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.
For forty years this school stood abandoned and rotting. The main building, put up in 1896, was designed by Ulysses J. Lincoln Peoples, who also designed an addition in 1904 for the rapidly growing neighborhood. An auditorium-gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland in 1931. The school closed in 1980, and then it just sat while the neighborhood crumbled around it.
This is how the school looked in 2011, when the indefatigable Lee Paxton, who photographed nearly every Pittsburgh landmark for Wikipedia, stopped to snap its picture. But look at that same Larimer Avenue façade today:
Doesn’t that make you happy?
The restoration was done as part of the huge Cornerstone Village housing development, a mixed-housing community that has brought attractive new housing to long-neglected Larimer. All the beautiful details that Mr. Peoples, Mr. Rowland, and dozens of nameless craftsmen left for us have been scrupulously preserved, cleaned, and made to look almost new.
This is the Larimer Avenue end of the building, which has a grand entrance—but not the grandest entrance.
Around the corner on Winslow Street is the original main entrance to the 1896 building.
But even this is not the grandest entrance.
In 1904, an addition was built to the southeast of the main building. A new entrance was built linking the main building to the addition, and this is the grandest entrance.
When he was heading for Larimer, old Pa Pitt somehow walked out of the house without any long lenses. He will have to return soon to pick out those very amusing bracket heads, which he suspects were done by the same sculptor who did the whimsical decorations for the Western Theological Seminary. But the picture above is 20 megapixels, so if you enlarge it you will see a fair amount of detail. You will also see raindrops, because it was raining by the time Father Pitt got to the school, but he was not going to let mere weather deter him.
The child on the right is regrettably not the first or last to have lost his head when he went to school.
In 1931, an auditorium and gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland. By that time styles had changed considerably. Rowland stuck to the classical idiom, but chose the simpler Doric order rather than the more florid Ionic and Corinthian of the original school and addition, and flavored the front with a dash of Art Deco.
The newer Saint Joseph School was built just after the Second World War; this one, however, predates St. Joseph’s Church. Old maps show a frame building here in 1882, and a brick one of the same dimensions in 1890; either this building replaced an older one at some point in the 1880s, or the frame building was shrouded in brick. The restrained classicism is unusual for the era; old Pa Pitt does not know how much the building has changed from its original state.
This apartment building with Renaissance details was built in about 1905. The architect was A. E. Linkenheimer,1 about whom old Pa Pitt knows very little so far.
The name of the building is interesting, because it is the name of a project that was planned at about the same time nearby at the intersection of Penn and East End Avenues, where Titus de Bobula was to supervise an immense $600,000 Alpha Apartment Hotel. That project fell through; at the moment Father Pitt does not know that the name was anything more than coincidence.
This building is under sentence of condemnation, but it does not appear to be in such bad shape that it could not be rescued. Homewood is not rich, but there has been some renovation going on in nearby streets.
The Braddock Avenue side has its own neatly symmetrical façade.
A banking palace from the 1890s, with the ground floor still in use as a bank. The style is classical on the ground floor but Romanesque above; we suspect the ground floor may be a later alteration. Father Pitt does not know the architect yet. L. A. Raisig, a successful architect and builder who designed many buildings in Wilkinsburg, kept his office here, so it is possible that he designed the building.
Dedicated in 1901, this was an institution created by and for Black women, though it had financial support from some of Pittsburgh’s wealthy White families. After the Home closed, it was a Baptist church for a while; but now it is vacant and slowly decaying. We hope something can be done to rescue it, because it has a fascinating story to tell—in fact, many fascinating stories.
The home was a comfortable place for women who had no family to support them: it had beautiful appointments inside and spacious grounds outside. A long article in the Pittsburg Post for August 25, 1901, described the institution and its new home, and introduced us to some of the ladies who would be living there. We’ll transcribe the whole article down below the pictures.
Thomas Scott designed this palatial waterworks, which stands in a little enclave of the city of Pittsburgh on the north shore of the Allegheny just outside Aspinwall. As he did with the Mission Pumping Station on the South Side Slopes, he decorated this one with elaborate grotesque heads and other classical effusions.
Impressive fat columns tell us that this is a colossal building even if we’re too close to see how colossal it really is. The architect was Daniel “Make No Little Plans” Burnham.
