Father Pitt

Tag: MacClure & Spahr

  • Oliver Bathhouse, South Side

    The Oliver Bathhouse

    The Oliver Bathhouse, built as the South Side Baths but soon renamed for its donor (who had died in the long delay between the donation and the construction), has been getting a thorough restoration and renovation. The outside of the building looks almost brand new.

    Old photo of the South Side Baths

    This picture from Preservation Pittsburgh’s collection is dated January 31, 1913, at Wikimedia Commons, but that is an error. In the Construction Record for May 30, 1914, we read, “Architects MacClure & Spahr, Keystone building, will lake bids until June 1 on the erection of a brick, stone and terra cotta fireproof bath house on Tenth and Bingham streets, for the Henry W. Oliver Estate. Cost $100,000.” The building might have been finished by January of 1915 if the construction got started right away. Wikipedia concurs that the building was finished in 1915. Since this picture was taken from a printed source, we suspect that a poorly-scanned “1918” might have been misread as “1913.”

    Inscription over the entrance: “South Side Baths presented to the City of Pittsburgh by Henry W. Oliver.”
    “South Side Baths, presented to the City of Pittsburgh by Henry W. Oliver.”

    Oliver’s steel mills nearby employed many of the workmen who would benefit from these baths. He might not pay them enough to afford more than squalid tenements with inadequate bathing facilities, but he was willing to spend enough to make them smell better on Saturday nights.

    Cartouche
    Oliver Bathhouse
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The Oliver Bathhouse survives as a bathhouse, uniquely among the public baths in Pittsburgh, because the more upscale denizens of today’s South Side appreciate its large indoor swimming pool, the only city pool open in the winter.

    More pictures of the Oliver Bathhouse.

    Map.

    Comments

  • Monongahela Incline

    Nonongahela Incline

    The Monongahela Incline on a rainy day. The incline opened in 1870, but the ornate lower station was built in 1904; it was designed by MacClure & Spahr.

    Lower station
    Lower station with car approaching
    Incline cars passing
    Incline car
    Incline car arriving at upper station
    Lower station with two cars on incline
    Lower station
    Lower station
    Lower station
    Monongahela Incline
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Chapel, Office, and Gatehouse at the Homewood Cemetery

    Tower of Homewood Cemetery Chapel

    Albert Spahr of MacClure & Spahr designed the chapel, the administration building, and the gatehouse for the Homewood Cemetery in a Perpendicular Gothic style. (Mr. MacClure had already died, but his name remained at the head of the firm.) The effect is to make us think of our ideal image of an English village.

    Office and chapel
    Chapel
    Chapel
    Chapel with trees
    Tower entrance to the chapel
    Inscription: Anno Domini MCMXXII
    Lantern
    Flower and foliage
    Hinge

    The doors have impressive iron hinges and pulls.

    Door pull
    Tower clock

    Here is an extraordinarily rare thing: a tower clock that is keeping accurate time.

    Office

    The administration building.

    Office
    Office entrance
    Gatehouse

    The gatehouse appears to have been expanded by a third on the right; the seam is only just visible in the front, but much more obvious in the rear.

    Rear of the gatehouse
    Rear of the gatehouse

    Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Coraopolis YMCA

    Coraopolis YMCA

    Now the Historic State Avenue Apartments, this old YMCA was designed by MacClure & Spahr and built in 1910. The style is a rich Georgian that makes the place look like a high-class resort hotel.

    Composite view of the front
    Entrance
    Alcove

    Even the alcoves for trash and utility equipment have a rich Colonial look.

    Coraopolis YMCA

    Cameras: Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Acheson House, Shadyside

    Acheson House

    An elegant Tudor or Jacobean mansion designed by MacClure & Spahr and built in 1903, as the dormer tells us. This Post-Gazette story (reprinted in a Greenville, North Carolina, paper that does not keep it behind a paywall) tells us that a 1925 addition was designed by Benno Janssen, who had worked in the MacClure & Spahr office and may have had some responsibility for the original design. The article also tells us how vandals masquerading as interior designers rampaged through the house and painted all the interior woodwork white or pale grey to “banish dark wood,” but at least the exterior is in good shape.

    Dormer with the date 1903
    Perspective view of the house
    Side of the house

    Cameras: Nikon COOLPIX P100; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • Some Houses on Bigelow Boulevard, Schenley Farms

    Ledge House

    As we mentioned before, we are attempting to photograph every house in the residential part of Schenley Farms. Here is a big album of houses on Bigelow Boulevard, which becomes a residential street as it winds through the neighborhood. Above, Ledge House, the strikingly different home of A. A. Hamerschlag, the first director of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). It was designed by Henry Hornbostel, who designed the Carnegie Tech campus and taught at Carnegie Tech. It has recently been cleaned of a century’s worth of industrial soot and restored to its original appearance.

    Ledge House
    4107 Bigelow Boulevard

    Above and below, the D. Herbert Hostetter, Jr., house, architects Janssen and Abbott. Benno Janssen and his partner abstracted the salient details of the Tudor or “English half-timber” style and reduced it to the essentials, creating a richly Tudory design with no wasted lines.

    4107 Bigelow Boulevard

    Because we have so many pictures, we’ll put the rest below the metaphorical fold to avoid weighing down the front page here.

    (more…)

  • Top of the Diamond Bank Building

    Lion on the Diamond Bank Building

    Banks and lions go together all over Pittsburgh, and the top of the Diamond Bank Building, an early skyscraper designed by MacClure & Spahr, has a copper cornice bristling with lion heads.

    Top of the Diamond Bank Building

  • Langley High School, Sheraden

    Langley High School

    This school began in 1923 as Sheraden High School, then was renamed Langley. It is now an elementary and junior high school. The architects were MacClure & Spahr, whose instinct for late English Gothic made it a memorable Tudor palace.

    Long wall
    Another entrance

  • Dilworth, Porter & Co. Office

    Dilworth, Porter & Co. office

    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.)

    Entrance
    Carving
    Carving
    Carving
    Ornament

    Map.

  • Adding Five Stories to an Eight-Story Office Building in Pittsburgh

    We’ve mentioned before that the Jones & Laughlin Headquarters Building was expanded upward by five floors almost a decade after it was built. It seems that the expansion was planned and provided for from the beginning, which explains how the architects, MacClure & Spahr, managed it so neatly. The Engineering News for January 18, 1917, gives us the technical details of how it was done, and includes a picture of the back of the building with the construction in progress.

    Adding Five Stories to an Eight-Story Office Building in Pittsburgh

    An extension of five stories—planned at the time the structure was erected to its original height of eight stories—has just been added to the Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. office building in Pittsburgh. In the original construction the floorbeams of the ninth floor had been put in place and used to support a temporary roof, and the columns had been provided with splices to take the future extensions. When the addition was begun, holes were cut through the roof to enter the columns, and then these holes were housed around to keep out the rain. A stiffleg derrick hoisted the steel and then erected it.

    To give access to the portion of the floor lying between the stifflegs, the loads were temporarily landed at the extreme swing of the boom. The boom was then passed back of a disconnected stiffleg and proceeded with the erection after the stiffleg had been replaced.

    The old roof was wrecked as soon as the tenth-floor slabs and the new side walls of the ninth floor were in place. The floor was maintained in a fairly water-tight condition. It had originally been intended to require that the new roof be placed before the old was removed.

    All materials other than steelwork, including concrete and débris from the old roof and cornice, were handled in the construction elevator at the rear of the building. Floors were built on the Witherow system, with removable steel centers on which were cast a beam-and-slab floor framing into the steel floorbeams.

    McClure & Spahr were the architects, and James L. Stuart was the contractor.

    So MacClure & Spahr had to design a building that would look finished at two different heights, which they managed with elegance and finesse. It is now the John P. Robin Civic Building, and the exterior is almost perfectly preserved.