The McCormick Company, a firm that seems to have specialized in buildings for the food industry, designed this beloved landmark on the Boulevard of the Allies. It was built in 1929 for Isaly’s, a chain of dairy-delicatessen-restaurants that had begun in Ohio but took over the Pittsburgh market in a big way. At its peak, there was an Isaly’s in just about every neighborhood business district. This building had a big Isaly’s restaurant on the ground floor.
Today the building is given over to medical offices, but the Art Deco details are still well preserved.
Rutan & Russell designed this building for a hardware company that had already been on this corner—Wood Street and Second Avenue (now the Boulevard of the Allies)—for sixty years when the new building opened in 1907.1 It belongs to Point Park University now, and it is so thoroughly integrated with the buildings around it that most people probably pass it by without noticing it. But it is a unique survivor, as we’ll learn in a moment.
A larger building was put up only ten years after the first one, and then this small skyscraper in 1907. Obviously the company was prospering, and it would continue to prosper for quite a while. The frontispiece to a Joseph Woodwell catalogue from 1927 shows us the all the Woodwell buildings up to that date.
You notice the main Woodwell Building in a picture from 1907, and then the same building surrounded by newer construction in 1927. But although it’s the same building, it’s not in the same place.
Until 1920, Second Avenue was a narrow street like First Avenue or Third Avenue—streets that would count as alleys in most American cities. But in 1920, when the Boulevard of the Allies to Oakland was being planned, the city began widening Second Avenue by tearing down all the buildings on the north side of the street.
All but one. The Woodwell Building was not demolished: instead it was moved, all eight floors of it, about forty feet to the right. That makes it the sole surviving complete building on the north side of the street from before the widening project. (The Americus Republican Club survived in a truncated form.) The building gained a four-floor addition (now replaced with a more modern building) to the right on Wood Street, and yet another new building went up for the prospering Woodwell firm behind the relocated building on the Boulevard of the Allies.
So the next time you walk down the Boulevard of the Allies, pause briefly to acknowledge the Woodwell Building. It’s a stubborn survivor as well as an attractive design by one of our top architectural firms, and it has earned some respect.
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.
This building seems to date from before the Civil War, possibly the 1850s. It was designed in the very free interpretation of Italian Renaissance that was popular at the time; later architects would have studied their historical precedents more closely, and later architects than those would have repudiated historical precedent altogether.
The building originally belonged to the Fulton Bell Foundry, which made bells for decades in downtown Pittsburgh. It’s a remnant of Victorian Second Avenue. All the remnants of Second Avenue downtown are on the south side of the Boulevard of the Allies; the street was widened in the 1920s by tearing out the buildings on the north side.
The well-preserved carved stone lintels have been lovingly cleaned.
These pictures are from a year and a half ago, but old Pa Pitt just ran across them. You never know what you’ll find if you look behind the sofa.
Frank & Seder was never our biggest department store, but it was a pretty big store. Like all the other department stores downtown, it needed a big warehouse to hold the merchandise until it was ready to delight downtown shoppers. This colossus on the Bluff was designed in 1923 by William E. Snaman,1 an architect who had already had a long and prosperous career and by this time in his life was specializing in large warehouses and other industrial buildings. The Boulevard of the Allies runs past on a course that is not perpendicular to the side streets, so that the front of the building is at an odd angle to the rest of the building.
Just a little later, Snaman was designing another warehouse on the North Side for Rosenbaum’s, another big downtown department store.2 This is a slightly blurred picture from the window of a car stopped in traffic on the approach to the West End Bridge, but it will have to do for now.
Source: The American Contractor, February 3, 1923: “Warehouse & Garage: $200,000. 7 sty. & bas. 88×200. 1819–23 Bluff st. Archt. & Engr. W. E. Snaman, Empire bldg. Owner The Frank & Weder [sic] Co., Isaac Sedar [sic], pres., Fifth av. & Smithfield st. Brk. Drawing prelim. Plans.” The building as it stands is five storeys. ↩︎
Source: The American Contractor, November 10, 1923: “Warehouse (add.): $500,000. 4 sty. & bas. 159×291. Brk. Beaver av. & Fayette st. Archt. & Bldr. W. E. Snaman, Empire bldg. Owner The Rosenbaum Co., Max Rothschild, pres., 6th & Penn avs. Revising plans.” The “addition” in this listing is most of the building, except for the three-storey section in front. It seems likely that Snaman was responsible for that, too. ↩︎
It occurred to old Pa Pitt this afternoon that he had never seen a complete picture of the front of this building. It took several photographs and some technical fussing to get the composite picture above, but here you are.
Until the 1890s, a Welsh Methodist chapel stood here; but by the early 1900s it had been replaced by this building for the Eichbaum Lithography and Printing Company, a direct descendant of early printer Zadok Cramer’s Franklin Head Bookstore. The architecture is basic industrial Romanesque, enlivened by a more elaborate stone arch for the entrance to the upstairs offices.
A very firehousey-looking firehouse, still in use by city emergency services. According to a city architectural survey, this was built in about 1900 and designed by city architect William Y. Brady. The details are unusual; the style is more or less classical, but instead of Doric or Ionic pilasters, we get unexpected obelisks in relief.
It is interesting to compare this engine house to the one up the street. That one is also attributed to Brady by the city architectural survey, but Father Pitt, on good evidence, attributes it to Charles Bickel. The styles are quite different. It is possible that Brady supervised some alterations to the Bickel firehouse, and that record confused the surveyors.
