Father Pitt

Tag: Clubs

  • Central Turnverein, Oakland

    Central Turnverein

    A Turnverein (German for “gymnastics association”) was a German athletic club, many of which were scattered through the city. This was doubtless the most luxurious of the lot. It is now the Gardner Steel Conference Center of the University of Pittsburgh.

    Art Nouveau is rare in Pittsburgh, but here is a building that crosses Jugendstil with Prairie Style to produce a distinctive classical modernism. (The picture above is big: enlarge it to appreciate the delightful abstract decorative details.) It was finished in 1912, when Jugendstil was perhaps past its peak in Germany but was still adventurously modern here. The architects were Kiehnel and Elliott, who were more experimental in spirit than most Pittsburgh architects of the time. Richard Kiehnel was born in Germany and had absorbed Jugendstil at the source. The firm is actually more famous for its buildings in Florida; Kiehnel designed a Miami mansion for the president of Pittsburgh Steel, and it apparently made such an impression down there that Kiehnel and Elliott moved to Miami in 1922.

    Gardner Steel Conference Center

  • Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association, Oakland

    Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association

    If your club was prospering, you could have a clubhouse by Benno Janssen, Pittsburgh’s favorite club architect. Among the club buildings he designed that are still standing we may mention the Twentieth Century Club, the Keystone Athletic Club, the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, the Masonic Temple, and this one, a cultural and athletic center that was one of the ancestors of today’s Jewish Community Center. Like several of Janssen’s other club buildings, this one, built in 1924, takes the form of a Renaissance palace. The building now belongs to Pitt, of course, which calls it Bellefield Hall and still keeps up its splendid indoor swimming pool.

    Inscription

    The university has glassed in the huge arch that forms the main entrance; old Pa Pitt has ruthlessly manipulated this picture to bring the inscription out from behind the glass.

    Cartouche

    Father Pitt imagines the sculptor, having worked months to intertwine the letters Y, M, W, and H in this artistic cartouche, proudly presenting his work to Mr. Janssen and being told, “You left out the A.”

    With fountain in foreground

    A view of the building from Heinz Chapel’s new formal garden across the street.

  • Liberty Hall, South Side

    Update: Thanks to Donna Gunton (see the comment below), we know that this was a Polish hall often used for political meetings and other social events. In 1921, when the hall was built, Poland had just been reestablished as an independent country for the first time since 1795, so the name “Liberty Hall” must have occurred naturally to Polish immigrants.

    The original article is preserved below so that you can see how far old Pa Pitt was wrong and how close he came to being right.

    Old Pa Pitt would be delighted if someone could tell him something of the history of this building. He knows that it was put up in 1921, because the date is proudly displayed at the top of the building. He suspects, from the look of the building and from some random chatter on the Internet, that it was an ethnic club, possibly Serbian—but that is speculation. Technically it is on the Slopes side of the railroad that separates the South Side Flats from the South Side Slopes, but this lower part of the Slopes seems to be socially more connected to the East European Flats than to the German streets above. About fifteen years ago, Liberty Hall was briefly a nightclub; it closed in less than a year, and neighbors rallied to prevent it from opening again. And that is all Father Pitt knows, so he would be happy to hear from someone better informed.

  • Twentieth Century Club and Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Oakland

    Two great cultural institutions that vacated their landmark buildings for different reasons. The Twentieth Century Club, Pittsburgh’s premier women’s club, fell on hard times like most clubs in our antisocial twenty-first century. The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, on the other hand, prospered and moved its collection to the Heinz History Center in the Strip. Old Pa Pitt is delighted to see that the old Historical Society building will soon be a Latin American Cultural Center, so that once again it will be a cultural landmark in Oakland.

    The Twentieth Century Club was designed by the prolific Benno Janssen.

    The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania was by the firm of Ingham and Boyd.

  • Polish Falcons

    Polish Falcons hall

    It is now apartments, of course; the Polish Falcons have moved to more modest quarters just a few blocks away. A historical marker in front of the building recalls the visit of Paderewski, in his role as one of the founders of modern Poland (though he was probably in town to play at Carnegie Music Hall), to recruit for a Polish army to fight in the First World War and win independence for his long-oppressed country. A falcon still flies from the upper façade.

    Falcon

    Addendum: This was built as the First Methodist Episcopal Church of East Birmingham some time before the South Side was taken into Pittsburgh in 1872. It is possible that the architect was Charles F. Bartberger.

  • The Twentieth Century Club

    Like almost every other substantial building in this part of Oakland, the Twentieth Century Club—once Pittsburgh’s premiere women’s club—now belongs to the University of Pittsburgh. This picture was taken a little more than a year ago.


    Map

  • Pittsburgh Athletic Association

    The Pittsburgh Athletic Association, built in 1911, is Pittsburgh’s grandest clubhouse. (Not the richest, of course: that honor belongs to the Duquesne Club, the focus of all money and power in the city.) The architect was Benno Janssen, who was quite successful in Pittsburgh in the early 1900s. The club itself went bankrupt in 2017, but was able to make a deal to sell the building to investors who will allow them to occupy part of it. Now the building is getting a renovation.

  • Courtyard of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club

    The Duquesne Club around the corner may be the center of power in Pittsburgh, but this more modest club also possesses some influence. The Alcoa Building (a bit of it is visible in the left background) actually has a notch cut out of it to avoid demolishing any of the club. The club seems to have been made from late-nineteenth-century rowhouses (back when there were still such things downtown), remodeled into a luxurious club in the 1930s.