Frederick Sauer was the architect of this ornate commercial palace, built in 1908. It is covered in white enameled terra-cotta ornaments that give it a sense of opulence above its budget.
We also have some earlier pictures of the Werner Building and some remarks on its history.
Like a great European cathedral, East Liberty Presbyterian Church, which Ralph Adams Cram considered his masterpiece, is too huge and complex to take in all at once. We can only appreciate some of the details, and then come back later for more. Here are some views from various spots in East Liberty.
This was the first telephone exchange for East Liberty: it was already here by the time the 1890 Hopkins plat map was compiled. It was built for the Central District & Printing Telegraph Company, which was soon absorbed into the Bell system.
The building has lost a cornice or crest in the front, but otherwise is well preserved.
The style is what old Pa Pitt likes to call Rundbogenstil, because Rundbogenstil is fun to say: it combines classical details, like the arches from the Baths of Caracalla in the third-floor windows, with decidedly unclassical decorative details in terra cotta and stone.
A house in a dignified version of the Queen Anne style, but still with plenty of picturesque details, which take on added picturesqueness in sunset light.
The elaborate woodwork and shingles in the gables have been preserved.
A pattern of stock terra-cotta tiles set in the wall may have taken the place of a filled-in window.
The dense Highland Avenue business district in Shadyside spilled across the tracks from East Liberty in the 1920s. Before that, the area was a residential section that began to build up in the 1870s. And if you peer behind the storefronts, you can see that much of that residential section is still there behind a crust of commercial development. For example, the building above looks like a typical 1920s store-and-apartments building from the front, but from this angle we can see that it’s an addition to a large double house built in the Second Empire style in the 1870s.
This house had its ground floor turned into a store without extreme alterations to the rest of the building.
This Second Empire house, built in the 1880s, has a magnetic attraction for architectural debris.
Here is a drawing of Rowe’s department store that was published in 1907, when East Liberty was booming as it became the business hub for rapidly developing East End neighborhoods. The building, put up in 1898, still looks much the same today, though it has been many years since it housed a department store. By choosing Alden & Harlow, the most prestigious firm in the city, as his architects, Mr. Rowe declared to East End residents that he would offer them as high a class of merchandise as they could find anywhere downtown.
The drawing came from a lavishly illustrated book published in 1907 by the Pittsburg Board of Trade—a book that, oddly, has two titles: Up-Town: Greater Pittsburg’s Classic Section/East End: The World’s Most Beautiful Suburb. Here is what the book tells us about Rowe’s:
C. H. ROWE CO.
To the residents of the East End the department store of C. H. Rowe Company, at Penn and Highland avenues, is a household word. Little can be said of it which every woman and child does not already know, yet no history of the development of the East End would be complete without mention of this enterprising company.
It was in 1898 that C. H. Rowe Co. began to relieve the residents of the East End of the necessity of going down town to meet any requirements they had in the matter of dress goods, undermuslins, white goods of every description, millinery, children’s outfittings, all that the feminine domestic economy required.
Such enterprise as the firm of C. H. Rowe Co. has shown has naturally received a hearty response from the residents of the East End. The aim of this section of the city is to provide every want that its citizens require. So far as the dry goods business is concerned that is what this company has done.
It takes a modern four-story establishment, with 58,000 square feet of floor space to accommodate the company’s stock of goods. It requires 125 persons in the dullest season to attend the wants of the customers of C. H. Rowe Company and many delivery wagons are employed in distributing the goods to such customers who prefer that accommodation.
The directors of the company include Messrs. C. H. and W. H. Rowe, D. P. Black, H. P. Pears and J. H. McCrady. James S. Mackie is the general manager.
It is little wonder with such attention to all the requirements of the East End public that C. H. Rowe Company’s store has become the veritable center of the East End trade, and that its growth is so much a matter of pride not only to the members of the firm but to the residents of the entire East Liberty community.
More pictures of the Rowe’s or Penn-Highland Building.
Built in 1898 for Rowe’s department store, this building has been called the Penn-Highland Building for years now. The architects were Alden & Harlow.
Lions stare back at you from all over the building.
Inside the building was a mass of wires and electrical equipment and operators’ switchboards. But the Bell Telephone Company insisted that the outside of every telephone exchange must be an ornament to the neighborhood. They were all Renaissance palaces like this until the 1930s, and it is likely that they all came from the same architectural office—namely, the office of James Windrim, who also designed the 1923 Bell Telephone Building downtown. After Windrim, Press C. Dowler took over as the Bell company’s court architect, and the style changed to refined Art Deco.
Built in 1893 as Sixth United Presbyterian, this church was designed by William S. Fraser, who was a big deal in Pittsburgh in the later 1800s. Fraser adopted a very Richardsonian kind of Romanesque for this church, putting its congregation right at the top of the fashion heap for the moment.
If you ask why there are two Presbyterian churches so close together—this and East Liberty Presbyterian—the answer is that there were two kinds of Presbyterians. Sixth U. P. belonged to the United Presbyterians, a Pittsburgh-based splinter group that eventually merged with the other Presbyterians in 1958. Most neighborhoods and boroughs with large Protestant populations thus had two Presbyterian churches—or more, since there were Reformed Presbyterians and Cumberland Presbyterians as well.
The stained glass is being restored slowly and carefully.
Paul Irwin designed this house for R. P. McAllister; it was built in about 1920. (Father Pitt knows this information because the owners of the house helpfully inscribed it on a bronze plaque around the corner at the delivery entrance.) Though it is eclectic in its influences, everything works in harmony, from the Georgian front door to the Japanese eyebrow in the roofline to the surprising outbreaks of half-timbering in the rear.
