Father Pitt

Tag: Bickel (Charles)

  • West Penn Building

    West Penn Building

    Charles Bickel designed this small skyscraper at First Avenue and Wood Street, which was finished in 1907. It’s a perfect demonstration of the base-shaft-cap form of an early skyscraper. In fact we can use this building as a textbook in our short course on how to read a Beaux-Arts skyscraper. The two-storey base contains the public aspects of the building—retail stores, public offices, and so on. The shaft is the main body of the building, a repeated pattern of windows and wall. The cap gives the building a presentable top, since a gentleman would not appear outdoors without his hat. Note also the floor just above the base outlined with a prominent border. That is the bosses’ floor, where the managers and other important people have their offices. “Form follows function,” as Louis Sullivan said; and in this case the form gives concrete shape to a social reality. You have now completed our course, and may award yourself a certificate.

    West Penn Building

  • Ewart Building

    Ewart Building

    Charles Bickel was quite at home in the Romanesque style, and he prospered in a city that had gone mad for Romanesque after Richardson’s County Courthouse appeared. The Ewart Building was put up in 1892. Old Pa Pitt was attracted to this morning view by the pattern of reflections on Liberty Avenue.

  • Frank & Seder Department Store, 1927

    Frank & Seder

    An image from an advertisement in the National Vaudeville Artists’ Annual for 1928. You and your dancing poodles are invited to shop here. This building is now under renovation, and with the removal of some later accretions the shadows of the Frank & Seder signs are visible (see the recent photos here).

  • Ewart Building

    The prolific Charles Bickel designed this well-balanced Romanesque building, two doors up from another one of his Romanesque creations on Liberty Avenue, the Maginn Building. Below we see both of them in context, with, of course, a bus coming toward us, because old Pa Pitt likes to do that.

  • Granite Building

    A very-wide-angle view of the Granite Building, designed by the prolific and versatile Charles Bickel for a German bank. He has made use of every texture and shape of which granite is capable, and the result is a particularly lively, if perhaps a bit jumbled, rendering of German Romanesque.

    You may notice some ghostly figures, including a spectral automobile, in the photograph. Father Pitt would love to be able to claim privileged access to the wonders of the invisible world, but in fact this is a composite photograph taken on a busy street, and people will continue to move even when they see an older gentleman in a cocked hat trying to take a composite picture.

    The Granite Building is just across Wood Street from the Wood Street subway station.

  • Concordia Club

    The Concordia Club was one of a number of fine clubs in Oakland; it lasted until 2009, when its building was sold to the University of Pittsburgh, which made it into the O’Hara Student Center. It was founded “to promote social and literary entertainment among its members,” and it seems always to have been a largely Jewish organization. Father Pitt does not know the details of the sale, but it took at least the club’s Web site by surprise. The site is frozen in 2009, with a calendar of events whose last entry is April 30, 2009: Annual Meeting and Dinner.

    The building itself was designed by the prolific Charles Bickel, who could always be relied on to make the client proud.

  • May Building

    Built in 1909, this is a typical small Beaux-Arts skyscraper. Its base has been unsympathetically modernized, and perhaps at the same time it grew an ugly parasitic infestation in the rear; but the basic shape of the building is still intact.