Ellsworth Dean designed this school, built in 1903. The rich cinnamon brick—actually made of several related colors of brick—still looks dignified today. The school is now the primary school for the Environmental Charter School.
This year’s garden emphasizes native American crops, including corn and Echinacea purpurea.
We have more pictures of the Park Place School in the winter, including a complete front elevation.
Edward J. Carlisle designed this school, built in 1898, when it was in the vanguard of the new White City classical style for schools in Pittsburgh.
At first you might take it for a stone building, but the walls are actually of stone-colored brick. At some point in the 1960s, the big front windows were partly filled in, but otherwise the school is in good shape.
Lush plantings of trees make it impossible to see the whole front at once, but make for very pleasant grounds.
A plaque commemorates World War I soldiers from the community. The names will all be legible if you enlarge the picture.
The side entrances are near-duplicates of the front entrance.
The school has always kept a public garden, which is delightfully crowded with a wide variety of plants from native to tropical.
From the tropics, we have an Alocasia; behind it, the very native Joe-Pye-Weed.
Milkweeds for our butterfly friends.
Frederick Sauer was the architect of this ornate commercial palace, built in 1908. It is covered in white enameled terra-cotta ornaments that give it a sense of opulence above its budget.
We also have some earlier pictures of the Werner Building and some remarks on its history.
A fine classical bank adapted as the headquarters of the Indiana County Tourist Bureau. The interior is well preserved, except for a partition behind the teller counters that obscures some of the intended symmetry of the design.
With five floors in a base-shaft-cap formula, this imposing classical building is the closest thing downtown Indiana has to a traditional skyscraper.
Designed in 1902 by the Beezer Brothers, this was Wilkinsburg’s contribution to the early skyscraper age. It was put up for Leopold Vilsack, a real-estate investor who was also one of the founders of the Iron City brewery. He named it for his son Carl; later it became known as the Shields Building.
When it was announced, the building was to have eight floors. One floor fell away between initial design and construction.
The building is now apartments. The base has been refurbished with a simpler and more abstract design that hardly registers as different from the original until we look at it closely.
The cap is festooned with elaborate Baroque terra-cotta ornaments.
Alden & Harlow were the architects of this classically symmetrical school, which was built in 1926. Alden had died in 1908, and Harlow had only another year to live (he died in 1927); it seems that by this time much of the design work in the firm was done by Howard K. Jones. The school now is kept in good shape as the home of various community services.
The 1920s were in the middle of the golden age of terra-cotta ornament.
The architects had a typically Pittsburghish lot to deal with, so the school has four floors above ground on the Wallace Avenue front and two in the rear on North Avenue.
The North Avenue entrance is reached by a bridge over a sort of trench that exposes the windows of the floor below.
Old Pa Pitt knows nothing about this little bank except that it was built in about 1921. Its classical style is designed to say “bank” as soon as you see the building.
Those spindly Corinthian columns at the entrance look like an afterthought. Father Pitt imagines the architect presenting his clean and dignified plans to the client, who immediately points and says, “Where are the columns? It’s a bank, for Pete’s sake.”
Vrydaugh & Wolfe, famous for churches and millionaires’ mansions, were the architects of this tiny bank, built in 1904. Newspaper stories of the time seem to tell a tale of contracted ambition, and it is probable that the building as it stands was meant to have more floors added as the bank prospered. (Instead, in the late 1920s, the bank built a much larger building across the street and down the block a bit, and then shortly after that failed in the great bank massacre of the early Depression.)
In January of 1904, we read that the Franklin Savings and Trust Company was planning a $30,000 four-story building on its newly purchased lot1. But just four and a half months later, in the middle of May, we read that the bank had occupied its new building, which had cost $20,000 and had only one floor.2 It was fairly common in those days to plan a building so that it would support additional floors when they were needed, and old Pa Pitt suspects that is what happened here: the bank decided it would be prudent to save some money for the moment. Perhaps the luxurious interior appointments of mahogany and marble had cost more than the directors had anticipated.
The result was a little bank that looks almost as if it could be towed away by a large truck. But the pediment over the entrance and the arched windows (now filled in and muraled over, except for the shrunken one in front) would have given it a prosperously bankish look.
Columbia Hospital merged with Pittsburgh Hospital and East Suburban General in Monroeville to form Forbes Health System. The location in Wilkinsburg closed some years ago, but unlike some other large buildings in Wilkinsburg, this complex found new uses. The largest part is a nursing home, and several other businesses and services occupy smaller sections.
The original hospital buildings were designed by John Lewis Beatty, whom we have met before mostly as a designer of Protestant churches. They are faced with a very attractive cinnamon brick that is actually made up of randomly assorted but related shades.
If we walk around to the forgotten back alley behind the hospital, we discover the old abandoned emergency entrance. We can also see some more of the older buildings in the complex.
In 1956, the hospital announced a big new addition and planned to raise a million and a half to pay for it. The architects were Prack & Prack, longtime specialists in large industrial and institutional buildings.
