Last year we saw the Natatorium Building in the middle of a renovation. Now here it is renovated, and looking pretty much the same. The original architect was R. B. Melvin.
We also have some history of the Natatorium Building.
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The Natatorium Building, Renovated
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Borough Hall, Bellevue
E. T. Sanderson, an architect who has not made a big impression on old Pa Pitt so far, designed the Bellevue Borough Hall,1 and it has changed little since it was built in 1910.
Thanks to David Schwing for pointing out this illustration. Mr. Sanderson’s prettily rendered front elevation was published in The Builder for July, 1909. From it we can see that the terra-cotta ornamentation was radically simplified between initial design and construction: what would have been an elaborately stacked Renaissance entrance with pilasters and pediment was pared down to a much more modern-looking terra-cotta frame.
Terra cotta is very good for decorative inscriptions.
The tower has some pleasing Arts-and-Crafts woodwork.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
- Proposals, Pittsburgh Post, April 4, 1910, p. 4: “Sealed proposals for a low pressure gravity heating apparatus for the basement and first story of the borough hall, Bellevue, Pa., in accordance with plans and specifications on file at the office of E. T. Sanderson, architect, 704 Empire Bldg., Pittsburgh, Pa.…” ↩︎
Addendum: We reprint the descriptive text that went with the architect’s drawing above:
The Proposed Borough Hall
The proposed borough hall at Bellevue, Pa. was designed by Architect E. T. Sanderson, Pittsburgh. It contains a high basement and two stories. The lower end of the basement is a full story above the ground and contains quarters for the fire department, consisting of a room for the ladder truck and hose wagon and the stables and also a room for apparatus that may be purchased in the future.
There is also a hose tower for drying the hose and at the top of this tower is the fire bell. On this floor are also located the police department headquarters, with cell room, headquarters room, locker room, etc. The office of the burgess is also located on this floor, as is the heating apparatus.
On the main floor is the council chamber, which is of ample size with committee rooms adjoining it. here also are the offices of the borough officials and a wide staircase leads from the entrance hall to the auditorium on the floor above. The rear portion of the first floor is given over to rooms for the firemen, consisting of lounging and reading rooms, billiard room, locker room, card room and toilet.
The upper floor is largely taken up with the assembly hall or auditorium, which contains an ample stage, with dressing rooms at either side. This assembly hall has a seating capacity of about five hundred.
At the rear of the hall are retiring rooms for men and women and also a large serving room.
The exterior of the building is of brick and terra cotta with a green tile roof.
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City-County Building and Grant Building
Early-morning views of the City-County Building and the Grant Building, both designed by Henry Hornbostel, from northward on Grant Street.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Rutledge Hall, Shadyside
This would be an ordinary brick box, except that the main entrance has been grandified with two floors’ worth of Doric columns and an elaborate classical entrance, making the building look like a modernist apartment block that collided with a plantation house.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Engine Co. No. 11, Troy Hill
Joseph Stillburg, toward the end of an illustrious career, designed this very firehousey-looking firehouse for the city of Allegheny. It later became Truck Company No. 39 in Pittsburgh before being diverted to other uses.
Obviously the top of the tower has gone missing; Mr. Stillburg would not have put in Corinthian pilasters to hold up a strip of aluminum. Somebody ought to take those utility cables out of the picture.
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Fujifilm FinePix HS20 EXR. And here are some more historic utility cables.
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Edgewood School and Edgewood High School
The original Edgewood Public School was built in 1891, as the keystone of its great entrance arch tells us. Old Pa Pitt was not able to find the architect of the school, but he would not be surprised to hear that it was Frederick Osterling. The picturesque and asymmetrical Romanesque of this building reminds us of his early style, which was influenced by Richardsonian Romanesque but also reached back into the pre-Richardsonian Romanesque of his master Joseph Stillburg.
In 1914, Ingham & Boyd were commissioned to design a new high school for the growing borough,1 which was built the following year. The style could hardly be more different. This is a typical Ingham & Boyd building in every way, with a simple and dignified classicism (and no columns, because Ingham & Boyd disapproved of columns) and a completely symmetrical façade. Today both schools, connected by a newer entrance (so that the old entrances are blocked in), are in use as the Edgewood Elementary STEAM Academy. The builders of the original 1891 school would probably have agreed that a well-educated citizen ought to have some familiarity with the marvelous properties of steam technology.
The new high school was featured in the April, 1917, issue of the Architectural Forum. This photo shows us that the entrance has been eliminated, and the windows replaced with blank expanses of glass. In the main, though, the general appearance of the school has not changed.
Here we see how the entrance looked when it was an entrance.
Second Floor Plan The floor plans show us that, as a high school, the building was small, but up to date with all the latest features. The accompanying text describes the school thoroughly:
Edgewood High School, Edgewood Park, Pa. Page 102. The High School at Edgewood Park, Pa., is located adjacent to a grade school building, with which it is connected by a covered and enclosed passage, so that the grade school pupils may use the gymnasium and auditorium of the high school building, the connection being made through the first floor main corridor on the left of the plan. It is intended to enlarge the building, when necessary, by an additional corridor and class rooms at the rear of the auditorium, leaving one side of the auditorium and gymnasium free, the lighting being maintained substantially as at present. The exterior walls are of mottled gray brick and terra cotta. The floors and roof are built fireproof, of reinforced concrete and hollow tile. The floors of corridors and locker rooms are of terrazzo, tile being used in toilet rooms and maple flooring elsewhere in the building, except in the chemical laboratory, where the floor is of asphalt. The interior trim is of oak, except on the ground floor, where pine is used. The heating and ventilating are by a combined motor driven supply and exhaust fan system, supplemented by direct radiation. The steam plant is in the adjoining grade school. The class rooms seat from 35 to 40 pupils each, a total of 310. The cost of the building was 17 cents per cubic foot.
Sony Alpha 3000; Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. “Higher education leads to higher ideals, to greater wisdom, and to contentment.” It is a typical Ingham & Boyd touch to add an inspiring quotation to the front of a school.
But where did the quotation come from? This is a curious mystery. It must have been familiar, or it would not have been enshrined in terra cotta. But old Pa Pitt’s diligent searches in the world’s digitized libraries have found it in only two places:
- A 1949 advertisement from the Committee on Steel Pipe Research of American Iron and Steel Institute that ran in several architectural magazines, where it is again quoted as a well-known saying: “The American system of free public education has become a symbol of democracy through its thousands of magnificent school buildings from coast to coast. The number, size, beauty, and superior physical equipment of these schools demonstrate our public understanding that ‘higher education leads to higher ideals, to greater wisdom, and to contentment.’ ”
- The March 21, 1959, issue of the Shamokin News-Dispatch, where it is used as an unattributed space-filler, again in quotation marks, meaning that the compositor grabbed it from somewhere.
So we have a quotation that was well known in 1915, but has left no trace in print before 1949 across the millions of digitized books, magazines, and newspapers on line. If anyone can give us a hint as to where this quotation came from, old Pa Pitt would be very grateful.
- We have the Architectural Record article, of course, and many other listings as well. The Construction Record, October 3, 1914. “Architects Ingham & Boyd, Vandergrift building, are writing specifications on a two-story brick and fireproof high school building for the Board of Education to be built on Maple avenue at a cost of $75,000.” ↩︎
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Allegheny Post Office, North Side
Now part of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which began in just part of this building and has gradually expanded to take over all of it, and Buhl Planetarium, and part of the old Carnegie Free Library, in addition to its own new buildings in between. This was one of the buildings scheduled to be demolished for the “urban renewal” of Allegheny Center, but the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation scored a major victory in preserving it, and then kept its headquarters here for a while before the redevelopment of Station Square.
The building was put up in 1897, after the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 had created a sudden mania for pristine white classical buildings. The architect was listed as William Martin Aiken, Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury, and a building this size might well have had his personal supervision.
Many buildings have blank faces around the back where no one is expected to go, but this is a building designed to be seen from every angle.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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The Ellsworth, Shadyside
Kodak EasyShare Max Z990. John A. Butz, the brother of the more productive Edward M. Butz, designed this apartment building, which was put up in 1912.1 Here we see it in the last rays of evening sun.
Addendum: Our correspondent David Schwing sends us this photograph of the Ellsworth that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post for September 28, 1915, before the building was obscured by trees and later buildings.
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Buhl Planetarium, North Side
Ol’ Ptolemy had heard of that weird theory that the earth moved around the sun instead of vice-versa, but he rejected it as unnecessarily counterintuitive. Hs sure did know his stars, though. For half a century a trip to Buhl Planetarium was one the most enduring childhood memories of anyone who grew up in Pittsburgh. The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was most famous for its star shows—with its massive Zeiss projector, it was touted as the most sophisticated planetarium in the world—but it had many other scientific exhibits as well.
The building was designed by Ingham & Boyd, who specialized in educational buildings—Ingham & Boyd, and later Ingham, Boyd & Pratt, had the franchise for all the school buildings in Mount Lebanon for decades, and designed numerous others in the city and suburbs. Their style for institutional buildings was purely classical into the 1930s, and then began to take on an Art Deco hue. But they kept their classical mania for symmetry, and the front of Buhl Planetarium is typically symmetrical.
The building is decorated with extraordinary sculptures by Sidney Waugh, whose Art Deco sensibilities perfectly complement the Deco classicism of the architecture. He has made use of the symmetry of the building to arrange his sculptures as complementary pairs. Over the entrance are the bronzes Primitive Science and Modern Science, and Waugh shows them as engaged in the same intellectual enterprise. Instead of placing the modern scientist in a superior position, Waugh has the American Indian scientist and the lab-coated scientist at exactly the same height and scale admiring each other’s work as intellectual equals. In the most literal sense, they see eye to eye.
Note the three inventions Waugh has chosen to represent the accomplishments of pre-Columbian American thought: smoke signals, which created long-distance communication; the bow and arrow, which were developed to a high degree of accuracy; and snowshoes, an invention that was unique to North America.
The modern scientist has his globe, his microscope, and his test tube. He looks across the ages at the American Indian and sees a peer who knew his onions.
On the front wall of the building are two allegorical stone reliefs: “The Heavens” and “The Earth,” again facing each other at the same scale.
Finally, the exit doors from the planetarium have small reliefs of “Night” and “Day.” Here old Pa Pitt must confess that he failed to capture “Day”; it was obscured by leafy trees when he visited, and perhaps he will be able to get a picture when the leaves come down in a month or so.
When the Buhl Planetarium merged with the Carnegie, the result was the Carnegie Science Center—now Kamin Science Center—which brought a much larger science museum to the North Side, including a new higher-tech Buhl Planetarium. But after a few years of mostly lying fallow, the Buhl Planetarium building was taken over by the Children’s Museum and resumed its mission of educating children by delighting them.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Kerr & Snodgrass Warehouse, North Side
If you look closely, you can see that there is a seam right down the middle of the Isabella Street face of this building. It was put up in two stages: the left half in 1906, the right half after 1910.
Kerr & Snodgrass were wholesale wallpaper dealers—obviously very successful ones. They commissioned William J. Shaw of Bellevue to design this building, and it was announced in the Gazette for October 15, 1905, with a reproduction of Shaw’s rendering.1 (Note that the building grew a ninth floor by the time it was actually constructed; apparently Kerr & Snodgrass could hardly keep up with their own prosperity.) The rendering shows the front on Isabella Street and the side along Vulcan Way. According to the news story, this building was to be very similar to the one on the other side of Vulcan Way, which has since disappeared, replaced by a bigger building.
This building has prospered with the rise of the North Shore as a desirable address; it is now known as Four North Shore Center. Its next-door neighbor on Sandusky Street is the Andy Warhol Museum.
Kerr & Snodgrass were willing to spend more than usual for a mere warehouse: the two lower floors are stone, not brick, and festooned with fine carved decorations.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
- “Allegheny Gets Another Fine Wholesale Business Structure,” Gazette, October 15, 1905. ↩︎
