Tag: Stotz (Edward)

  • Church of the Epiphany, Lower Hill

    West front of Epiphany Church

    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.

    Epiphany Church

    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.

    Detail of the West Front

    These Romanesque columns and arches strongly remind old Pa Pitt of organ pipes.

    Rose Window
    West Front
    Statue of Christ

    Christ stands at the peak of the west front.

    Statue of St. Peter

    On Christ’s right hand, St. Peter with his key.

    Statue of St. Paul

    On Christ’s left hand, St. Paul with his book.

    Angel

    An angel with plenty of anti-pigeon armor prays for worshipers as they enter.

    Epiphany Church
    Epiphany School

    The school is built in a simpler Romanesque style that links and subordinates it to the church.

    “Epiphany” inscribed on the school
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    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.


    Comments
  • Carrick Municipal Building

    Carrick Municipal Building

    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.

    Inscription: “Erected 1905 / Borough of Carrick / Incorporated June 21, 1904”
    Carrick Municipal Building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    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:

    Found at the Carrick-Overbrook Wiki.

    Comments
  • Church of the Annunciation, Perry South

    Church of the Annunciation

    Edward Stotz was the architect of this church, built in 1905. The parish closed twenty years ago, but the church has found other tenants and is kept in good shape.

    Church of the Annunciation
    Church of the Annunciation
    Annunciation relief

    A later relief of the Annunciation is over the main entrance.

    Church of the Annunciation
    Rear of the church
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Comments
  • Irene Kaufmann Settlement Auditorium, Hill District

    Irene Kaufmann Settlement

    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.

    Irene Kaufmann Settlement
    Inscription: “Irene Kaufmann Settlement”
    Entrance
    Irene Kaufmann Settlement
    Comments
  • Coraopolis Junior High School

    Coraopolis Junior High School

    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.

    “Ridgeview” Apt’s 1130

    The inscription over the door was hand-painted by someone with a distinctive idea of quotation marks.

    Entrance
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.
    Side of the school
    Coraopolis Junior High School
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
  • Some Houses on Bigelow Boulevard, Schenley Farms

    Ledge House

    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.

    Ledge House
    4107 Bigelow Boulevard

    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.

    4107 Bigelow Boulevard

    Because we have so many pictures, we’ll put the rest below the metaphorical fold to avoid weighing down the front page here.

    (more…)
  • Mercy School of Nursing, Bluff

    Mercy School of Nursing, Pittsburgh

    Father Pitt believes this is one of the buildings designed for Mercy Hospital by Edward Stotz, but would be happy to be corrected.

  • Fifth Avenue High School

    Fifth Avenue High School

    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.)

    Entrance
    Ornament
    Foliage
    View along the front
    Three-quarters view
    Rear of the school
    The rear of the school, taken in January of 2021.
  • Schenley High School

    Schenley High School

    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.

  • Hartley Rose Building

    Built for the Hartley-Rose Belting Company (so old Pa Pitt has no idea why the name on the awning lacks a hyphen, but he has no control over that), this is in effect a miniature Beaux-Arts skyscraper, with the regulation base–shaft–cap design. The architect was Edward Stotz, many of whose most famous commissions were schools—notably Schenley High School and Fifth Avenue High School.