Father Pitt

Tag: Classical Architecture

Park Building

The sun was glaring and the shadows were deep, but as far as old Pa Pitt knows, these composite photographs are the only complete elevations of the Park Building on the Internet. Above, the Smithfield Street face; below, the Fifth Avenue face.

And, of course, the most striking feature of the building: the telamones that hold up the roof.

The Park Building, built in 1896, is Pittsburgh’s oldest extant skyscraper. (The Carnegie Building, demolished in 1952, was a year earlier.) George B. Post of New York was the architect, and he designed it in the florid Beaux Arts style that would also be usual in the earliest New York skyscrapers. Although it was damaged decades ago by an ill-conceived modernization, the basic outlines and much of the ornament are intact. It displays all the attributes of an early New York skyscraper—the attributes that became dogma for early skyscrapers across the country. (See “The Convention in Sky-Scrapers.”) And with good reason: a bunch of these skyscrapers may create a certain monotony in the skyline, but following the Beaux Arts skyscraper formula reliably produces a good-looking building.

“Form follows function,” as Louis Sullivan said. Modernist architects used that saying as a slogan (which probably annoyed Mr. Sullivan) meaning that the form of a building should express the structural functions of the parts. But the form of a Beaux Arts skyscraper expresses the social functions of its parts: it makes visible what different parts of the building do, in a way that modernist architecture often fails to accomplish.

The basic formula for early skyscrapers is base, shaft, and cap. “A convention of treating them as columns with a decorated capital, a long plain central shaft, and a heavier base, was early adopted,” as the Architectural Record said in 1903.

The base—usually the first two floors—is the public part of the building, where retail shops or banking halls and such things are located—where, in short, the public interacts with the main business of the building.

The shaft, which is usually a repeating pattern of windows and wall, is where the ordinary business offices of the skyscraper are located.

Up in the stratospheric heights of the cap are the very most important people—the princes of commerce, and the lackeys and flunkeys who attend to their needs.

Now look at the Park Building, and you will see that the third floor, though more or less part of the shaft, is outlined and set apart from the rest. This is the bosses’ floor, in which the important men who supervise what goes on downstairs are located.

Just by looking at the face of the building, you can tell what goes on in each of its parts, which is not true of a modernist glass box. Here the social functions of each floor are made visible in stone and brick. Although the form is not structural, in a human sense this is form following function.

March 20, 2024
William Penn Snyder House, Allegheny West

Designed by George Orth, this is—surprisingly—the only New-York-style brownstone palace in Pittsburgh. Here we see it at twilight.

March 18, 2024
Bank in Dormont

This building originally housed a bank, and was still a PNC branch until a few years ago. It was built in 1926, and it straddles the line between classical and Art Deco.

You know it’s a bank because it has a vomiting lion at the top of the building.

As with many banks, the elaborate stone front hides a building mostly clad in cheaper and more prosaic brick.

March 8, 2024
Sharpsburg Public School

Here is a hint for institutions finding themselves in possession of distinguished historic buildings that are crumbling a bit at the cornice: when the low-bidding contractor says, “Sure, I can fix that…”

…see what the second-lowest-bidding contractor has to offer.

The building is still in use as a school, now for special education. We note that it has been modified to suit the modern discovery that natural light poisons children’s blood.

March 4, 2024
St. Michael School, South Side

This little Slovak school, which opened in 1917, was designed by German-American architect Herman Lang, known for some splendid churches (notably St. George’s in Allentown and St. Basil’s in Carrick). He gave it a dignified and symmetrical façade that no one will ever see like this, because it faces a tiny narrow alley with room for one car to squeeze past the buildings on either side. It is impossible to photograph the school without resorting to trickery, but old Pa Pitt has never been above trickery. You will notice the seams if you enlarge this picture, but that is because this is one of the most impossible photographs Father Pitt has ever attempted.

The building is in good shape, having been turned into apartments, like almost every other school on the South Side.

The cornerstone was laid in 1916.

March 2, 2024
Refurbishing a Building in Dormont

After many years of a drab modern front on the first floor, this building on West Liberty Avenue has been given a makeover that brings the ground floor back to something more like the original look.

February 16, 2024
U. S. Post Office Entrance

The Post Office and Courthouse (now called the Joseph F. Weis, Jr. U.S. Courthouse) is Pittsburgh’s grandest monument of the style old Pa Pitt calls “American Fascist.” The post office was on the Seventh Avenue side; it has moved to Liberty Center, but the inscriptions are still here. The building was put up under Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, of whom it was often said that three presidents served under him. The architects were Trowbridge & Livingston, who also worked on some of Mellon’s private projects, like the Gulf Building across the street.

February 9, 2024
Colonial Place

Colonial Place is one of those tiny enclaves all built at once in which Shadyside abounds. This one was built in 1898, and it is unique in that the entrance is flanked by two grand mansions.

George S. Orth was the architect of almost all the houses in Colonial Place. (See if you can guess which house old Pa Pitt thinks was not part of the original plan.) Mr. Orth had a prosperous career designing mansions for the wealthy, as well as some large institutions like the School for Blind Children. But he seems to have been forgotten faster than most Pittsburgh architects. He died in 1918; ten years later, when the architect George Schwan died at 55, his obituary in the Charette had to remind readers who Orth was: “He [Schwan] was trained in the office of George S. Orth, old time architect of Pittsburgh…” That is all the more remarkable because the Charette was the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, of all groups the one that would be most likely to remember George S. Orth.

At any rate, Colonial Place is still a remarkably pleasant little street. The landscaping was done by E. H. Bachman, and the sycamores he planted still shade the street in summer and make a striking avenue in the winter with their stark white branches and trunks.

This mansion is currently the residence of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Pittsburgh.

This one is currently for sale, and you can tour the interior on Google Street View (push the “Browse Street View images” standing-figure button to reveal little blue dots all over the house).

January 21, 2024
Burke Building

Designed by John Chislett, our second resident professional architect (Benjamin Latrobe was our first), the Burke Building opened in 1836. It just missed the Great Fire nine years later, and it was substantial enough to remain valuable through the many booms that followed, so that it has survived to be the oldest building downtown outside Fort Pitt. That seems astonishing when we recollect that there had been a city here for 78 years before this building was put up, but flood and fire wiped away much of what came before, and prosperity destroyed the rest.

We are lucky to have the Burke Building. It is a particularly elegant example of Greek Revival design, and it manages to create a very rich appearance with minimal ornament. Young architects would do well to imitate it.

The Brookline Connection site has a page on the Burke Building with some interesting historical pictures.

January 16, 2024
Under the Rotunda at Penn Station

The rotunda of Penn Station is such a remarkable structure that it has its own separate listing with the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. The skylight is a fine example of abstract geometry in metalwork.

The current owners of the Pennsylvanian hate photographers and tourists who come up to see the rotunda, and post signs on the walk up to the rotunda warning that this is private property and no access beyond this point and, with dogged specificity, NO PROM PHOTOS. But old Pa Pitt walked up through the parking lot, taking pictures all the way, and therefore saw the signs only on the way back. Sorry about that, all ye fanatical upholders of the rights of private property, but these pictures have already been donated to Wikimedia Commons, so good luck getting them taken off line.

The four corners of the earth, or at least the four corners of the Pennsylvania Railroad, are represented on the four pillars of the rotunda.

“Pittsburg” was the official spelling, according to the United States Post Office, when the rotunda was built in 1900.

December 30, 2023