Father Pitt

Tag: Beaux-Arts Architecture

  • Beaux-Arts at the Waterworks

    Waterworks building

    This small but grand pumping station, or some sort of utility building, sits by the reservoirs behind the Waterworks shopping center. Thomas Scott was the architect of most buildings for the Pittsburgh water system in the era when this one was built, and this is certainly in his style, so we attribute it to him with some confidence. The windows that would have flooded the building with light have been blocked in, possibly for security reasons, but more likely because no one could see the point of maintaining glass windows when plywood covers the holes just as well.

    Waterworks building

    On city planning maps, the waterworks, the Waterworks shopping center, and St. Margaret’s Hospital are in the Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar neighborhood, which is otherwise on the other side of the Allegheny—one of those neighborhood-boundary absurdities that no real Pittsburgher would recognize. Pittsburghers would say they are at Aspinwall, although they belong to the city and not the borough of Aspinwall.

    Waterworks building
    Waterworks building

    Behind the encroaching jungle of vines and utility cables we can just make out a pair of classical dolphins—always the emblem of a water-related building—and a cartouche with the city arms.

    Waterworks building
    Olympus E-20N.
    Comments

  • Frick Annex

    Frick Annex, later the Allegheny Building, Pittsburgh
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Built in 1906, this skyscraper was designed by Daniel Burnham, architect of the neighboring Frick Building, as the second part of Henry Frick’s architectural tantrum that cut off the light and air from the Carnegie Building. The Carnegie Building was demolished to make way for the nearly windowless Kaufmann’s Annex; this building, which gets plenty of light, is now luxury apartments.

  • Hartje Brothers Buildings

    Hartje Buildings

    Two nearly identical buildings side by side on Wood Street, both built around the turn of the twentieth century for the Hartje Brothers, a big paper company. Charles Bickel was the architect, and here he compressed the usual American skyscraper formula of base-shaft-cap into seven floors.

    The corner building has a long front on the Boulevard of the Allies; we saw it about a year and a half ago, but here is the same picture again.

    Boulevard of the Allies side
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    A short time after these buildings went up, the Hartje Brothers called on Bickel again to design a twelve-storey skyscraper a block away at Wood Street and First Avenue, which we have used as a textbook example of the Beaux Arts skyscraper.

    Comments

  • Top of Penn Station

    Penn Station
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    The top of Penn Station seen from the Bigelow Boulevard bridge over the Crosstown Boulevard.

    Comments

  • May Building

    May Building

    Old Pa Pitt’s New Year’s resolution is to bring you more of the same, and to try to get better at it.

    The May Building was designed by Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, and a versatile one as well.

    Wreath on the cornice

    The famous Sicilian Greek mathematician and philosopher and inventor and scientist Archimedes was nicknamed “Beta” in his lifetime, because he was second-best at everything. That was Charles Bickel. If you wanted a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this one, he would give you a splendid one; it might not be the most artistic in the whole city, but it would be admired, and it would hold up for well over a century. If you wanted Richardsonian Romanesque, he could give it to you in spades; it might not be as sophisticated as Richardson, but it would be very good and would make you proud. If you wanted the largest commercial building in the world, why, sure, he was up to that, and he would make it look so good that a century later people would go out of their way to find a use for it just because they liked it so much.

    Cartouche on the May Building
    May Building and addition

    The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.

  • Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Station

    Night view of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie station, Pittsburgh

    The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie could not quite get a foothold downtown, but it had the next best thing: a station right on the Smithfield Street Bridge, so that it was only a short walk from downtown to the P&LE trains—or a short trolley ride, since the streetcars ran on the bridge.

    P&LE station from the south
    Smithfield Street Bridge entrance to the station
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    The entrance to the station was right at bridge level, with a grand staircase down into the grand concourse.

  • The Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal

    Wabash Terminal
    The flag on top of the cupola shows us that what today’s designers call “Photoshopping” has a long history reaching far back into the analogue era.

    The Wabash Terminal was a magnificent folly, like the railroad it represented. The building was designed to say that Jay Gould’s new railroad, a competitor to the well-established Pennsylvania Railroad, was here to stay. It opened in 1904, and the railroad went bankrupt four years later.

    The Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway had to perform enormous feats of engineering just to get into Pittsburgh. The Wabash Tunnel, now a little-used automobile highway, led to a new bridge across the Monongahela. All the land downtown was already taken up, so the Wabash had to make an elevated freight yard, which cost fabulous amounts of money.

    The building itself was designed by Theodore C. Link (whose famous St. Louis Union Station still stands), and it was as extravagant as the rest of the enterprise. These pictures were published in The Builder for November of 1904, a Pittsburgh-based architectural magazine. They show us that the terminal building was up to the same extravagant standard as the rest of the operation. Carved decorations were provided to a lavish extent by Achille Giammartini, Pittsburgh’s best decorative sculptor.

    First floor of the Wabash Terminal
    First floor of the Wabash Terminal
    Second floor of the Wabash Terminal
    Second floor of the Wabash Terminal

    After its railroad went bankrupt, the Wabash terminal still served passengers on some lines until 1931. It was converted to offices after that. Disastrous fires gutted it shortly after the Second World War, and it sat as a looming wreck until 1953, when it was demolished to make way for new buildings at Gateway Center.

    Doorway

    This doorway shows us some of Mr. Giammartini’s work.

  • Looking Up at the Horne’s Building

    Terra cotta on the cornice of the Horne’s building
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The decorated cornice of the Horne’s building gleams in late-afternoon sun.

    Horne’s building
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Highland Building, East Liberty

    Highland Building
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. This picture is more than 13 megabytes if you enlarge it; be careful on a metered connection.

    Designed by Daniel Burnham, this is the only skyscraper left in East Liberty; another one, designed by Frederick Osterling, was demolished decades ago when the neighborhood’s fortunes were sinking. Now the neighborhood is once again bustling, and the Highland Building, after years of abandonment, is beautifully restored.

  • Kinder Building, Allegheny West

    Kinder building

    Thomas Scott, who lived around the corner and designed some of the neighborhood’s best houses, was the architect of this Beaux Arts gem in the heart of the Allegheny West business district.1

    Entrance to the Kinder Building

    Scott was also the architect of the Benedum-Trees Building, and we can see the same extravagant but tasteful elaboration of ornament here on a smaller scale.

    Inscription: “Kinder”
    Kinder building, perspective view
    Canon PowerShot SX 150 IS.
    1. Source: Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, January 27, 1904. “Mr. Joseph Kinder will erect a brick store and apartment house on Western avenue and Grant avenue, Allegheny, from plans prepared by Thomas H. Scott, Empire Building.” Grant Avenue is now Galveston Avenue. ↩︎