These pictures are more than a year old, but old Pa Pitt just ran across them and realized they had never been published. It’s an important building with its own entry in the National Register of Historic Places, so Father Pitt’s only excuse is that the piles of pictures sometimes accumulate too fast for him to process.
Edward B. Lee was the architect of this YMCA, built in 1922–1923 for the “colored” population of the Hill District. The idea of separating races of human beings gives old Pa Pitt hives, and he wishes it had been repudiated more thoroughly than it has been. But if it was separate, we must at least give it credit for being equal. Few neighborhoods could boast a YMCA better than this one.
Allegheny High School, now the Allegheny Traditional Academy, has a complicated architectural history involving two notable architects at three very different times.
From Art work of Pittsburgh, part 3 (Chicago: W. H. Parish, 1893), with thanks to “Camerafiend” for making the picture available.
The original 1893 Allegheny High School on this site was designed by Frederick Osterling in his most florid Richardsonian Romanesque manner. This building no longer exists, but the photograph above gives us a good notion of the impression it made. The huge entrance arch is particularly striking, and particularly Osterling; compare it with the Third Avenue entrance of the Times Building, also by Osterling.
In 1904, the school needed a major addition. Again Osterling was called on, but by this time Richardsonian Romanesque had passed out of fashion, and Osterling’s own tastes had changed. The Allegheny High School Annex still stands, and Osterling pulled off a remarkable feat: he made a building in modified Georgian style that matched current classical tastes while still being a good fit with, and echoing the lines of, the original Romanesque school.
The carved ornaments on the original school were executed by Achille Giammartini, and we would guess that he was brought back for the work on the Annex as well.
A war memorial on the front of the Annex. Twenty-two names are inscribed. Everyone who went to Allegheny High in those years knew someone who was killed in the Great War.
By the 1930s, the school was too small again. The original school was torn down, and Marion Steen, house architect for Pittsburgh Public Schools (and son of the Pittsburgh titan James T. Steen) designed a new Art Deco palace nothing like the remaining Annex. The two buildings do not clash, however, because there are very few vantage points from which we can see both at once.
The auditorium has three exits, each one with one of the three traditional masks of Greek drama above it: Comedy, Meh, and Tragedy.
St. Richard’s parish was founded in 1894 and immediately put up a temporary frame church. Two years later, a rectory—obviously meant to be permanent—was designed by J. A. Jacobs in a restrained version of the Queen Anne style.
In 1907, the parish started building a school, which would also have temporary facilities on the ground floor for the church until a new church building could be built. It was partly financed by “euchre and dance” nights.
Father Pitt has not yet succeeded in finding the name of the architect, but he has found a lot of newspaper announcements of euchre and dance nights.
The permanent church was not yet built in 1915 when this convent, designed by Albert F. Link, was put up. Although the second-floor windows have been filled in with much smaller windows, and the art glass has been replaced with glass block, the proportions of the building are still very pleasing.
We note a pair of stained-glass windows in one of the filled-in spaces on the second floor. If Father Pitt had to guess, he would guess that they came from one of the central windows that are now filled in with glass block.
It turns out that the permanent church was never built. The dwindling congregation continued to meet for Mass on the ground floor of the school until the parish was suppressed in 1977. The school became St. Benedict the Moor School, and the ground floor was finally converted into the classrooms it had been designed for. Later the school moved to larger facilities at the former Watt Public School, but the parish kept up the old building as an events center.
Built in 1931, Laughlin Hall was designed by E. P. Mellon, an architect of conservative but refined taste who prospered through his connection to the Mellon family. (E. P. stood for Edward Purcell, but he seems to have been known by his initials.) The Mellons were big patrons of the Pennsylvania College for Women, Chatham’s predecessor, and Uncle Andy himself had his house nearby.
Lamont Button, who made a specialty of high-class houses for the higher classes, designed this club for university women, which opened in about 1932. “It is planned to provide rooms on the second and third floors for college girls working in the city,” the Press reported. “The first floor will have a large social hall and tearoom. In the basement will be a main dining room and several smaller dining rooms. An auditorium seating 470 will be included in the plans.”
Today the building belongs to Pitt, but on the outside it has hardly changed from Button’s elegant design—a simplified, modernized Georgian that could hardly look out of place anywhere, and fits perfectly in the wildly diverse Craig Street streetscape.
Colonial revival had passed from a fashion to a mania by the 1930s, with the restoration of Williamsburg capturing the American imagination with visions of an elegant Georgian past. Small federal buildings, especially post offices, almost always adopted the Georgian style—as we see in this modest post office with its neat Georgian entrance, complete with fanlight. The post office has moved to larger quarters, but the building is kept in original shape by its current occupants.
“Altholl” was built on Stanton Avenue for U. S. Steel executive James Scott in 1900. Stanton Avenue, which today is marked as the border between Highland Park and East Liberty on city planning maps, was already lined with grand Queen Anne mansions; but the Colonial Revival was coming into fashion, and Scott’s house must have looked bracingly modern. It has the adaptable form of the typical large Pittsburgh center-hall house of the turn of the twentieth century, which can swing from Georgian to Renaissance to Prairie Style depending on the details. We’ll call this one “eclectic Georgian.” The house is listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places.
The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.
The Negley was probably built in about 1909; the architects were the firm of Janssen & Abbott. Some of the original details have vanished over the years, but Benno Janssen’s spare version of Georgian style still leaves an impression of dignity and elegance.
An unusual choice: the doorway frames are cast iron.
