Correction: In an earlier version of the article, old Pa Pitt had a lapse of memory and attributed the design to Edward Stotz instead of T. E. Billquist. His apologies are offered to Mr. Billquist.
Much of the original Magee Hospital, designed by Thorsten E. Billquist,1 is still standing, but so many additions have grown up around the buildings that we can only catch occasional glimpses of them. While old Pa Pitt was paying a visit to someone in the hospital, he noticed this view in an interior courtyard. Magee Hospital merged with Pittsburgh Woman’s Hospital to form Magee-Womens Hospital, now UPMC Magee-Womens. Eventually, if UPMC expands its empire enough, it will be able to afford an apostrophe.
Edward Stotz was the architect of the building for Epiphany Church, with considerable interior work done by John T. Comès. It was built in 1903 to replace the old St. Paul’s Cathedral downtown as the downtown parish church after Henry Frick made the Catholic Diocese an offer it couldn’t refuse, and Epiphany served as the temporary cathedral for three years while the new St. Paul’s was going up in Oakland.
When the Lower Hill was demolished for “slum clearance,” Epiphany and its school were the only buildings allowed to survive. Thus Pittsburgh accomplished, here and at Allegheny Center, what Le Corbusier had failed to do in Paris: we created a sterile modern wasteland punctuated by a few ancient landmarks pickled in brine.
These Romanesque columns and arches strongly remind old Pa Pitt of organ pipes.
Christ stands at the peak of the west front.
On Christ’s right hand, St. Peter with his key.
On Christ’s left hand, St. Paul with his book.
An angel with plenty of anti-pigeon armor prays for worshipers as they enter.
The school is built in a simpler Romanesque style that links and subordinates it to the church.
Officially the Lower Hill has ceased to exist. It is counted as part of downtown in the city’s administrative scheme. But it has never been integrated into downtown, and indeed was forcibly cut off from downtown by the Crosstown Boulevard—a bad mistake recently ameliorated somewhat by building a park on top of the boulevard. With the new FNB Financial Center and other developments, there is some hope that this neglected wasteland may become city again. Meanwhile, Epiphany, now part of Divine Mercy Parish, still serves downtown worshipers, and perhaps will be there for new residents as the neighborhood grows and changes.
Carrick became a borough in 1904, and for this little all-in-one borough building hired the big-deal architect Edward Stotz.1 It must have created an impression of prosperity when it was built in 1905, and it still looks solid and respectable today, one year short of a century after the people of Carrick voted for the borough to be annexed by the city of Pittsburgh in 1926. It has been converted into a retail store, and the huge second-floor window makes an excellent display for the current tenant.
The building originally had an elaborate baroque crest that has been shorn off. We can see it in this picture, where the municipal building appears behind the Carrick Hotel:
Edward Stotz was the architect of this church, built in 1905.1 The parish closed twenty years ago, but the church has found other tenants and is kept in good shape.
A later relief of the Annunciation is over the main entrance.
Edward Stotz was the architect of this auditorium, built in 1928. It was the centerpiece of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, which was founded by the Kaufmanns of Kaufmann’s department store to memorialize a daughter who died young; its purpose was to serve the poor immigrants of the Hill.
Edward Stotz, who also designed Fifth Avenue High School and Schenley High School (the country’s first million-dollar high school), was the architect of this staid and respectable school, now turned into apartments.
The inscription over the door was hand-painted by someone with a distinctive idea of quotation marks.
As we mentioned before, we are attempting to photograph every house in the residential part of Schenley Farms. Here is a big album of houses on Bigelow Boulevard, which becomes a residential street as it winds through the neighborhood. Above, Ledge House, the strikingly different home of A. A. Hamerschlag, the first director of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). It was designed by Henry Hornbostel, who designed the Carnegie Tech campus and taught at Carnegie Tech. It has recently been cleaned of a century’s worth of industrial soot and restored to its original appearance.
Above and below, the D. Herbert Hostetter, Jr., house, architects Janssen and Abbott. Benno Janssen and his partner abstracted the salient details of the Tudor or “English half-timber” style and reduced it to the essentials, creating a richly Tudory design with no wasted lines.
Because we have so many pictures, we’ll put the rest below the metaphorical fold to avoid weighing down the front page here.
Someone left one of those temporary storage modules in front of the building, which mars our otherwise architecturally perfect picture of the Fifth Avenue façade. There is only so much old Pa Pitt can do.
This Flemish Gothic palace, built in 1894, was designed by Edward Stotz, who would later give us Schenley High School. His son Charles Morse Stotz was more or less the founder of the preservation movement in Pittsburgh: he wrote the huge folio The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania, still an invaluable reference as well as a gorgeous book. It is fitting, therefore, that the father’s great landmarks have been among our preservation success stories.
The school was closed in 1976, and after that it sat vacant for more than three decades. A generation knew it only as that looming hulk Uptown. It is a tribute to the architect that it survived in fairly good shape. In 2009 it was finally brought back to life with a years-long restoration project that turned it into loft apartments, which sold well and suggested that there might be some potential in the Uptown neighborhood. (It certainly helped that the new arena—currently named for PPG Paints—opened at about the same time.)
This is the most magnificent work of an architect who specialized in magnificent schools: Edward Stotz, whose son was the noted preservationist Charles Stotz. The building occupies a triangular sloping plot, which certainly challenged the architect. Mr. Stotz responded with a triangular building that looks inevitable on its site.
When it opened in 1916, Schenley High was a shrine of culture and art, an idealized version of what high-school education could be in an enlightened city. It closed as a school in 2008, and it has now, like every other substantial building in a desirable neighborhood, been refurbished as luxury apartments.
Curiously, Edward Stotz was also responsible for another famously triangular building: the Monongahela Bank Building, which is now the Wood Street subway station and the Wood Street Galleries.
