Father Pitt

Tag: Osterling (Frederick)

  • 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.

  • Three Flemish Houses by Frederick Osterling, Brighton Heights

    Osterling houses on California Avenue

    This trio of Flemish-style houses is one of the most remarkable features of the Brighton Heights neighborhood. Frederick Osterling lived in Brighton Heights and designed several houses worth seeing there; these from about 1900 were beautifully restored as the “Osterling flats” a few years ago.

    Center house
    All three houses

  • Achille Giammartini

    Purely by accident, old Pa Pitt stumbled on this portrait of the great architectural sculptor Achille Giammartini, whose work adorns churches, houses, and commercial buildings all over the city. There is almost no trace of Giammartini on the Web: in fact, search engines usually come up with no more than half a dozen results, and the first two are usually from Father Pitt. So this seems like as good a time as any to announce Father Pitt’s new project.

    Bit by bit, Father Pitt is building a Pittsburgh Encyclopedia, where he will keep detailed information about architects, sculptors, neighborhoods, and such things, so that he can refer to those articles rather than repeating himself every time he publishes a new picture. Something similar has worked well with Flora Pittsburghensis and the Flora Pittsburghensis reference site.

    At present the Pittsburgh Encyclopedia is just beginning: it has nine articles in total. But we have just added an article on Achille Giammartini that gathers more information about him than exists in any other single place on the Web.

  • Clyde House, Shadyside

    This Renaissance house in Shadyside is now a residence for first-year students at Carnegie Mellon. The round dormer is unusual, but there was a brief fad for them around the turn of the twentieth century: see also the J. J. Matthews House.

    Addendum: The architect was Frederick Osterling. This is the sole survivor of a row of three houses Osterling designed; this one was for James H. Hammond. See Works of F. J. Osterling by J. Franklin Nelson, 1904.

  • Allegheny County Morgue

    Entrance

    By a splendid exercise of bureaucratic irony, the old morgue now houses offices of the county health department. It was designed by Frederick Osterling and built—on Forbes Avenue—in 1901. In 1929, it was moved to its current location on Fourth Avenue.

    Lion-headed serpent

    Frederick Osterling’s Romanesque buildings nearly always give us a monster or two to admire.

    Chimera
    Relief
    Morgue

  • Top of the Arrott Building

    The top of the Arrott Building, rendered in old-postcard colors by the Two-Strip Technicolor script for the GIMP.

  • Hillsdale School, Dormont

    Hillsdale School

    Frederick Osterling designed this school for the mushrooming borough in 1912. The building itself grew rapidly, with additions in 1914, 1916, and 1918, all in a matching style. According to the book Dormont by the Dormont Historical Society (one of the Images of America series by Arcadia Publishing), at some point in the second half of the twentieth century, high winds destroyed the original roof, and the building was given an up-to-date flat roof and a new front entrance with this fine late-Art-Deco sign.

    Hillsdale

    In 1996, the school closed, and in 1999 the borough government moved in, so that this is now the William & Muriel Moreland Dormont Municipal Center. The Dormont Historical Society has a small museum here, open one day a week.

  • 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.

  • The Arrott Building Reflected

    Reflection of the Arrott Building

    The wonderfully elaborate top of the Arrott Building reflected in the Patterson Building.

  • Times Building

    Times Building

    In his earlier career, Frederick Osterling carved out a niche for himself providing Richardsonian Romanesque buildings for people who couldn’t get Richardson (because Richardson was dead). The Allegheny County Courthouse created a mania for the style in Pittsburgh, and Osterling seems to have had all the work he could handle. In this building from 1892, we see the hallmarks of Osterling’s own variation on the style. He was more florid than Richardson, but he was always aware of the overall composition, never allowing the numerous individual details to break up the carefully orchestrated rhythm of the façade.

    Below, we see the Times Building in context, with One Oxford Centre looming in the middle distance.

    Times Building and One Oxford Centre