A banking palace from the 1890s, with the ground floor still in use as a bank. The style is classical on the ground floor but Romanesque above; we suspect the ground floor may be a later alteration. Father Pitt does not know the architect yet. L. A. Raisig, a successful architect and builder who designed many buildings in Wilkinsburg, kept his office here, so it is possible that he designed the building.
George S. Orth, who lived in Bridgeville, designed this building,1 which was put up in two stages, beginning in 1903 or 1904, for the Bridgeville Trust Company. If you look very carefully, you can see the seam in the middle of the long side along Station Street, marking the line between the original square building on the corner and the later addition behind it. At some time in the middle twentieth century, the ground floor was entirely redesigned to look more like a modern bank, so that only on the second floor is Orth’s work visible today. The building was still a bank (a branch of PNC) until just a few years ago.
Across the street, the First National Bank of Bridgeville was going up at the same time. James E. Allison was the architect of this one.2 Soon—probably while this building was still going up—he would take his brother David on as a partner in the firm of Allison & Allison. In 1910 they moved to Los Angeles, and they flourished there as architects of some of the most notable buildings in the city.
Trowbridge & Livingston, Andrew Mellon’s favorite architects, designed this block-long palace of finance. The legendary interior was destroyed in the 1990s for a blink-and-you-missed-it department store, but the exterior is almost completely unchanged from the day the building opened in 1925.
Built as a branch bank, this tidy little modernistic building seems to be succeeding in its second life as a little neighborhood grocery. It is one of several “flatiron” buildings in Sheraden, and old Pa Pitt had to stand in the middle of a fairly busy intersection to get this picture of the sharp end:
One of several “flatiron” buildings produced by the irregular street layout of Crafton. This one is odd angles all around.
The main entrance is on the sharp corner facing the intersection of Noble Avenue, Crafton Avenue, and Dinsmore Avenue (which is what we meant when we said Crafton had an irregular street layout).
A segmental pediment—that is, a pediment whose top is a segment of a circle, rather than the more usual triangle.
The side entrance would have led into the upstairs offices: a bank putting up a building like this would expect to make extra income from office rentals, and bank buildings were usually prestigious addresses.
The side of the building not meant to be seen is finished more cheaply.
One of the most imposing-looking banks in the whole Pittsburgh area, this expensive—we had almost said egregiously expensive—Doric pile seems not to be occupied at the moment, but it is in beautiful shape externally. It was still in use as a bank until about six years ago, so it is fully accessible and waiting for the next tenant who needs a building that will knock people’s socks off.
Addendum: The architects were Mowbray & Uffinger of New York, specialists in banks, who also designed the Peoples Building in McKeesport.1
A sharp-looking but still respectable bank in a kind of baroque version of Art Deco. It is no longer a bank, but it is kept in fine condition by the current occupants.
N. G. Pollock of Cleveland was the architect of this small but rich-looking bank, which was built in about 1916.1 It seems likely that some sort of ornate classical crest is missing from the corner above the name “
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.
You could count on architect Press C. Dowler for the bankiest-looking banks. The correct Ionic front of this one looks almost exactly the way he drew it, as we can see from the architect’s rendering that was published in the Press on February 8, 1931.
It seems to old Pa Pitt that the mark of a Dowler bank is correct classical detail combined with a lack of fussiness. There is never too much detail. But he takes the details seriously. In other buildings he was already adopting Art Deco and modernist styles, but a bank needed to look traditional and timeless—especially in the Depression. For other Dowler bank designs, see the Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company and the Braddock National Bank.
