Father Pitt

Tag: Liberty Avenue

  • Hoffstot Building

    811 Liberty Avenue

    This building was put up in 1886, and in 1892 a sixth floor was added. It appears that the pediment was from the original construction, moved up one level in 1892; the ornamental scrolls on the fifth floor would have accented the pediment very nicely.

    Pediment

    As we often see in Victorian commercial buildings, what might appear to eyes trained on modernism as a cacophonous racket of detail turns out to be carefully organized, more a fugue than a racket. There are some interesting little outbreaks of randomness, however. Here are some of the delightful details you can pick out if you stand across the street from the building.

    Flower
    Profile facing right
    Profile facing left
    Flower and foliage
    Scroll

  • 6th and Penn Garage

    6th and Penn Garage

    Connoisseurs of brutalism in architecture regard this as a remarkably fine example of the style. (Father Pitt could not find the architect with a short search, and he was not willing to do a long one.) “Brutalism” is the modernist school that makes its aesthetic statements through exposed raw concrete. The “raw” part is very important here: the architectural world blew a collective gasket when, in Washington, D.C., the Metro authorities responded to the increasing grubbiness of 1970s Brutalist subway stations by painting over the grime, which was blasphemy. Old Pa Pitt is not a great lover of brutalism (except for the Metro stations in Washington, which are like modernist cathedrals), but he can appreciate the care that went into making the most of concrete as a material in this building—the curved surfaces, the geometric forms, the play of light and shadow. It is also notable that, instead of killing the whole block, the builder put storefronts on the ground floor, so that some life could remain on the streets below the garage.

  • Meyer Jonasson & Co. Building

    File:Meyer Jonasson & Co. building

    Now called just 606 Liberty Avenue, this was once a high-class department store. The odd-shaped building was designed by MacClure & Spahr, who gave us many distinguished buildings downtown. The odd shape was forced on this one by the oblique angle of the intersection of Liberty and Oliver Avenues. That last block of Oliver Avenue was later filled in to make PNC Plaza, but this building memorializes the intersection that used to be.

    Arch

    The front on both streets is covered—perhaps the appropriate word is festooned—with terra-cotta decorations. The style is a kind of fantasy Jacobean Renaissance, with wide arches coming to a very shallow not-quite point. Old James I only wished he could have buildings like this in his realm.

    Terra-cotta olive and oak and acanthus
    More terra cotta
    Terra cotta
    Entrance
    Lion head
    Light fixture
    Reflections of the arches

    The arches reflected in Two PNC Plaza next door.

    From the sidewalk on the same side of the street

  • 905 Liberty Avenue

    This exceptionally attractive industrial building is now—we really don’t have to say this, but we will anyway—loft apartments.

  • Renshaw Building

    Renshaw

    The Renshaw Building at Liberty Avenue and Ninth Street was built in 1910, with an extra floor added to the top at some time in the modernistic era. It’s a perfect miniature skyscraper, with base, shaft, cap, and the outlined bosses’ floor above the main floor. There are some good terra-cotta decorations, especially around the Ninth Street entrance.

    Renshaw Building
    Nonth Street entrance
    Frieze

  • Two Sides of Charles Bickel

    Charles Bickel was one of our most prolific architects of medium-sized commercial buildings. He was versatile and adaptable, as we see here in two buildings of very similar dimensions and very different styles, built within two years of each other. Above, the Maginn Building, from 1897, in a very Richardsonian Romanesque idiom; it is currently being converted into—who would have guessed?—luxury loft apartments. Below, from 1895, the United Presbyterian Board of Publications Building, in a pure Beaux-Arts classical style.

  • 820 Liberty Avenue

    820 Liberty Avenue

    A splendid Victorian commercial building from 1881. The huge windows suggest showrooms or possibly workshops; the northwestern exposure would have given those rooms bright even lighting all day. Next door is the Baum Building, built as the Liberty Theater.

    Addendum: This is the B. F. Jones Building, designed by Joseph Stillburg, according to Inga Gudmundsson McGuire, the world’s leading expert on Stillburg.

  • Harris Theater

    Harris theater

    This little movie house, built as the Avenue Cinema in 1931, became the Art Cinema in 1935; from the 1960s until the 1990s, it showed “adult movies,” which old Pa Pitt assumed meant that all the films were over 21 years old. But it had begun life as an art-film house, and in 1995 it resumed that role under the name “Harris,” after one of the founders of the movie-theater business—John P. Harris, who with his brother-in-law opened the world’s first movie theater, the Nickelodeon, which was on Smithfield Street (a plaque marks the site today). Movies had been shown in theaters before, but the Nickelodeon was the first to show only movies. The idea caught on with amazing rapidity, and “Nickelodeons” sprouted everywhere.

  • Clark Building

    Clark Building

    The Clark Building was built in 1928 at the same time as the Stanley Theater (now the Benedum Center) around the corner, and designed by the same architects—the Hoffman-Henon Company, which specialized in theaters but could also turn out a pretty good skyscraper in a sort of modernized Beaux-Arts classical style. The upper floors are apartments, but the lower floors are still, as they have been for many years, the center of the jewelry district downtown.

  • Ewart Building

    Ewart Building

    Charles Bickel was quite at home in the Romanesque style, and he prospered in a city that had gone mad for Romanesque after Richardson’s County Courthouse appeared. The Ewart Building was put up in 1892. Old Pa Pitt was attracted to this morning view by the pattern of reflections on Liberty Avenue.