Last week we saw this picture of the old Carrick Hotel, with the Carrick Municipal Building behind it. The Municipal Building is still there, converted to a storefront. What happened to the hotel?
It’s still there, too, under decades of accretion.
You would hardly recognize it, until you notice those distinctive dormers peering at you from behind the later overgrowth. This kind of development is typical in business districts that became prosperous but not too prosperous: prosperous enough for commercial frontage to be valuable, but not prosperous enough to make it worthwhile constructing larger buildings. Houses and other buildings grew storefronts in front, but the valuable original building remained behind the new construction. As the neighborhood aged, the commercial frontage became less valuable again, and it was adapted into offices or apartments.
This was one of the major developments in postwar Pittsburgh—a $5,500,000 skyscraper apartment house financed by the FHA. Tennyson & Van Wart were the architects—a partnership of Arthur Tennyson, of Mount Lebanon, and John Van Wart, a successful New York architect who had been lured here in the 1930s by a job with Westinghouse. For many decades it has been a hotel under various owners, currently as the Doubletree.
From the Pittsburgh Press, March 3, 1950.
“The Federal Housing Administration has insured a mortgage loan to build a 19-story, H-shaped structure on Webster Ave. on the site of St. Mary’s High School and Home for Girls at Webster Ave. and Tunnel St,” the Press reported.
“It will cost approximately $5½ million and provide housing for 465 families. Construction is expected to begin in June and be completed by June, 1951.”
Mr. Van Wart died unexpectedly in June of 1950, while this building was under construction. Tennyson continued the practice alone, and would end up designing many more modernist apartment blocks in the Pittsburgh area. We’ll see more of his work.
The Hotel Roosevelt, as it appeared in a 1928 advertisement in the National Vaudeville Artists Year Book. The advertisement was designed to appeal to performers on the vaudeville circuit (which was just about to come crashing down and would be nearly extinct in five years), and it was certainly a convenient location, within a block’s walk of at least five theaters. The Roosevelt still stands today, converted to apartments, and it is still surrounded by theaters.
The ad carries the name of L. Fred Klooz, President and Managing Director, and it includes a bit of doggerel so awful that we can only presume it was written by Mr. Klooz himself.
A “hotel” in the common Pittsburgh sense had rooms for rent, but probably expected to make most of its money from the bar downstairs. The rooms were there because it was much easier to get a liquor license for a hotel than for a bar or restaurant. Both these hotels were on backstreet corners in Allegheny. Above, the Hotel Reeg at the corner of Tripoli (originally Third) Street and Middle Street.
We can just make out the ghosts of the letters that used to spell out “Hotel Reeg.” But it helped that old Pa Pitt was able to guess that it looked like a hotel, and that the name “Geo. Reeg” appears as property owner on old plat maps.
The Hotel Rahn, a block away at the corner of Suismon (originally Second) and Middle streets, is still very active. The rooms upstairs may be apartments now, but the restaurant and bar are a Dutchtown landmark: Max’s Allegheny Tavern, one of Pittsburgh’s top spots for German food.
The Hotel Henry was on Fifth Avenue; it was replaced in 1951 by the Mellon Bank Building (525 Fifth Avenue). Here we see a huge banquet for the newspapermen of Pittsburgh in 1904, which incidentally gives us a look at the posh appointments of the banquet hall.
Hotel Henry logo from a fragment of plateHotel Henry at some time around 1900, from the Historic Pittsburgh site. Note that the offices of the Leader are two doors up from the hotel; those reporters didn’t have far to walk for dinner.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
