The Hilltop neighborhoods outgrew this telephone exchange, and a new Art Deco palace of telephony was built up the street. But the building remained standing, and has been converted to apartments.
James Windrim, the Philadelphia architect who did all of Bell of Pennsylvania’s work for some years in the early twentieth century, supervised alterations and additions to this building in 1923 or 1924,1 but he may not have been the original architect.
Commercial electric light was only a few years old when this power station was built in 1889. It was built in a restrained Victorian classical style that seems meant to make electric power look tame and respectable. But just a few years later, a new building was added next door that conveys quite a different architectural message.
The Irwin Avenue Substation was built in 1895, but it has the look of something built shortly after the Norman Conquest. The architectural message here seems to be that electricity is such a mighty force that only a medieval fortress can keep it under control. This building still belongs to Duquesne Light, and it is still called the Irwin Avenue Substation, even though Irwin Avenue has been called Brighton Road for more than ninety years.
According to Wikipedia and the National Register of Historic Places and the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation and numerous books and so on and so forth, the architects of Westinghouse High School were Ingham & Boyd. So you can just take the story as it comes to you, or you can can do what Father Pitt can’t stop himself from doing: keep pulling at a loose thread until the whole story unravels and has to be woven again.
The loose thread was that old Pa Pitt kept running across construction listings that said George S. Orth & Brother were designing a Homewood-Brushton High School in the middle teens of the last century. For a long time Father Pitt had just assumed that the project fell through, and later Ingham & Boyd were hired to design the school that was actually built in 1921. But then he found this elevation of the school as designed by the Orths:
It was printed in the Year Book of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, Incorporated, for 1916—long before the current school was built in 1921. But even a casual glance shows that it is fundamentally the school that stands today. Details are different, but the three-arched entrance, the blank walls on the projections at the ends of the building, the exact number and proportion of the windows, and so on, are all the same.
So why are the Orths not credited as the architects of Westinghouse?
The Wikipedia article on Westinghouse High School explains it, though without mentioning the change of architects. Digging for the foundation of the school began in 1915, while the Orths were still frantically scribbling their final drawings. But then the bids from the construction contractors came in, and they were shockingly high. The school board decided to wait for a little bit. Then there was a big war, and the construction didn’t actually begin until 1921.
So much we can learn from Wikipedia. The article does not mention the Orths, however, so it does not inform us that George S. Orth died in 1918, and Brother (his name was Alexander Beatty Orth) died in 1920. Having gone to a better place, the Orths were not inclined to finish the supervision of the project, so new architects had to be found. Enter Ingham & Boyd.
Comparing the Orths’ drawing with the school as it stands shows us that Ingham & Boyd took over the original plans, but adapted them to their own taste. They made the design more rigorously classical, changed the partly brick walls to all stone, simplified the ornamentation, and added inscriptions (a typical Ingham & Boyd touch) to the blank walls. But the main outlines were already established by George S. Orth & Brother.
Having sifted through the history of Westinghouse High School, we must say that Ingham & Boyd did the larger part of the work. They not only remade the plans in a more modern style, but also supervised the construction and dealt with the school board as the costs kept rising, which must have required patience and many soothing words.
But the original design belongs to George S. and Alexander Beatty Orth, and they deserve the credit for it. It will probably take a long time for that truth to percolate through the many repositories of Pittsburgh architectural history. But, as the book of I Esdras says…
The vestibule at the original entrance to the Carnegie Institute building, seldom used now because visitors come in through the modernist Scaife Galleries addition. This picture was taken hand-held in dim light with the ultra-wide auxiliary camera on old Pa Pitt’s phone, so please forgive its obvious flaws.
A typical FDR-era public building, put up in 1940 in the modernized hybrid of Art Deco and classical style that old Pa Pitt likes to call American Fascist.
The arms of the City of Pittsburgh.
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.
Ornamental patterns, including a fine Vitruvian scroll (the wave pattern in the middle), over the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Frick Building.
There are several Campbell Buildings in the United States, some quite large. But this tiny office is the only one with its own Wikipedia article. It is even on the National Register of Historic Places, though unfortunately the registration documents have not been digitized yet.
In the boom years around the turn of the twentieth century, developers selling off lots would often build a temporary real-estate office on the site of the development. This one was built by Thomas Campbell, and it is the only one Father Pitt knows of that survives to this day, probably because Campbell was a flop as a developer. Since then it has been home to all kinds of small businesses, and currently houses a tattoo artist.
One of several “flatiron” buildings produced by the irregular street layout of Crafton. This one is odd angles all around.
The main entrance is on the sharp corner facing the intersection of Noble Avenue, Crafton Avenue, and Dinsmore Avenue (which is what we meant when we said Crafton had an irregular street layout).
A segmental pediment—that is, a pediment whose top is a segment of a circle, rather than the more usual triangle.
The side entrance would have led into the upstairs offices: a bank putting up a building like this would expect to make extra income from office rentals, and bank buildings were usually prestigious addresses.
The side of the building not meant to be seen is finished more cheaply.
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:
