Doubtless built for very pedestrian commercial uses—with huge windows that provided bright light from the south all day—these two buildings nevertheless could not be seen in public until they were dressed in the proper Beaux-Arts fashion. Other more recent buildings grew up around them and then were torn down, but these have survived, and seemed to be getting some work when Father Pitt walked past them recently.
Both buildings pull from the same repertory of classical ornaments in terra cotta, but mix them up in different ways.
No. 819 is more heavily ornamented—both in the sense of the abundance of ornaments and in the sense that the individual ornaments seem weightier:
No. 821, on the other hand, is decorated with a lighter and more Baroque touch:
The Beezer Brothers designed Wilkinsburg’s miniature skyscraper for real-estate developer and brewer Leopold Vilsack. It was built in 1902.1 It had been announced as the Vilsack Building; Vilsack named it the Carl Building (after his son) while it was still under construction; later it was called the Shields Building. It holds a curious place in the history of public housing: it was converted to apartments for senior citizens in 1975 as the first Section 8 housing project.
The Beezers’ rendering of the proposed building appeared in the Gazette for April 12, 1902:
You may notice, if you count carefully, that the building lost a floor between initial design and construction.
We transcribe the caption under the drawing:
Wilkinsburg is soon to have a sky-scraper—somewhat of an infant in its class, perhaps, but ’way above any of its neighbors, and abundant evidence of the hustle and pride that characterize the residents of Pittsburgh’s most attractive suburb. The Vilsack office building, for such will be the title of the new structure, will be a thoroughly high-class building, its owner, Leopold Vilsack, having spared no pains or cost in the plans to make it equal in convenience to any of the more pretentious structures downtown. The site for the building is at the southeast corner of Wood and Ross streets, on a lot 33×122 feet, which Mr. Vilsack purchased a few months ago through his agent, James B. Lawler, for $18,000. The building was designed by Beezer Bros. It will be seven stories high and absolutely fireproof in its construction. Architecturally the building will be an exceptionally handsome structure. The first two stories facing in Wood and Ross streets will be built of Indiana limestone and the upper stories of gray pressed brick and terra cotta. Two high-speed elevators will carry the tenants and the building will have a duplicate boiler system to furnish it with power, heat and light. The first floor will be used for storerooms. On the upper floors are about 90 offices, all finished in hard wood and provided with marble floors and wainscoting. A large barber shop and a photograph studio will be among the features. Water will be supplied from an artesian well. The building is to be erected under the immediate direction of Beezer Bros. and will cost at least $150,000. The house on the lot, now occupied by Dr. A. B. Smith, the former owner, will be moved about 150 yards up Ross street on to another lot of Mr. Vilsack’s. Work on the new building will begin May 1 and it is expected it will be finished by January 1.
It is interesting to note that, if you visit the building today, you will once again find “a large barber shop” among the features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.
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.
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.
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.
This doorway shows us some of Mr. Giammartini’s work.
