The South Side Market House, designed originally by Charles Bickel, and given its current form by Stanley Roush, taken on film in glorious black and white. We also have color pictures and some historical photos of the South Side Market House.
When Tasso Katselas designed the annex to the May Building (which was designed by Charles Bickel), modernism was not just fashion—it was dogma. Fashions have changed and dogmas have relaxed, and the annex is being remodeled to be less aggressively different from the original building. We’ll have more pictures as the remodeling takes shape.
The South Side Market House was built in the heart of old Birmingham in 1893. The architect was Charles Bickel.
Originally the building was much more elaborate:
However, in 1915, a fire gutted the building, leaving only the outer walls standing.
Mr. Bickel was still alive at the time, but the reconstruction was designed by the city’s own talented Stanley Roush.
This bovine cartouche commemorates the death and resurrection of the South Side Market.
The fire was not the end of the building’s adventures. In 1950, public markets having become obsolete in Pittsburgh, the building was remodeled as a recreation center under the supervision of Button & McLean, who left the exterior almost unchanged from Roush’s 1915 design.
It was refurbished again in 2012 as a “Healthy Active Living Center” for senior citizens. Father Pitt does not yet know who supervised that remodeling, but he would be delighted to hear from anyone who has information.
The giant Kaufmann’s department store grew in stages over decades. This part of it was designed by Charles Bickel, who decorated it with exceptionally fine terra-cotta ornaments.
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.
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.
Charles Bickel designed the May Building, and—as he often did—he made liberal use of terra cotta in the ornaments.
More pictures of the May Building.
For a century, this section of Penn Avenue was the furniture district, and Spear and Company had one of the largest stores. The building was designed by Charles Bickel, who festooned it with terra cotta in blue and white.
The picture above comes from 1915. The original is at Historic Pittsburgh; Father Pitt has brightened the shadows a little to bring out more detail.
Charles Bickel was the architect of this factory and warehouse, which, like many industrial buildings of the time, takes its inspiration from the Marshall Field’s Wholesale Store by H. H. Richardson. Bickel, however, added his own sensibilities, and made it an impressive and distinctive building. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
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.
This was the home of the Rodef Shalom congregation for a very short time. It was downtown on Eighth Street, a narrow one-block alley where its site today is a parking lot. In those days, however, Eighth Street was crowded with buildings and institutions, including the Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Christian Home for Working Girls, and the North Public School. Having outgrown their previous building, the Rodef Shalom congregation hired Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, to design a magnificent temple that told the city its Jewish residents were proud to be part of the social fabric.
Building the new temple required tearing down the old one, but the people of the Second Presbyterian Church around the corner (not the Reformed Presbyterians next door) opened their doors to their Jewish neighbors, and for a year the two congregations shared the Second Presbyterian building, one worshiping on Saturday and the other on Sunday. A news story at the time tells us that, among the Rodef Shalom congregation, “there were many expressions of good feeling over this neighborly act on the part of the Presbyterian neighbors” when the agreement was announced.
The new temple opened in 1901. But the congregation was growing so quickly that, by 1904, it was already too small. Rodef Shalom had to find new quarters, with more land to spread out.
Rodef Shalom today worships in one of the most admired synagogue buildings in America, the magnificent temple on Fifth Avenue designed by Henry Hornbostel.
When we look at the two buildings, designed less than a decade apart, it’s striking how different they are in style. Bickel’s design looks old-fashioned; Hornbostel’s looks forward to the future, and it has stood the test of more than a century’s radical changes in taste.
But a comparison of the two buildings also reveals how much they have in common. Almost all the same design elements are in both buildings (with the prominent exception of the turbaned towers on the Bickel building); it almost looks as though the congregation had told Hornbostel, “We want the same thing we have downtown, but bigger.” (Though it’s not visible in either picture, another feature both buildings share is a large central dome.)
The Bickel building had several decades of life after Rodef Shalom moved out. The congregation sold it to their good friends at the Second Presbyterian Church, who moved into the relatively new building, and were thus able to sell their valuable corner location at Penn and Seventh, where Katz Plaza is today. For many years, the Second Presbyterians and the Reformed Presbyterians coexisted side by side on Eighth Street. The old Bickel building was still there in 1957, according to aerial photos; by 1967 it was replaced by parking lot, which is what has been there ever since.
