Father Pitt

Tag: Corinthian

  • Larimer School

    Larimer School

    For forty years this school stood abandoned and rotting. The main building, put up in 1896, was designed by Ulysses J. Lincoln Peoples, who also designed an addition in 1904 for the rapidly growing neighborhood. An auditorium-gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland in 1931. The school closed in 1980, and then it just sat while the neighborhood crumbled around it.

    Photo by Lee Paxton, 2011
    Photo by Leepaxton at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    This is how the school looked in 2011, when the indefatigable Lee Paxton, who photographed nearly every Pittsburgh landmark for Wikipedia, stopped to snap its picture. But look at that same Larimer Avenue façade today:

    Larimer Avenue façade

    Doesn’t that make you happy?

    Sign for Ora Lee Carroll House at Cornerstone Village

    The restoration was done as part of the huge Cornerstone Village housing development, a mixed-housing community that has brought attractive new housing to long-neglected Larimer. All the beautiful details that Mr. Peoples, Mr. Rowland, and dozens of nameless craftsmen left for us have been scrupulously preserved, cleaned, and made to look almost new.

    Larimer Avenue end

    This is the Larimer Avenue end of the building, which has a grand entrance—but not the grandest entrance.

    Larimer Avenue entrance
    Larimer Avenue entrance
    Larimer Avenue façade

    Around the corner on Winslow Street is the original main entrance to the 1896 building.

    Winslow Street entrance
    Winslow Street entrance

    But even this is not the grandest entrance.

    1904 addition

    In 1904, an addition was built to the southeast of the main building. A new entrance was built linking the main building to the addition, and this is the grandest entrance.

    Entrance
    Entrance
    Balcony above the entrance

    When he was heading for Larimer, old Pa Pitt somehow walked out of the house without any long lenses. He will have to return soon to pick out those very amusing bracket heads, which he suspects were done by the same sculptor who did the whimsical decorations for the Western Theological Seminary. But the picture above is 20 megapixels, so if you enlarge it you will see a fair amount of detail. You will also see raindrops, because it was raining by the time Father Pitt got to the school, but he was not going to let mere weather deter him.

    Tympanum

    The child on the right is regrettably not the first or last to have lost his head when he went to school.

    Auditorium

    In 1931, an auditorium and gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland. By that time styles had changed considerably. Rowland stuck to the classical idiom, but chose the simpler Doric order rather than the more florid Ionic and Corinthian of the original school and addition, and flavored the front with a dash of Art Deco.

    Front of the auditorium
    Sony Alpha 3000, Sony Cyber-shot DSC-S9.
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  • Corinthian Capitals on the Benedum-Trees Building

    Three Corinthian capitals
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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  • Grand Staircase at the Carnegie

    Grand staircase from the ground floor

    The building was designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow; the murals were painted by John White Alexander.

    Decorated newel post
    Grand staircase from the second floor
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
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  • Terra-Cotta Pilasters on the Donahoe Building

    Terra-cotta front of the Donahoe’s building

    Donahoe’s was a prosperous market and restaurant that commissioned William E. Snaman to design this elegant commercial palace on Forbes Avenue. Its striking terra-cotta front is still magnificent from the second floor up.

    Evening sun paints the pilasters gold

    The ground floor has been completely redesigned, though “designed” is a generous term, as we see in this picture from 2022.

    Donahoe’s Building

  • Base and Bosses’ Floor of the Benedum-Trees Building

    Base and bosses’ floor of the Benedum-Trees Building

    Built in 1905 as the Machesney Building, this early skyscraper was designed by Thomas Scott, who kept his office there, which doubtless made a strong first impression on potential clients. It was renamed eight years later when it was bought by a pair of oil barons, and it has been the Benedum-Trees Building ever since.

    Here we see the generous base of the building, with three-storey Corinthian pilasters and huge windows. Above it is the “bosses’ floor.” For a short lesson in reading a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this, see our article on the West Penn Building.

    Entrance to the Benedum-Trees Building
    Window

  • Colonial Trust Company

    Colonial Trust Company Building

    Fourth Avenue, the second-biggest American financial center after Wall Street, was famous for its bank towers. But one bank decided to go long instead of high. The Colonial Trust Company built a magnificent banking hall that ran right through from Forbes Avenue to Fourth Avenue, skylit all the way. Pittsburghers passing between Fourth and Forbes, especially in cold weather, would take the route through the bank so regularly that the hall became known as Colonial Avenue.

    Frederick Osterling was the architect, and he designed this magnificent Corinthian face for the Forbes Avenue side.

    Lion’s head

    What would a bank be without its lions?

    Cartouche

    Home-repair tip: if your pediment is broken, you can fill the gap with a baroque cartouche.

    Two years ago, old Pa Pitt got pictures of the other entrances as well, so the rest of the pictures are reruns.

    The Fourth Avenue side is in the same style, but narrower:

    Fourth Avenue entrance
    Lion

    This side also has its lions.

    In 1926, the bank decided to expand by building another equally magnificent hall perpendicular to the first, with an entrance on Wood Street. Osterling was the architect again—but fashions, and Osterling’s own taste, had changed.

    Wood Street entrance

    Instead of florid Corinthian, this side is in a simpler Ionic style. The outlines are cleaner, and the wall of rectangular panes of glass and the shallow arch at the top seem almost modernistic. It is still a bravura performance, but perhaps a more perfectly controlled one.

    Fortunately the whole building has been adapted as Point Park’s University Center, so it is not going anywhere, for the near future at any rate.

  • Grand Concourse, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Terminal

    The interior of the P&LE terminal, now Pittsburgh’s most spectacular restaurant.

    Addendum: According to the Inland Architect, the “quite elaborate” waiting room and stair hall were designed by Crossman & Sturdy, decorators, of Chicago. The architect of the building was William G. Burns, or possibly George W. Burns, depending on the source.

  • Homewood People’s Bank

    Homewood People’s Bank

    Here is another small bank that gets the architectural message exactly right, as we said a few days ago about the Carnegie National Bank. How could your money not be safe in a bank that looks like this? Imagine, too, how bright and cheerful the banking hall must have been before those tall windows along the side were filled in.

    Cartouche

    Winged chimeras guard the cartouche at the top of the great front arch.

    Capitals
    Homewood People’s Bank

    Addendum: The bank was built in about 1924; the architects were Simons, Britton & English.1

    1. Source: The American Contractor, October 20, 1923: “Bank Bldg.: $80,000. 1 sty. 618 Homewood av. Archt. Simons, Britton & English, Magee bldg. Owner The Homewood People [sic] Bank, W. B. McFall, 618 Homewood av. Brk. & stone. Finishing revised plans & specs.” ↩︎

  • First National Bank, Castle Shannon

    First National Bank, Castle Shannon

    You might pass this little building by without a second glance as you walked along Poplar Street, if you ever did walk along Poplar Street (a very pleasant street) in Castle Shannon. But if you did pause, you might notice the tall Corinthian columns and sturdy-looking quoins (those patterns in the bricks that are meant to look like cut stone) and think, “I wonder whether that used to be a bank.”

    Then you would look up at the pediment, and all doubt would be removed.

    Vault alarm

    The electric vault alarm still sits prominently in the pediment where a richer bank might have had an allegorical figure of Commerce.

    To judge by old maps, this bank was built between 1890 and 1906.

    Corinthian capital
    First National Bank

  • Dollar Bank

    Dollar Bank

    The adjective “tasteful” does not naturally attach itself to this structure. It has the look of a building specified by a banker who hired an expensive architect and was determined to wring every cent of his money’s worth out of the details. It is magnificent in a slightly horrifying way: this is the kind of monstrosity that was in the minds of the modernists when they condemned all things Victorian. Old Pa Pitt would not change a single swirl or swag or grotesque half-vegetable naked lady.

    The architect in question was the firm of Isaac H. Hobbs & Sons from Philadelphia. Isaac H. Hobbs was a kind of celebrity architect. He was familiar to the thousands of ladies across our fair land who read Godey’s Lady’s Book, the premier fashion magazine of the middle 1800s: every month, Hobbs contributed a design for an elaborately Victorian residence for the lady readers to drool over. It was something like having a regular segment on a popular daytime talk show today. According to the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation’s Fourth Avenue walking tour (PDF), Hobbs designed a number of houses around Pittsburgh, but Father Pitt does not know any of them; he wonders whether they were original designs, or whether they were adaptations of the many designs published in Godey’s.

    It appears that the crust of 150-year-old ornamentation requires some stabilization: netting is stretched over the top half of the building at the moment.