Father Pitt

Tag: Osterling (Frederick)

  • The Castle, Wilmerding

    This splendid palace, officially the Westinghouse Air Brake Company General Office Building, presides benevolently over the pleasant company town of Wilmerding. The architect of the main part was Frederick Osterling, one of the great names in Pittsburgh architecture; the section at the left end was added later.

    As a kind commenter notes, this is a bit of a white elephant for the little borough: it needs restoration work, but its out-of-the-way location makes it hard to sell. For a while it was operated as a museum of things Westinghouse, but the small nonprofit group that owned it could not afford the major renovations necessary to keep it open. One plan that has been fermenting for some time is to turn it into a boutique hotel.

    Camera: Olympus E-20n.
    Camera: Samsung Digimax V4.

    This is the building as it looked in about 1905, before the addition.

  • The Morgue

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    Frederick Osterling designed this atmospherically Romanesque morgue to match Richardson’s courthouse and jail a block away. Generations of Pittsburgh teenagers made a tradition of visiting the morgue after the prom. This curious memento mori is one of those Pittsburgh customs that old Pa Pitt must simply file away as unaccountable, not even attampting an explanation; unless it be that the visit to the morgue, by a direct appeal to all the senses at once, was intended to achieve what Mr. Andrew Marvell attempted to achieve by verse alone.

    The morgue is a short walk from the First Avenue subway station.