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.
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First National Bank, Indiana
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Midtown Building, Indiana
With five floors in a base-shaft-cap formula, this imposing classical building is the closest thing downtown Indiana has to a traditional skyscraper.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Carl Building (Shields Building), Wilkinsburg
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.
Pittsburgh Gazette, April 12, 1902, p. 8. 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.
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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Horner School, Wilkinsburg
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.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. The North Avenue entrance is reached by a bridge over a sort of trench that exposes the windows of the floor below.
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Swissvale Trust Company
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.”
Sony Alpha 3000; Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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Old Franklin Savings & Trust Co., Strip
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.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. 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.
- “Eastern Men to Build Apartments,” Gazette, January 16, 1904, p. 13: “Through the Commonwealth Real Estate and Trust Company the Franklin Savings and Trust Company has purchased the J. W. Roberts property at the southwest corner of Penn avenue and Twenty-first streets for $13,000. The lot measures 24×57 feet and is improved with a two-story brick building. As this is the first sale in this immediate locality since the boom last spring, it is interesting to note the price paid, $541 a front foot or $9.50 a square foot. The purchasing company has had plans prepared by Architects Vrydaugh & Wolfe for a four-story brick and terra cotta building to be erected in the spring at a cost of $30,000.” ↩︎
- “Trust Company at Home,” Press, May 5, 1904, p. 8: “The new building of the Franklin Savings & Trust Co., at 2850 Penn avenue, was occupied for the first time this morning. It is a one-story buff brick and stone structure and was erected at a cost of $20,000. The interior of the new bank is finished in mahogany and marble.” ↩︎
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Columbia Hospital, Wilkinsburg
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.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR. 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.
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Larimer School
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.
Photo by Leepaxton at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. 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.
Sony Alpha 3000, Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S9.
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Old St. Joseph’s School and Convent, Manchester
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.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Alpha Apartments, Homewood
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.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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