This glorious Renaissance palace was built in 1910; the architect was Thomas Hannah, who also gave us the Keenan Building. It is now a hotel.
Addendum: Here is a picture of the building when it was freshly built, from the June 1914 issue of The Builder, which is devoted to works of Thomas Hannah. The long side faced open space in those days.
This rich little Beaux-Arts bank on Carson Street at 18th Street was built in 1902. We have a daylight picture of the Peoples Trust Company of Pittsburgh building from the same angle.
Built in 1904 as the First Congregational Church, this building had a surprisingly short life with its original congregation; the Congregationalists left in 1921, and the Greek Orthodox congregation bought it in 1923. The church became a cathedral when Pittsburgh was elevated to a diocese. The architect was Thomas Hannah, who was at home in both classical and Gothic idioms. Here he went all in for classical, producing an ostentatiously Ionic front that looks like a Greek temple—which, oddly, is a style a Greek Orthodox congregation would never choose for its church if it were building one from scratch.
This beautiful building has a long and varied history. It seems to have been built a little before 1910 by a dry-cleaning company.1 After a while the East Liberty Chamber of Commerce moved in to preside over the slow decline of East Liberty. In 2001, when the East Liberty revival was barely beginning, the Werner Building became a performance-art space. Now, with East Liberty booming, it’s a profitable property.
The metalwork on top supported a billboard where artists spelled out messages, but in 2018 one artist posted a message so offensive that the building’s owner had it removed and shut down the billboard scheme. What was this offensive message? “THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE.” That was all. Father Pitt can only say that, if you are offended by the idea that there are Black people in the future, then you can go off and get yourself your own future, because old Pa Pitt does not want to be part of it.
The whole building is lavishly festooned with terra cotta and stained glass.
Update: Once in a while old Pa Pitt has a chance to boast about his architectural instincts, and here is one of those occasions. In the original article, he wrote that he suspected Edward B Lee of having designed the remodeling of the theater into an office building. He was right. Source: The American Contractor, December 15, 1923: “Store & Office Bldg. (remod. from theater): $150,000. 5 sty. & bas. H. tile. Liberty av. & Strawberry Alley. Archt. E. B. Lee, Chamber of Commerce bldg. Owner The Fidelity Title & Trust Co., Wilson A. Shaw, chrm. of bd., 343 Fourth av. Gen. contr. let to Cuthbert Bros., Bessemer bldg.”
The original text of Father Pitt’s article follows.
Edward B. Lee was the architect of the Liberty Theater—or Theatre, as theatrical people often insist on spelling it—when it was built in 1912. These pictures were published in The Brickbuilder in 1913, so they show the theater as it was when it was new. Either the theater failed or the owners decided it would be more profitable as an office building, because only eleven years later, in 1924,1 it was remodeled into the Baum Building, and it still stands today.
The shell and outlines are the same, but quite a bit was changed externally. Old Pa Pitt suspects that Lee was the architect of these changes, too, and they were accomplished so elegantly that we would never know the building had not been planned that way from the beginning.
These small drawings (orchestra, first balcony, second balcony) show the aggressive adaptations Mr. Lee had to make to the irregular shape of the lot—a common difficulty for buildings on the southeast side of Liberty Avenue, where the two grids of the irrationally rationalistic eighteenth-century street plan collide.
Detail over the entrance. These decorations disappeared when the building was converted to offices.
Corner detail. The cornice and pilasters survive, but the elaborate terra-cotta decoration between the pilasters vanished in 1924.
This block-long palace is a startlingly imposing building to run across in the residential back streets of Shadyside. The dwellers in the houses surrounding it must feel a glow of confidence knowing they are well protected should the Prussians invade. The building was designed by the W. G. Wilkins Company, also responsible for the Maul Building and the Frick & Lindsay Company Building (now the Andy Warhol Museum). It opened in 1916.
Detroit architect Peter Dederichs gave us this gorgeous Renaissance basilica, which is crammed into an absurdly tiny space at the foot of the bluff in Sharpsburg. The exterior hasn’t changed in any significant way since the building went up in 1916, as we can see in a cover story in Stone magazine from February of 1919. In that story we learn that the stone was Dark Hollow Gray Bedford limestone from Indiana, and it has stood up perfectly to more than a century of Pittsburgh atmosphere.
The foundation of the congregation.
The building of the church.
Capitals of the Corinthian order.
The apse, and an especially lush growth of utility cables.
Looking toward the church on Penn Street.
Henry Hornbostel’s drawing of the south façade of the School of Mines Building, later State Hall. It was demolished in 1973 to make way for the Chevron Science Center, and perhaps someone thinks that was an improvement.
This drawing was published in 1909 in The Brickbuilder, an architectural magazine from which we’ll harvest more illustrations in the future.
Father Pitt believes this is one of the buildings designed for Mercy Hospital by Edward Stotz, but would be happy to be corrected.
It would be interesting to know who was the architect of this eclectic pile, and whether he was the nephew of the burgess. It might have been more attractive before the bricks and stone accents were painted the drabbest possible grey, but it was probably never a beautiful building. It has, however, grown some character with age, and old Pa Pitt is pleased that it has been fairly well preserved, except for the installation of some standard-size windows and doors in holes that are too big for them.
This stonework reminds Father Pitt of Titus de Bobula.
