This fine Jacobean office in the forgotten industrial back streets of the near South Side is certainly the work of a distinguished architect or architects, but old Pa Pitt has not been able to find a name with the limited research he was able to do. He is therefore going to go far out on a limb and attribute it to MacClure & Spahr, because it is just their sort of thing.
Dilworth, Porter & Co. made railroad spikes and other things you would need if you were putting a railroad together. The company later became part of Republic Steel, and the plant was closed in 1950. It is now the M. Berger Industrial Park, with the old industrial sheds behind this office painted in garish colors. (Update: A reader very reasonably questions the use of the word “garish”—see the comment below—and perhaps “cheerful” would have been better. The point is that the colors are extraordinarily bright and seldom seen on old industrial buildings like these.)
Now called “The Highline,” the Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse and Transfer Company was one of the largest commercial buildings in the world when it was finished in 1906. The architect was the prolific Charles Bickel, who gave us a very respectable version of Romanesque-classical commercial architecture on a huge scale.
The building was planned in 1898, but it took several years of wrangling and special legislation to clear three city blocks and rearrange the streets to accommodate the enormous structure. Its most distinctive feature is a street, Terminal Way, that runs right down the middle of the building at the third-floor level: as you can see above, it has now been remade into a pleasant outdoor pedestrian space. You can’t tell from the picture above, but there is more building underneath the street.
The bridge coming out across the railroad tracks is the continuation of Terminal Way, which comes right to the edge of the Monongahela, where the power plant for the complex was built.
The reason for the complex is more obvious from this angle. Railroad cars came right into the building on the lowest level to unload.
It also had access to the river, and road access to Carson Street at the other end. Every form of transportation came together here for exchange and distribution.
McKean Street separates the main part of the complex from the Carson Street side; Terminal Way passes over it on a bridge.
The Fourth Street side shows us the full height of the building. Fourth Street itself is still Belgian block.
A view over the McKean Street bridge and down Terminal Way from the Carson Street end.
This absurdly narrow building is on the Carson Street side of the complex; it has usually housed a small restaurant of some sort. One suspects that this was the result of some kind of political wrangling that ended in a ridiculously small space on this side of Terminal Way between Carson and McKean Streets.
The power plant for the complex, seen above from the Terminal Way bridge across the railroad. It could use some taking care of right now.
This view of the complex from the hill above Carson Street was published in 1911 as an advertisement for cork from the Armstrong Cork Company.
Now an office building poetically called 2100 Wharton Street, this enormous warehouse covers almost an entire block of the South Side. It was built for the Gimbels department store in the 1920s, when it would have had rail access to the Pennsylvania Railroad spur that ran right down the middle of 21st Street.
Below we see it from the riverfront, looming over South Side rowhouses in the middle distance.
Addendum: The warehouse was built in about 1924; the architects and engineers were James P. Piper and Henry M. Kropff.
In 1889 the whole idea of a power station was new. What should it look like? Obviously it should be elegantly proportioned, because we don’t want to give the neighbors any more reason than they already have to object to the death rays we’ll be generating in there. Thus this fine example of Victorian industrial architecture, which old Pa Pitt believes was Allegheny’s first power station, and which still stands with not too many alterations just off Brighton Road on what is now for some reason called Riversea Road, though it has previously been Braddock Street and then Brocket Street.
Once there was an elegantly arched entrance, which has been replaced by a wider commercial garage door. The date is still prominent in the keystone of the arch.
A few years later, a new building was added in quite a different style:
This one still belongs to Duquesne Light and is still called the Irwin Avenue Substation, in spite of the fact that Irwin Avenue has been Brighton Road for many years now. The style is impossible to pin down: the tall rounded arches and flared buttresses make us think of a Norman castle, and the pointed Tudor arch in the middle makes us think of a Norman castle that had passed into the hands of an Elizabethan landowner who placed more value on being able to drive a showy carriage through his gate than being able to defend his castle.
Most Pittsburghers with an interest in local history know that there were many inclines operating in the city a hundred years ago. Few know that part of the Mount Oliver Incline is still here. The incline itself closed in 1951, and the stations are gone, but the power house, which was across Warrington Avenue from the upper station, still stands. It has been converted into a shop for a heating and air-conditioning contractor.
A dignified industrial building now converted to loft apartments. It was built in the 1890s as a machine shop for the Bair & Gazzam Manufacturing Company, and by 1910 it belonged to the Ruud Manufacturing Company, makers of those marvelous automatic water heaters. The style is very much in line with the industrial Romanesque that was popular in the late 1800s; but if we look carefully at the arches on the ground floor, we notice that they are very subtly pointed.
Father Pitt does not know the whole history of this building, but it looks as though the top two floors were a later addition.
Continuing our visits to car dealers of the past, we visit the White Motor Company dealer on Melwood Avenue, which has fortunately found a new use in the medical-industrial complex.
White started in the automobile business with a successful steamer (more Whites were built than Stanleys), but as gasoline-powered cars took over the market, White abandoned steam and went with the crowd. At some point around World War I or after, White left the car business and concentrated its efforts on trucks and buses. The company was very successful in that business, and remained a manufacturing force until it was bought out by Volvo in 1980.
Correction: We had identified the architect as Edward B. Lee, based on the Construction Record for November 18, 1911: “Architect E. B. Lee, 1307 Peoples Bank building, has completed plans-for a two-story brick and reinforced concrete garage and sales building, to be constructed in the East End, for the White Motor Car Company, 3122 West Twenty-fifth street, Cleveland.” However, it appears that this entry refers to the building at the corner of Craig Street and Baum Boulevard, which later became an Oakland dealership (Oakland automobiles, that is). A picture of that dealership appears in the September 1913 issue of The Builder, with the caption “Garage and Sales Room for the White Motor Company, Pittsburgh, Pa., Edward B. Lee, Architect, Pittsburgh.”
The double arch inside a single arch, with a circle to fill in the gap, is characteristic of the style of classically influenced Romanesque the Germans called Rundbogenstil, the round-arch style. It may not be exclusive to the Rundbogenstil, but Father Pitt likes to say the word “Rundbogenstil.” The B. M. Kramer and Co. building on the South Side, built as a beer warehouse, is one of the masterpieces of industrial architecture in Pittsburgh.
We continue our look at the remarkable number of early automobile dealers preserved in Oakland and Shadyside. This old Packard dealer on Baum Boulevard is still in the luxury-automobile business. Only the marque has changed; the building has been sensitively updated for our century, but in outline it is much the same as it was when Packards gleamed in its generously large showroom.
