Father Pitt

Tag: Hotels

A Stroll on Mill Street in Coraopolis
Kodak Pony 135 with Kentmere Pan 100 film (monobath developed).

The main business streets of Coraopolis are Fifth Avenue, Fourth Avenue, and Mill Street, a very narrow street that crosses the other two. (There is also a Main Street in Coraopolis, but, in Pittsburghish fashion, it is not the main street.) Let’s take a stroll down Mill Street together. We’ll take two cameras with us, one digital and the other loaded with black-and-white film.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

We’ll start at the Coraopolis Savings and Trust Company building, a splendid bank designed by Press C. Dowler, who gave us a number of grand classical banks. Right across Fifth Avenue is…

…another grand classical bank, the Ohio Valley Trust Company. This one is still in use as a bank.

This plain but dignified doorway leads to the upstairs offices, which were a prestigious address for local businessmen. The architect W. E. Laughner had his office here.

Across the street is a substantial commercial block with a corner entrance.

Now we come to a building with tangled layers of history, but enough remains to show us the style of the original.

This bricked-in arch has a terra-cotta head for a keystone. Note that the original building was faced with Roman brick—the long, narrow bricks you see outside the arch—and not just Roman, but yellow Kittanning Roman brick.

This building next door used similar Kittanning Roman brick. The storefront has been altered, but long enough ago that it has an inset entrance to keep the door from hitting pedestrians in the face.

At the intersection with Fourth Avenue we meet the old Hotel Helm,¹ with its distinctive shingled turret. It probably bore a cap when it was built.

From here Mill Street leads past the train station and the Fingeret building, both of which we’ve seen before. At Second Avenue—as far as we’ll go for now—we come to…

…the Hotel Belvedere, which was probably a cheaper place to stay than the Hotel Helm. It still preserves its shingled gable, though the rest has been sheathed in three colors of fake siding.
1. Some of our information comes from 1924 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps at the Library of Congress. ↩︎
November 19, 2024
Top of the Pittsburgher

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The Pittsburgher was built in 1929–1930 as a hotel; the architects were the H. L. Stevens Company of New York. For many years, converted to offices, it was known as the Lawyers Building. In 2015 it was bought by a company called King Penguin Opportunity Fund, which restored the original name and put it in lights at the top. This view was taken from Gateway Center with a very long lens.

November 7, 2024
Hotel Hall, McKees Rocks

The painted signs identifying this as the Hotel Hall are still clearly legible. It’s a fairly large version of the typical Pittsburgh hotel: bar on the ground floor, rooms upstairs.

The most interesting feature of the hotel is its corner entrance with iron brackets.

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

October 17, 2024
Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown

Still Pittsburgh’s largest hotel, this opened in 1959 as the Pittsburgh Hilton. It was designed by William Tabler, the Hilton company’s pet architect. Originally it was, as James D. Van Trump told us in The Stones of Pittsburgh, “partially sheathed in panels of gold anodized aluminum, very appropriate to a luxury hotel.” The panels have been painted over.

The addition to the front opened in 2014; it does not seem to go with the rest of the building.

October 1, 2024
Norwood

Norwood is a traditionally Italian neighborhood in Stowe Township, originally a suburban development of modest detached houses connected to McKees Rocks and the Pittsburgh transit system by its own incline. The Norwood Incline closed in 1923, though a little shelter at the bottom station remains (see pictures of the Norwood Incline Shelter here). By that time, it was easy to get to the neighborhood by automobile or trolley.

The Norwood Honor Roll, above, no longer has its honor roll. Many neighborhoods had painted honor rolls, and it is possible that this one was painted. Or it is possible that a bronze plaque was stolen and sold to a scrap dealer, who, faithfully believing that people are fundamentally honest, never even suspected that the hunk of bronze with names all over it was stolen. Perhaps someone from the neighborhood can tell us the story. The painted dedication is an act of love from someone in the neighborhood.

Many of the buildings in what was the business district of Norwood are faced with Kittanning brick, but clad the rest of the way around with cheap ordinary brick.

Layers of history and cycles of prosperity and decline can be read in these two buildings. It looks as though a small business, owned by the residents of the house to the right, grew and prospered and faded and was finally replaced with apartments. The renovations to the building on the left suggest that there was probably plenty of money in the 1970s.

This tall and narrow building looks like a hotel in the Pittsburgh sense—a bar with a few rooms upstairs.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

Note the patterned bricks, which remind us of similar decorations in West Park.

September 6, 2024
Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown

This was built as the Pittsburgh Hilton, which opened in 1959. William Tabler, the house architect for Hilton Hotels, designed the main building, which is a box of square windows. Originally the parts between the windows were gold-colored aluminum, but that was painted over to remove the last trace of anything exciting about the building.

In 2014, after years of delays and a change of ownership, a new lobby addition opened on the front of the building, designed by Stephen Barry of Architectural Design, Inc. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, the addition does not belong on this building. It belongs on a much more interesting building. Here it looks like some sort of parasite attacking the main structure. Nothing about it matches the original building in shape or color, and it is too interesting not to draw attention to itself as something that does not belong here.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

August 13, 2024
German Victorian on the South Side Slopes

This has the look of a “hotel” in the Pittsburgh sense: a bar with rooms upstairs, thus qualifying for the much more readily available hotel liquor license. It still has a bar on the ground floor. The style is what old Pa Pitt calls “South Hills German Victorian,” and indeed a glance at the plat maps shows that this part of the Slopes was thoroughly German when this building went up shortly before 1910. The whole triangle bounded by South 18th Street, Monastery Place, and Monastery Street (now Monastery Avenue) was owned by Elizabeth Lenert.

When your building has an acute angle, but not sharply acute, one way of dealing with it is to put the entrance there and make the corner into a feature rather than something that looks like an unfortunate necessity. The rocket-shaped turret on this building acts like a hinge to make it feel as though the building was meant to fold into this shape.

Otherwise, this is not an elaborate building, but the clever arrangement of bricks at the top of the 18th Street side makes an attractive cornice that doesn’t fall down.

We must pause to admire two different chimney pots, both of them fine examples of their types.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

The building would have had a much more dignified and balanced appearance before the ground-floor storefront was filled in; but since a corner bar is close in spirit to a men’s club, patrons should be grateful that it has windows at all.

July 4, 2024
Kilkeary’s Hotel

Composite photograph.

This building on Ninth Street has housed various establishments of varying reputability over the years. It was built, however, as a good hotel for Joseph F. Kilkeary, and it was designed by the very reputable Edward B. Lee, a young architect who had made his reputation as the winner of the design competition for the City-County Building (though Lee would later insist that the real designer of that one was Henry Hornbostel).

It seems that the project for this hotel evolved gradually from a remodeling of Kilkeary’s much smaller existing hotel to a full-scale reconstruction. In The American Contractor, July 5, 1924, we read: “Hotel (Kilkeary’s, rem.): $15,000. 9th st., bet. Penn. av. & Duquesne Waw [sic] Archt. Edw. B. Lee, Chamber of Commerce bldg. Owner Jos. F. Kilkeary, 131 Ninth st. Drawing plans.” This would have bought an extensive renovation of a smaller building. But by 1926 the plans were more ambitious, as we read in The Charette, April 1926: “Lee, Edward B., Architect, Chamber of Commerce Building, Pittsburgh, Pa. Hotel, 9th and French Sts., Pittsburgh, Pa. J. F. Kilkeary, Owner, address care Architect. Working drawings are being made. General contractor has been selected by owner, Taylor-Meyer Company, Keystone Building. Size of building 57 ft. x 56 ft., six stories in height. Basement with heating plant and two store rooms; guest rooms on 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th and 6th floors; steel frame; metal partition walls; brick and stone trim on front; side and rear tile curtain walls; 8 in, cement floors; each room with bath; steam heat; conduit wiring; modern hotel equipment; cubage approximately 150,000 cu. ft.” This listing describes the building more or less as it stands today.

June 10, 2024
Some Decorations on the William Penn Hotel

The architect Benno Janssen, one of the titans of Pittsburgh architecture, was very fond of terra cotta, as he showed early in his career in the exuberant Wedgwood patterns of the Buhl Building. The William Penn is more restrained, but it is still a feast for lovers of ornament.

The head of William Penn in ceremonial Quaker headdress.

February 12, 2024
Old Hotel in McKees Rocks

Old Pa Pitt is simply guessing that this building on Island Avenue at John Street used to be a hotel, in the old-fashioned Pittsburgh sense of the term: that is, a bar with rooms for rent upstairs. (Update: Note the comment below confirming that this was a classic Pittsburgh hotel-and-bar.) The ground floor was obviously a commercial establishment of some sort, though it has been filled in and made an apartment; the location is right above the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad shops and roundhouses, making this an ideal stop for railroad men who were not virtuous enough or poor enough for the Railroad YMCA four steps away across John Street. It was built before the YMCA, probably in the 1890s. The painted billboard on the side once advertised Pittsburgh Home Savings to the traffic inbound on Island Avenue.

Whoever invented those ubiquitous front doors with the three staggered lights probably made a billion dollars and retired to the Cayman Islands.

There are some spots in McKees Rocks where time seems to have stopped moving forward a while ago, and this building is one of them. Note the truck cab parked beside it.

November 14, 2023