Built in 1850 for the borough of Birmingham, this is the oldest public-school building left in the city of Pittsburgh. It was built in the still-fashionable Greek Revival style, and it originally had a cupola in which the Birmingham town clock was installed. It remained a school of some sort until 1960; then it was sold to be used as a warehouse. In 1997 it was converted into lofts by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson, who has left a trail of beautiful restorations wherever she went.
Note the identical but separate entrances. As in many mid-nineteenth-century schools, one was for girls and one was for boys.
If your eye detects a not-very-subtle difference between the name “Bedford” and the rest of the inscription, you can tell your eye that it is because the old Birmingham Public School No. 1 was renamed after Birmingham was taken into the city of Pittsburgh in 1872. The name “Bedford” honors Dr. Nathaniel Bedford, who had been a surgeon at Fort Pitt before the Revolution, and later laid out the borough of Birmingham on his wife’s family’s land.
The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was founded as part of the University of Pittsburgh, and this was its home for the first two decades of its life. When the Mellon Institute declared its independence, it moved to its palatial quarters out Fifth Avenue, and the old Mellon Institute building became Allen Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.
The building, which opened in 1915, was designed by J. H. Giesy, and it was properly classical to match Henry Hornbostel’s slightly mad plan of making the University a new Athenian Acropolis in Pittsburgh. (The plan was later abandoned in favor of Charles Z. Klauder’̑s much madder plan of a skyscraper university.)
The richly detailed bronze doors are unique.
The building is precisely located for the best vista up Thackeray Street.
Here is a picture of the building when it was new in 1915:
And old Pa Pitt has duplicated that picture for you in 2022, because that is the kind of effort he puts into serving his readers:
Nothing about the exterior has changed except the plantings, and even those have been reduced to show off the building: a few years ago much of the front was obscured by trees.
The Maul Building, built in 1910, was designed by the William G. Wilkins Company, the same architects who did the Frick & Lindsay building (now the Andy Warhol Museum). Both buildings are faced with terra cotta, and both lost their cornices—the one on the Andy Warhol Museum has been carefully reconstructed from pictures, but the one here is just missing. The rest of the decorations, though, are still splendid.
Old Engineering Hall at the University of Pittsburgh is a fairly successful marriage of modernism and classicism. It is almost postmodern avant la lettre, with classically inspired details but a shape that owes nothing to the classical world. It was built in 1955, when it was still common for modernist buildings to apologize for themselves by including a few dentils and a suggestion of a Greek-key frieze. This was Engineering Hall for only about fifteen years; the School of Engineering moved out in 1971 (into the uncompromisingly modern Benedum Hall), and since then this building has been put to such miscellaneous uses that the university has never been able to come up with a better name for it than “that building that used to be Engineering Hall.”
This fine little Renaissance palace, built in 1896, was the first of Carnegie’s branch libraries, and thus arguably the vanguard of the whole idea of branch libraries. It was also the first public library with open stacks, where patrons would just walk to the shelf and pick up the book by themselves. In other libraries—including much of the main Carnegie in Oakland until a few years ago—the patron would ask for the book at the desk, and a librarian would run back to the mysterious stacks and fetch it.
Like all the original libraries in the Carnegie system, this was designed by Alden & Harlow.
This severely classical building was built in about 1925 to a design by architect Abram Garfield, the son of martyred president James A. Garfield, and it looks as though nothing could possibly set fire to it. It passed into the hands of the University of Pittsburgh in 1968, and is now known as Thackeray Hall.
This modest but tastefully classical bank was built in 1902. Notice how the front composition of larger arch flanked by two smaller arches is rhythmically repeated on the side.
Here are two very similar churches in the same block of Bingham Street, both from the 1850s, and both built with the sanctuary on the upper floor. In the middle 1800s, this was a common adaptation for churches in crowded neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and adjacent boroughs (Birmingham was still independent until 1872). Built on tiny lots, they needed space for Sunday-school rooms and social halls, but the sanctuary obviously needed a high ceiling or it would look and feel absurd. Thus the ground floor was left for the smaller rooms.
The church above was the Bingham United Methodist Church (built 1859), now the City Theatre. It is a generic church-shaped church with vaguely classical details, including rounded arches in the windows. The same shape could be given details in any style; the church below is the First Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church of Birmingham (built 1854), with a very similar outline, but Gothic pointed arches in the windows. The windows along the sides are simple rectangles, and old Pa Pitt suspects that the 14th Street end was Gothicized at some time in the later 1800s.
The name “First Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church of Birmingham” is too long to fit on a date stone.
Boston ivy is eagerly devouring the entrance, so it is hard to see that this arch is also pointed.
When this article appeared, Joseph Moore commented:
Are those really the main doors for the Presbyterian Church? Very plain – look more like a loading doc than the entrance to a church, even a Calvinist one. The United Methodist Church has the architectural articulation one would expect for the main doors for a church.
We replied:
The main entrance might have been on the long side on Bingham Street, where the garage door is now. On the other hand, the Gothic arch with columns on the end (and the very interesting woodwork on the doors) does suggest that someone intended it as a main entrance. On the third hand, one would expect more natural light in a main entrance, which would probably have led into a foyer with a stairway (or a pair of stairways, as in the South Side Presbyterian Church). And on the fourth hand, it is possible that windows flanking the entrance have been bricked up. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to persuade himself that the brickwork is all original, and he has not been able to persuade himself that it is not. And on the fifth hand (we might as well be an octopus by now), Father Pitt has not been inside this building; it is possible that the whole front is a stairwell, in which case the large Gothic windows would provide ample light.
This was one of the small number of articles that did not survive the transition between servers, so it had to be reconstructed and the comments copied by brute force.
