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.
And here are some more historic utility cables.
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.
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.
“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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Utility companies that wanted to infect neighborhoods with their frightful new technologies learned to turn to architects to send a message of polite respectability. The Duquesne Light Company still uses this little substation off Craig Street.
Homestead Park was originally a suburb of Homestead in Mifflin Township; it later became the upper part of Munhall Borough. This school (now just called Park Elementary School) has been built in multiple stages. The largest part, built in 1928, was designed by Adam G. Wickerham of Homestead,1 who combined enough traditional decoration to please conservative tastes with some interestingly modern ideas, like the stark second-floor cutout above the Cambria Street entrance.
A blank wall is enlivened by a bit of decorative brickery that must have been fun to plan, perhaps with the aid of children’s blocks.
The Main Street end of the school is earlier; it is probably the “addition” designed by Ulysses J. Lincoln Peoples in 1919.2
There is also a modernist section of the school, probably built in the 1960s, that old Pa Pitt didn’t capture, because he was stopping very briefly on his way from here to there. Maybe next time.
In spite of the ever-growing number of additions that obscure more and more of it, the original Presbyterian Hospital building is still a commanding presence in Oakland. It was built in 1926; the architect was E. P. Mellon, who flourished with his family connections: Presbyterian Hospital had strong ties to the Mellon family.
“The Kaufmann & Baer department store is an enormous shiny white terra cotta building, filled with windows and probably good for its purpose.” So the architect Aymar Embury II (did ever an architect have such an architecty name?) dismissed this building in his article about Pittsburgh architecture in 1915,1 when the building was new. It was put up for Kaufmann & Baer—the Kaufmanns being members of the same family as Morris Kaufmann, who ran that other department store with a similar name on Smithfield Street. Most older Pittsburghers remember it affectionately as the Gimbels Building, because Gimbels bought Kaufmann & Baer in 1925 and this building was Gimbels for most of its life as a department store. Starrett & Van Vleck, New York specialists in department stores, were the architects.
