa Pitt doesn’t know exactly how far the consulting went. At any rate, the architects chose sculptor Henry Hering, who had done several prominent decorations in Cleveland, to create the cast-aluminum reliefs for this building. The picture below is from 2015, but it will serve to show the placement of the reliefs:

    Federal Reserve Bank Building

    The three main figures are obviously allegorical; they seem to represent industry, agriculture, and the professions.

    Relief by Henry Hering
    Relief
    Relief
    Decoration in aluminum
    1. Source: Walter Kidney, Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch, where this building is no. 137 in the List of Works. ↩︎

  • Colonial Trust Company

    Colonial Trust Company Building

    Fourth Avenue, the second-biggest American financial center after Wall Street, was famous for its bank towers. But one bank decided to go long instead of high. The Colonial Trust Company built a magnificent banking hall that ran right through from Forbes Avenue to Fourth Avenue, skylit all the way. Pittsburghers passing between Fourth and Forbes, especially in cold weather, would take the route through the bank so regularly that the hall became known as Colonial Avenue.

    Frederick Osterling was the architect, and he designed this magnificent Corinthian face for the Forbes Avenue side.

    Lion’s head

    What would a bank be without its lions?

    Cartouche

    Home-repair tip: if your pediment is broken, you can fill the gap with a baroque cartouche.

    Two years ago, old Pa Pitt got pictures of the other entrances as well, so the rest of the pictures are reruns.

    The Fourth Avenue side is in the same style, but narrower:

    Fourth Avenue entrance
    Lion

    This side also has its lions.

    In 1926, the bank decided to expand by building another equally magnificent hall perpendicular to the first, with an entrance on Wood Street. Osterling was the architect again—but fashions, and Osterling’s own taste, had changed.

    Wood Street entrance

    Instead of florid Corinthian, this side is in a simpler Ionic style. The outlines are cleaner, and the wall of rectangular panes of glass and the shallow arch at the top seem almost modernistic. It is still a bravura performance, but perhaps a more perfectly controlled one.

    Fortunately the whole building has been adapted as Point Park’s University Center, so it is not going anywhere, for the near future at any rate.