Father Pitt

Tag: Factories

  • Carnegie Steel Company Gatehouse, Stowe Township

    Carnegie Steel Company office and gatehouse

    The Pressed Steel Car Company had a huge plant in Stowe Township, just across the line from the McKees Rocks Bottoms. That company had a very cozy deal with the Carnegie Steel Company: Carnegie would not make railroad cars, and Pressed Steel Car would buy all its steel from Carnegie. Right next to the car works was the Carnegie Steel Company’s Schoen Rolled Steel Wheel Works, devoted to making wheels and axles. This elegant little building was the gatehouse and office for that plant.

    Front view
    Standard Forged Products gatehouse

    That plant is still in the same business, now under the name Standard Forged Products, still supplying railroad-car makers with “freight car, passenger car, subway or locomotive axles.”

  • Pittsburgh Stained Glass Studios, West End

    Pittsburgh Stained Glass Studios

    It is a remarkable thing that this stained-glass studio, originally the Pittsburgh Art Glass Co., has been here on a forgotten back street in the West End since 1909. This tidy Arts-and-Crafts building has enormous windows on the first floor to suck in all the natural light available.

    Oblique view

  • Ripley & Co. Glass Works, South Side

    Ripley & Co. Glass Works

    These buildings were put up in the 1880s, with additions in the 1890s; they later became part of the United States Glass Co. More recently the South Side was associated with steel, but in 1872, when the Birminghams, South Pittsburgh, and Ormsby were taken into the city, glass was at least as important. Just looking at the 1872 map, we find—

    Knox Kim & Co. Glass Works
    Est. of Wm. McCully Glass Works
    Pittsburgh Glass Works
    Bakewell, Pears & Co. Glass Works
    Whitehouse Flint Glass Works
    Doyle & Co. Glass Works
    Adams & Co. Glass Works
    Tremont Glass Works
    C. Ihmsen & Sons Glass Works
    McKee & Bro. Glass Works
    Bryce, Walker & Co. Glass Works
    Sl. McKee & Co. Glass Works
    A. King Glass Works

    We have probably missed a few, but the list is quite enough to show us that glass was a big deal on the South Side. Of all the old glass factories, this is probably the only one left in such a splendidly original state, if any of the others remain at all.

  • Reymer Brothers Candy Factory, Uptown

    Reymer Brothers

    Charles Bickel designed this Romanesque industrial building with considerable inspiration from H. H. Richardson’s Marshall Field’s Wholesale Store in Chicago, which set the pattern for Romanesque industrial buildings for a generation. Bickel’s design is simpler, and by placing the arches at the top he makes the building feel taller (in fact it is shorter by one storey than Richardson’s building was).

    Corner view

    The Reymer Brothers were in the candy business, but Pittsburghers remember them best for Reymers’ Blennd, or Lemon Blennd, the deliberately misspelled lemon-and-orange-flavored drink that cooled off generations of children in the summer. The Reymers’ Blennd brand was picked up by Heinz at some point; It seems to have vanished just this year with the demise of its last owner, Byrnes & Kiefer. It is certainly fondly remembered. Here is what claims to be the World’s #1 Lemon Blennd Site, and there are others if you go looking.

  • Duquesne Brewery, South Side

    Duquesne Brewery

    This started out as a fine Romanesque design for an industrial building; it sprouted more and more haphazard additions, and became something more like a European castle with its layers of contradictory history. Today, after an adventurous history of abandonment and adaptation, it is called “The Brew House” and is filled with lofts and artists’ studios.

    Brew House
    Duquesne Brewery

  • Armstrong Cork Factory in 2000

    Broken windows, graffiti, piles of rubbish, trees growing from the roof—this is how the Armstrong Cork Factory looked two decades ago, when architectural historians wondered whether it could be saved. It’s a fine piece of industrial architecture by Frederick Osterling, and it was turned into luxury riverfront apartments in 2007. The success of that venture proved that there was a market for loft apartments in vacant landmarks, with the result that dozens of substantial buildings in the city have been similarly adapted since then.

    This picture was taken with a Lomo Smena 8M.

  • Blowing Engine

    Blowing engine at Station Square

    This was the blast in a blast furnace: the machine that provided the air that rushed into the furnace to keep the chemical reactions going. Surprisingly, this one was not used in Pittsburgh: it was brought down from Sharpsville, a little steel town in Mercer County. But it was built by the Mesta Machine Company in West Homestead. Now it lives at Station Square, right in front of the Glasshouse apartments.

    Mesta blowing engine
    Blowing engine

  • B. M. Kramer & Co. Building

    Note that this picture is more than 13 megabytes if you enlarge it.

    Old Pa Pitt can only say this is not bad for a first try. He has always admired this little masterpiece of industrial architecture (which surprisingly still houses a pipe, valve, and fittings company), and set himself the task of getting a picture of the Sidney Street face, which covers the entire block between 20th Street and 21st Street on the South Side. The evening sun was not kind to him, so he may try again on a cloudy day; but this is still the only picture of the whole Sidney Street face on the entire Internet, so Father Pitt gives himself credit for that much. Below, a more conventional (and much easier) view from the corner of 20th and Sidney Streets, with the usual utility cables.

  • Duquesne Brewery in Evening Light

    Duquesne Brewery

    The Duquesne Brewery mushroomed into a titanic operation after the Second World War, and then rapidly collapsed in the 1960s and was gone by the 1970s. At its peak it took up three blocks on the South Side, and of course it was famous for the largest clock in the world. This 1899 building, the center of the empire, was abandoned for some time, then taken over by artist squatters, and finally, as the Brew House, became lofts and studios. It is an architectural curiosity, added to over the course of the brewery’s history with some regard for consistent style but no regard at all for symmetry.


  • Westinghouse Works

    [archiveorg silent-westinghouse-works width=640 height=480 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true]

    How do you give a good impression of how big the Westinghouse dynamo factory is? This extraordinary film from 1904 begins with an aerial tracking shot that goes on uninterrupted for two minutes. Then we see an army of women assembling the more delicate parts, and finally quitting time, when many of the younger workers literally run out the doors.