Father Pitt

Tag: Classical Architecture

Gimbels Building

This was built in 1914 as the Kaufmann & Baer Department Store, the Kaufmanns in the name being brothers of the Morris Kaufmann who owned the Big Store two blocks away. It was bought out by the Gimbel Brothers eleven years later, and for generations of Pittsburghers this was the Gimbels Building. Its name is now officially Heinz 57 Center, but most people still call it the Gimbels Building. The architects, Starrett & van Vleck, were specialists in department stores from New York.

Acres of terra cotta went into decorating the Smithfield Street and Sixth Avenue faces of this building.

And of course there was the clock. It was not as famous or elaborate as the Kaufmann’s clock, but it was another good place to meet someone downtown. This is obviously a good bit more recent than the building itself: it has a streamlined Art Deco look.

November 30, 2023
The Old Horne’s

Not the one with the Christmas tree, but the one before that. Horne’s was Pittsburgh’s first department store, and in 1880 the already-well-established Joseph Horne Company built this grand mercantile palace. It was Horne’s for only about seventeen years: in 1897, the department store moved to its much larger location at Penn Avenue and Stanwix Street, where it would stay for almost a century. After that, the Pittsburgh Post moved into this building, and later the Sun as well, when they were under the same ownership.

The Wikipedia article on the Joseph Horne Company is a mess, and old Pa Pitt ought to work on rewriting it, except that it would require extensive research. Among other things, it tells us (without citing a source) that this building was built in 1881 (which may be when it opened) and was designed by Charles Tattersall Ingham, who would have been four years old when he designed it. Decent work for a four-year-old. However…

The lower floors got a complete makeover in 1920, when the building was a newspaper headquarters, and that part of the building is in the trademark Ingham & Boyd style: rigorously symmetrical, with meticulously correct classical detailing. Charles Tattersall Ingham would have been 44 years old then, right in the middle of a prosperous career. Old Pa Pitt will therefore tentatively attribute that 1920 remodeling to Ingham & Boyd.

Do you have plans for a luxury-apartment project downtown? Here is your opportunity. Everyone else is doing it.

November 28, 2023
Westinghouse High School, Homewood

Possibly more famous people, and especially musicians, have gone to Westinghouse than to any other high school in Pittsburgh. We might compare it to the famous Austin High in Chicago for the number of great jazz lights who came out of it—and arguably the ones from Westinghouse have been more influential. So far only Billy Strayhorn has a historical marker outside the school, but there’s room for a forest of markers, or—since this is an Ingham & Boyd school—an orderly orchard of markers.

Ingham & Boyd designed the building in their usual severely classical and ruthlessly symmetrical style. When you walk in these doors, you know you are entering something important, and even the Bulldog banners cannot diminish the formality of it.

The two mottoes inscribed on the front of the school fit perfectly with the architecture. Mottoes and style convey the same message: there is one standard of absolute truth, and you will enter into the truth here.

November 28, 2023
St. Vincent de Paul School, Esplen

The church and other buildings of the parish are long gone, but this little parochial school is still standing in Esplen, a neighborhood few Pittsburghers ever think of. For a while the building belonged to a nondenominational church, but that does not seem to be active anymore. We hope the building can be preserved, since it is one of the few substantial structures in what is otherwise a neighborhood of frame houses and, increasingly, vacant lots.

This cross looks like an afterthought, as though someone worried that the building looked too much like a conventional public school—which it does—and decided that something had to be done to distinguish it as Catholic.

A later addition included a porte cochère, which must have been a blessing to pupils arriving by car in the rain. It bears unconscious testimony to the facts of religious life in the later twentieth century: increasingly, ethnic parishes were no longer serving parishioners in their own neighborhoods (all of Esplen is within walking distance of this school), but rather people who had moved to the suburbs and had to drive in to church or school. The next obvious step is that they stop driving in to church or school, and find themselves a parish in the suburbs.

November 27, 2023
Oliver Building

The Oliver Building, designed by Daniel Burnham, was the tallest building in Pittsburgh when it was put up in 1910, passing Alden & Harlow’s Farmer’s Bank Building (destroyed in 1997, or arguably thirty years earlier when it was given a fake-modern skin). Only two years later, though, it was passed by Daniel Burnham’s own First National Bank Building (destroyed in 1968 to make way for a modernist skyscraper barely any taller).

The front of the Oliver Building still produces an impression of absolute massiveness, spanning an entire block with a 348-foot-tall wall. The rear, on the other hand, is where the light wells are, which divide the building into three narrower towers, changing the impression to one of loftiness rather than massiveness.

Your eyes are not being fooled by a trick of perspective: the section on the right really does extend a little further toward us than the other two.

November 18, 2023
Mission Pumping Station, South Side Slopes
Imagine the uproar that would ensue if your city government today decided to hire a Beaux-Arts master like Thomas Scott to design a monumental palace for such a utilitarian purpose as a water-pumping station. Imagine the inquiries that would probe the vital questions of how much each of those carved faces cost and why stone trim was used when the same object could be accomplished with aluminum. The world has made a lot of progress since Scott, architect of the Benedum-Trees Building downtown (where he kept his architectural office, naturally), gave us this $100,000 pumping station on an out-of-the-way street on the South Side Slopes.¹

There were doubtless security reasons for bricking in the towering windows that used to flood the place with light. But Father Pitt cannot help suspecting that the real reason is that the workers here constituted a sort of men’s club, and men’s clubs in Pittsburgh abhor natural light.

Even in November, much of the building is obscured by trees.
1. Our source is the Construction Record, March 4, 1911: “The City of Pittsburg, Bureau of Water, will receive estimates until March 13th, on constructing a one-story brick, terra cotta and steel pumping station on Mission street, South Side, to cost $100,000. Plans were drawn by Architect T. H. Scott, Machesney building, and contract for foundation work was awarded to M. O’Herron & Co., First and McKean streets, South Side.” The Machesney Building was the original name of the Benedum-Trees Building. ↩︎
November 8, 2023
South Side Electric Light Plant

When the Duquesne Light Company invaded residential neighborhoods to plant its death-ray generators, the neighbors were likely to object. It would help the company’s image if the power substations were elegant constructions. This classical palace of voltage conveyed the message that your Duquesne Light Company was substantial, respectable, and benevolent. The big hole that was later cut out of the front on the right side conveys the message that we needed to put the death-ray cannon somewhere.

November 2, 2023
Back Corner of Soldiers and Sailors Hall

Seen from the corner of O’Hara Street and University Place.

October 30, 2023
Entrance to the Kinder Building, Allegheny West

The Kinder Building is a little Beaux-Arts masterpiece at the corner of Western Avenue and Galveston Avenue. At night its carefully balanced classical entrance takes on a pleasing air of mystery.

October 29, 2023
Henry Clay Frick Training School for Teachers

Ingham & Boyd designed a large number of school buildings in the city and suburbs, and they always gave the clients exactly the respectable school buildings they wanted. They were never embarrassingly out of date, nor were they embarrassingly modernistic. They were ornamented to exactly the right degree to say, “This is a building we spent money on.” The Ingham & Boyd brand of rectangular classicism is on full display in this building in Oakland, which is now the Pittsburgh Science & Technology Academy.

October 25, 2023