Lamont Button, who made a specialty of high-class houses for the higher classes, designed this club for university women, which opened in about 1932. “It is planned to provide rooms on the second and third floors for college girls working in the city,” the Press reported. “The first floor will have a large social hall and tearoom. In the basement will be a main dining room and several smaller dining rooms. An auditorium seating 470 will be included in the plans.”
Today the building belongs to Pitt, but on the outside it has hardly changed from Button’s elegant design—a simplified, modernized Georgian that could hardly look out of place anywhere, and fits perfectly in the wildly diverse Craig Street streetscape.
If you had asked Pittsburghers a century ago what kind of neighborhood Bloomfield was, they would have told you it was a very German neighborhood, with a few Irish mixed in, and a little pocket of Italians starting to move in back near the tracks. Go back a bit further, into the late 1800s, and hardly an Italian name is to be seen among the property owners.
Here is a uniquely well-preserved relic of German Bloomfield, whose date stone tells is that it was built in 1882 as the Baum German Evangelical Protestant Congregation. It now belongs to a charity called Shepherd Wellness Community that keeps it in beautiful shape.
Now, if we turn around and look up the street, we’ll find something else uniquely well preserved in a different way.
This building has seen layers and layers of renovations and alterations, but it goes back to the 1880s, if we read our old maps right. It appears on an 1890 map as the Bloomfield Liedr. S. Society, and on a map from a decade later under the fuller name Bloomfield Lieder-Tafel Singing Society. And if you look on Google Maps, you will find that it still appears as the Bloomfield Liedertafel Singing Society. It is still a private club devoted to music—a social relic of German Bloomfield, still in its original building.
The Maya produced some of the great architectural geniuses of the ancient world. In 1907, the architect Henry Hornbostel made a trip to Yucatan, where he was one of the first people to photograph the ancient Maya structures. In 1938, when he was director of parks for Allegheny County, Hornbostel produced this startling corbeled arch—a distinctive feature of Maya architecture—for the golf clubhouse in South Park.
Reliefs cleverly assembled from bricks show men and women having fun on the golf course. When old Pa Pitt visited, the men playing golf outnumbered women by at least ten to one, but in these reliefs the sexes come in equal numbers. In half the men swing and the women watch, and in the other half vice versa.
The interior decorations continue the abstract-Maya theme.
In his much-quoted talk on “American Style,” the eccentric genius and flimflam artist Titus de Bobula advised his fellow architects, “Go back to our own archeological excavations of Yucatan and Mexico,” where they would find inspiration for a truly American style. He earned some applause, but only a very few American architects followed that advice, producing a small treasury of “Mayan Revival” architecture. This may be the only unambiguous example in Pittsburgh. It took Hornbostel three decades from the time he visited Yucatan to the time he drew this Maya-inspired building, and it was at the end of his career. Perhaps the Maya style was too adventurous for Pittsburgh. But it gave us this one memorable clubhouse, and we can be thankful for that.
Men’s clubs live in terror of windows, which they gradually block up with glass blocks, bricks, or whatever else is handy. But the outlines of this dignified clubhouse remain as the architect drew them. It was designed in 1924 by Edward B. Lee, replacing an earlier lodge (designed by William E. Snaman) that had been destroyed by fire.
The style is noticeably similar to the style of the Americus Republican Club, also by Lee. The buildings are radically different shapes, but Lee applied the same design vocabulary to make both clubs look respectable in their different locations.
Some of the very few small houses left in downtown Pittsburgh were taken over in 1930 by the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club, which hired big-deal architect Edward B. Lee to transform them into an elegant clubhouse. The club survives, having absorbed two of Pittsburgh’s most prestigious other clubs—the Pittsburgh Club and the Allegheny Club—to become the Allegheny HYP Club. We note also that the club survived the construction of the Alcoa Building, which has a notch cut out in the back to accommodate its small but powerful neighbor.
Edward B. Lee designed this clubhouse for the Americus Republican Club in a lush Georgian style. It was built in 1918, and it spans the whole (very short) block from the Boulevard of the Allies to Third Avenue. Since the club moved out, this has been known as the Pitt Building.
Old Pa Pitt thinks the off-center pediment is an interesting choice for neo-Georgian architecture. It would not have occurred to him if he had been the architect, but the expected symmetry would probably have made a duller façade.
Update: A correspondent points out that Second Avenue was widened into a boulevard in 1921, and it was done by trimming, moving, or demolishing buildings on the north side of the street. One large building was moved back forty feet. Forty feet would be just enough to account for the asymmetry of this façade. E. B. Lee would have been available to supervise the alterations, but the building’s current form would represent the best he could do under adverse circumstances, not his original grand vision for the Americus Club.
Father Pitt does not know the history of this building, and would be delighted to be informed. A real-estate site says it was built in 1920 (Update: The correct date is 1912 or 1913; see below). It is residential now, but it has the look of a club. That impression is strengthened by the brickwork double-headed eagle at the peak of the Ella Street front. Old Pa Pitt is ashamed to admit that he didn’t notice the eagle when he hurriedly snapped these pictures on his way between the Ukrainian National Home and St. Mark’s School, but you can see it pretty well if you enlarge the picture above, and it is a clever bit of bricklaying. The eagle’s heads seem to be sharing some sort of military cap. Was this an Albanian or Serbian club? (Update: We have heard from the McKees Rocks Historical Society that this was indeed Serbian, which explains the double eagle. And another update: The architect was McKees Rocks’ own John H. Phillips; the building was put up in 1912 or shortly after.)
The windows were arched originally; the arches have been bricked in so that the windows could be replaced with cheap stock models.
The two-storey section at the rear is a later addition, after 1923 to judge by old maps; it may have been added when the club was converted to a residence. The bricks are carefully matched to make the link between the parts seamless. The tops of the doorways, however, seem to have been bricked in at different times, one of them with almost-but-not-quite-matching brown bricks, and the other with ordinary red bricks.
Father Pitt would like to introduce you to an architect you’ve never heard of, but one who merits your attention: John H. Phillips, who kept his office in McKees Rocks, and about whose personal life old Pa Pitt knows absolutely nothing.
When we speak of the early modernists in Pittsburgh—the architects before 1920 or so who adopted the idioms of Art Nouveau and related movements—we generally have a very short list: Frederick Scheibler, Kiehnel & Elliott, and the incomparable Titus de Bobula, the man who gave up his promising career as an architect because he would rather be a millionaire playboy Nazi dictator. Now Father Pitt proposes to add the name of John H. Phillips to that list. Here is the Ukrainian National Home, built in 1913 in a shockingly unconventional style.
We have to use our imagination to see the building with the colossal windows the architect designed to flood the building with light, because men’s clubs in Pittsburgh always block in their windows. But the outlines of the building are unaltered, and the ornamental brickwork is remarkable. Note in particular those squares above downward-pointing triangles at the entrance: they will reappear on other Phillips buildings, almost like a signature.
Where did this obscure architect get his Art Nouveau style? There could be any number of explanations, but Father Pitt suspects that Phillips took a lot of inspiration from Titus de Bobula. We will see some evidence for that speculation when we come to Phillips’ most prominent work in the McKees Rocks Bottoms, Holy Ghost Church. Meanwhile, this extraordinary building may serve as John H. Phillips’ initiation into the exclusive little club of early modernists in Pittsburgh.
This Romanesque—or shall we say Rundbogenstil? Because we like to say “Rundbogenstil”—firehouse was built for the city of Allegheny, probably in the 1890s to judge by our old maps. The alterations since then can be explained by the fact that a firehouse is basically a men’s club, and men’s clubs in Pittsburgh gradually fill in their windows and block as much natural light as they can. It does make one wonder what they expect to do with that tower now, but perhaps firemen have secret initiation rituals for which a dark tower is the ideal setting.
This little clubhouse on a narrow back street is modest to the point of shyness: you can walk right past and never notice it, partly because of the well-grown tree in front, but mostly because it is a good citizen of the streetscape. Yet it rewards a closer look. It was built in about 1914 to an Arts-and-Craftsy Spanish Mission design by Edward B. Lang. In the Construction Record, it is credited to E. M. Lang. The address, however, is right for Edward B. Lang; and that magazine is so full of misprints that one often finds an architect’s name spelled three different ways on the same page.
Edward Lang is an architect who is not much spoken of these days, but he had some significant buildings to his credit—St. Mark’s Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms and the Passionist convent in Carrick, to name two. The firm of Edward Lang and Brother was quite productive in the southern city neighborhoods, the Brother being Herman Lang, who is credited with St. George’s Church in Allentown and St. Basil’s in Carrick, among many others.
For readers who are interested, here is an example of the kind of detective work old Pa Pitt does for you. Why would someone write “E. M. Lang” instead of “E. B. Lang”? The answer is obvious when we remember that the Linotype was by far the most popular machine for typesetting periodicals. The Linotype has its own keyboard arrangement, and the M and B are right next to each other, where a fumblefingered typesetter can easily hit one for the other.
