There is often a greeter standing in the lobby of the main Carnegie Library in Oakland to say “Welcome to the Library” to every patron who walks through the door. But even when the greeter isn’t greeting, the building itself conveys the same message.
Ornate light fixtures hang in the vestibule and lobby.
Press C. Dowler, prolific architect of schools, banks, and telephone exchanges, designed this solid-looking classical bank, and the Pittsburgh Daily Post tells us that the opening (October 10, 1021) was a gala occasion.
The building no longer houses a bank, but almost nothing about the exterior has changed since that opening day, except that the big windows may not originally have been filled in with glass block.
A look down the Mill Street side of the bank, with the Ohio Valley Trust Company building in the background.
Mill Street does not meet Fifth Avenue at exactly a right angle, which leaves room for this curious triangular pit with a basement entrance.
A lantern on the front of the building.
A picture on a sunny day.
Three apartment buildings on Holden Street at the corner of Summerlea Street. The Delwood has lost its cornice, but otherwise they look much the way they were drawn by Perry & Thomas, the prolific Chicago architects who gave us many apartment buildings in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill.
Thomas Scott, who lived around the corner and designed some of the neighborhood’s best houses, was the architect of this Beaux Arts gem in the heart of the Allegheny West business district.1
Scott was also the architect of the Benedum-Trees Building, and we can see the same extravagant but tasteful elaboration of ornament here on a smaller scale.
Shoved against the hillside in Coraopolis, the old borough municipal building gains a floor’s worth of height from back to front. It had all the borough government services under one roof, including the police and fire departments. It now belongs to “Fabricator’s Forge,” a hobby and gaming emporium.
The Art Deco tiles on the fire tower make us suspect it was built or rebuilt later than the rest of the building.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm PinePix HS10.
This building was put up in two stages. It was built in 1902 as a seven-story building; two years later six more floors were added. Originally it had a cornice and a Renaissance-style parapet at the top, without which it looks a little unfinished.
From The Builder, April 1904. The architect, as we see in the caption, was James T. Steen, who had a thriving practice designing all sorts of buildings, including many prominent commercial blocks downtown. This was probably his largest project.
A small but very rich classical bank still in use as a bank.
The clock suggests that the bankers will consult an astrologer before investing your money.
Stock-photo sites will charge you good money for patently metaphorical pictures like these. Yet old Pa Pitt gives them to you for free, released with a CC0 public-domain donation, so there are no restrictions on what you can do with them.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285 (HDR stacks of three photographs); Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
A look behind the Post Office and Courts building, now the Joseph F. Weis U. S. Courthouse, shows how the building (originally designed by Trowbridge & Livingston, who also designed the Gulf Building across the street) was expanded in the early 2000s by filling in the light courts with surprisingly unobtrusive glass additions.
The Penn Avenue front is now a restaurant, but it would not be hard to guess from the Ninth Street side that this used to be a bank: the National Bank of Western Pennsylvania. Addendum: The architects were George S. Orth & Brother; the bank was built in about 1897.1
At the corner of Seventh Avenue and William Penn Place is a complicated and confused nest of buildings that belonged to the Bell Telephone Company. They are the product of a series of constructions and expansions supervised by different architects. This is the biggest of the lot, currently the 25th-tallest skyscraper in Pittsburgh, counting the nearly completed FNB Financial Center in the list.
The group started with the original Telephone Building, designed by Frederick Osterling in Romanesque style. Behind that, and now visible only from a tiny narrow alley, is an addition, probably larger than the original building, designed by Alden & Harlow. Last came this building, which wraps around the other two in an L shape; it was built in 1923 and designed by James T. Windrim, Bell of Pennsylvania’s court architect at the time, and the probable designer of all those Renaissance-palace telephone exchanges you see in city neighborhoods. The style is straightforward classicism that looks back to the Beaux Arts skyscrapers of the previous generation and forward to the streamlined towers that would soon sprout nearby.
Hidden from most people’s view is a charming arcade along Strawberry Way behind the building.
