Tag: Lee (Edward B.)

  • Bedford Dwellings, Hill District

    Welcome Bedford Dwellings

    Welcome to the projects.

    Do you know what happens if you walk into the projects with a camera?

    Well, people walking past smile and say “good morning,” because this is Pittsburgh, and that’s what we do.

    Bedford Dwellings

    At Wikimedia Commons, where Father Pitt donates all his pictures, another Commons user asked him as a favor to get some pictures of the Bedford Dwellings, because they are scheduled to be demolished when their replacements are finished, and there were no current pictures of them in Commons. So of course old Pa Pitt was out there the very next morning, because these are historic buildings whose memory should not be lost.

    Bedford Dwellings

    Suburbanites seem to be terrified of the “projects”—the public-housing developments for poor people in the city. Old Pa Pitt is not going to tell you that the projects are dens of luxurious living, or that it is always an easy thing to raise a family there. But these buildings are better maintained than many suburban apartment complexes, and they are filled with people who care about their community and try to be good neighbors to one another.

    Bedford Dwellings with skyscrapers in the background

    The Bedford Dwellings, built in 1939, were one of several New Deal housing projects in Pittsburgh. The architects were an all-star cast (and Father Pitt has no idea how they sorted out the work among themselves): Raymond Marlier, who designed Western Psych and several buildings at Kennywood; Bernard Prack, an expert in large industrial projects and worker housing; Edward B. Lee, architect of several tony clubs and the Chamber of Commerce Building downtown; and the venerable William Boyd, who was already architecting when the others were in kneepants. For this project they adopted a modernist simplicity that, in Father Pitt’s opinion, makes the development look like a barracks. But many expensive suburban apartment complexes adopted the same look at the same time.

    Bedford Dwellings
    Bedford Dwellings

    The idea behind the projects was to get poor people out of the awful “slums” and into decent housing, which would give them an opportunity to improve themselves.

    Now, in old Pa Pitt’s opinion, much of the thought behind the projects was misguided. The slums they replaced might have been unsanitary and crowded, but they were alive. They had corner stores and bars and synagogues and churches and all the things that make a neighborhood a neighborhood. In contrast, the projects were just warehouses for people. They did have a community center and a recreation area, but they organized the life out of the community.

    Bedford Dwellings with U. S. Steel building

    Before we think bad thoughts about the planners, the architects, and everyone else involved, let us recall that this was the modernist ideal for everyone. It was not just that the poor should be warehoused in barracks. Le Corbusier proposed leveling the whole city of Paris and installing everybody in identical apartment towers—and Le Corbusier was and still is the idol of the modernists. These housing projects, as we mentioned, are hard to distinguish from many profit-making suburban apartment complexes of the same era.

    In other words, the people who planned the Bedford Dwellings were trying, in good faith, to give people who were otherwise too poor to afford decent housing the best modern thought could offer them. The poor were to be upgraded to the living standards of the modern middle class.

    Two townhouses
    Most of the buildings are apartments; a few are rows of small townhouses like these.

    Nor were the housing projects built to weed out undesirable races. In fact, the projects were integrated from the beginning.

    In The Negro Ghetto, a 1967 book by Robert Clifton (New York: Russell & Russell), the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh was singled out as an organization with enlightened ideas.

    Whenever there is an activity sponsored by the Authority, it must be open to all ethnic groups, and whenever an activity is sponsored by a municipal or community agency, the Authority also insists that there be no racial segregation. [Page 184.]

    Public-housing projects in Pittsburgh were never segregated deliberately. The administrator of the Housing Authority (quoted in that same book) explained the policy thus:

    The general policy concerning occupancy is that the Housing Authority of the city of Pittsburgh will not, except for extremely compelling reasons, or reasons outside its own control, change the racial proportions of the large community in which any project may be built. However, the radius of such a community, and, therefore, the number of inhabitants that should be considered have never been precisely defined. [Page 185.]

    By 1967 the Hill was mostly Black, and therefore the population of the Bedford Dwellings was also mostly Black—but not exclusively. Other projects in the city had populations that reflected the neighborhoods around them, so that some were majority Black and others majority White, and at least one almost precisely fifty-fifty. Not one of the eight major projects in the city was racially monolithic.

    Row of townhouses

    But what of the Bedford Dwellings’ effect on the neighborhood? Well, they killed it. The Engineering News-Record for October 25, 1951, reported that more than 7,800 buildings had been demolished in Pittsburgh in the previous fifteen years. “The peak year was 1939, when 1,208 buildings were torn down, 670 of them to make way for the first three public housing projects, Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village Nos. 1 and 2.”

    In the National Association of Housing Officials’ Housing Yearbook for 1939, we read, “Some three months were required to relocate the families from the Bedford site. Of the 160 families removed, 83 per cent were Negroes.” So 160 families—which could easily add up to a thousand people—had three months to pack up their entire lives and get out of their vanishing neighborhood.

    Ideas have changed, and Father Pitt thinks they have changed for the better. These days, planners try to integrate their low-income housing projects into the neighborhoods by creating urban streetscapes, by fitting the architecture with the buildings around it, and by breaking down the barriers that isolate and define the “projects.”

    One thing hasn’t changed. The decisions are still being made by middle-class bureaucrats who know what’s good for poor people. They probably have better ideas than they had in the 1930s, but no one says, “Let’s ask the residents what they think we should do, and then do that.” There will be community meetings and surveys and all that kind of thing, and residents will spend hours making their views heard, and in the end the people who know best will do what they know is best.

    Entrance with satellite antennas

    But let us remember the Bedford Dwellings with an honest appreciation of their faults and their virtues. They made an urban neighborhood into a sterile suburb. But they also formed a community. They kept their promise of decent, sanitary housing for people who needed it. In spite of their historic importance, Father Pitt is willing to agree that it is time to let them go. But if they were not all good, they were not all bad, either. Let these pictures remain as a memorial to the Bedford Dwellings as they were when they were in good shape and still inhabited, and to the generations of people who lived their lives there, and even to the middle-class bureaucrats who honestly wanted everybody to have a chance at a decent home and worked hard to make that possible.

    Bedford Dwellings
    Entrance
    Unit numbers
    Back of a building
    Bedford Dwellings
    Entrances
    Bedford Dwellings
    Bedford Dwellings
    Bedford Dwellings
    Bedford Dwellings
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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  • Kilkeary’s Hotel

    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.

  • Allegheny Elks’ Lodge, Dutchtown

    Allegheny Elks’ Lodge
    Sony Alpha 3000.

    Men’s clubs live in terror of windows, which they gradually block up with glass blocks, bricks, or whatever else is handy. But the outlines of this dignified clubhouse remain as the architect drew them. It was designed in 1924 by Edward B. Lee, replacing an earlier lodge (designed by William E. Snaman) that had been destroyed by fire.

    The style is noticeably similar to the style of the Americus Republican Club, also by Lee. The buildings are radically different shapes, but Lee applied the same design vocabulary to make both clubs look respectable in their different locations.

  • Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club

    Allegheny HYP Club

    Some of the very few small houses left in downtown Pittsburgh were taken over in 1930 by the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club, which hired big-deal architect Edward B. Lee to transform them into an elegant clubhouse. The club survives, having absorbed two of Pittsburgh’s most prestigious other clubs—the Pittsburgh Club and the Allegheny Club—to become the Allegheny HYP Club. We note also that the club survived the construction of the Alcoa Building, which has a notch cut out in the back to accommodate its small but powerful neighbor.

    Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club
  • Americus Republican Club

    Americus Republican Club

    Edward B. Lee designed this clubhouse for the Americus Republican Club in a lush Georgian style. It was built in 1918, and it spans the whole (very short) block from the Boulevard of the Allies to Third Avenue. Since the club moved out, this has been known as the Pitt Building.

    Old Pa Pitt thinks the off-center pediment is an interesting choice for neo-Georgian architecture. It would not have occurred to him if he had been the architect, but the expected symmetry would probably have made a duller façade.

    Update: A correspondent points out that Second Avenue was widened into a boulevard in 1921, and it was done by trimming, moving, or demolishing buildings on the north side of the street. One large building was moved back forty feet. Forty feet would be just enough to account for the asymmetry of this façade. E. B. Lee would have been available to supervise the alterations, but the building’s current form would represent the best he could do under adverse circumstances, not his original grand vision for the Americus Club.

    Window
    Lunette
    Pitt Building
  • The Liberty Theater As It Was Built

    Update: Once in a while old Pa Pitt has a chance to boast about his architectural instincts, and here is one of those occasions. In the original article, he wrote that he suspected Edward B Lee of having designed the remodeling of the theater into an office building. He was right. Source: The American Contractor, December 15, 1923: “Store & Office Bldg. (remod. from theater): $150,000. 5 sty. & bas. H. tile. Liberty av. & Strawberry Alley. Archt. E. B. Lee, Chamber of Commerce bldg. Owner The Fidelity Title & Trust Co., Wilson A. Shaw, chrm. of bd., 343 Fourth av. Gen. contr. let to Cuthbert Bros., Bessemer bldg.”

    The original text of Father Pitt’s article follows.


    Edward B. Lee was the architect of the Liberty Theater—or Theatre, as theatrical people often insist on spelling it—when it was built in 1912. These pictures were published in The Brickbuilder in 1913, so they show the theater as it was when it was new. Either the theater failed or the owners decided it would be more profitable as an office building, because only eleven years later, in 1924,1 it was remodeled into the Baum Building, and it still stands today.

    The shell and outlines are the same, but quite a bit was changed externally. Old Pa Pitt suspects that Lee was the architect of these changes, too, and they were accomplished so elegantly that we would never know the building had not been planned that way from the beginning.

    These small drawings (orchestra, first balcony, second balcony) show the aggressive adaptations Mr. Lee had to make to the irregular shape of the lot—a common difficulty for buildings on the southeast side of Liberty Avenue, where the two grids of the irrationally rationalistic eighteenth-century street plan collide.

    Detail over the entrance. These decorations disappeared when the building was converted to offices.

    Corner detail. The cornice and pilasters survive, but the elaborate terra-cotta decoration between the pilasters vanished in 1924.

    1. In the original version of this article, Father Pitt had given the date as 1920, following a city architectural survey. The listing from the American Contractor proves that the date was actually no earlier than 1924. ↩︎
  • Clifford B. Connelley Trade School

    Now the home of the Energy Innovation Center, this grand old school on the brow of the Hill taught useful skills to generations of students. The architect was Edward B. Lee, who was a favorite school designer around here.