“God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, and the details that would have refined the style of this double house have been lost: windows have been replaced, a hipped roof (invisible from this angle) replaced the original flat roof about six years ago, and we suspect that the porch railings and aluminum canopies are not original. Even so, we can see enough to see that this was an interestingly modern construction when it went up, probably in the late 1930s or the 1940s. The corner windows were a badge of modernity.
Built in 1972 for the Bureau of Police Investigations, this building sat vacant for a long while. It was restored in 2019 with a very sensitive eye for its original modernist style.
Those steps in the front were part of the restoration. They make a very attractive composition. To old Pa Pitt’s eyes, they look like a liability lawyer’s every architectural fantasy come true.
“One of the most handsome modern structures in Pittsburgh, this building is oriented inward, with a blank wall on each street facade above the ground floor windows.” So said James D. Van Trump in “The Stones of Pittsburgh,” and Father Pitt defers to Mr. Van Trump’s superior taste. The wedge-shaped sign above the entrance is a relatively new addition, put up in 2016, but it fits well with the spare modernism of the rest of the building. The architects were Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of the biggest firms in the business and most famous for supertall buildings like the Sears Tower and the Burj Khalifa.
If it isn’t the sharpest, it must at least be close. Father Pitt remembers when the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art was going up in Washington (Big Worshington, that is): it was boasted that I. M. Pei’s design included the most acute angle in any American building. This angle is nearly congruent with Pei’s, except that here the point has been slightly blunted. The architect has made sensible use of that sharp corner by putting the stairwell there, with a column of windows to light it.
The biggest skyscraper project since the Tower at PNC Plaza, this was billed as the nucleus of new development that will finally make good on the promises of prosperity made when the Lower Hill was cleared out in the 1960s. The design was by Gensler, a huge architecture conglomerate also responsible for the Tower at PNC Plaza.
This interesting modernist church was built in 1963, as we find from the attractive plaque by the entrance:
The balance of modern design and hand-crafted artisanship in the lettering is very appealing.
The architects of the church were Williams & Trebilcock.1 The church was dedicated on April 5, 1964; it replaced a building that had been next to the old Presbyterian Hospital. This building now belongs to Living Word Ministry.
The destruction of the Lower Hill and the destruction of central Allegheny were the two great urban-renewal catastrophes in Pittsburgh’s history. A century ago, the Lower Hill was the classic American melting pot, where black and white, Christian and Jewish, and every other kind of people all lived together in a crowded but lively neighborhood. That made it a slum, according to middle-twentieth-century definitions. When “slum clearance” became an urban-planning buzzword, the Lower Hill was the prime target.
Many of the synagogues had moved to Squirrel Hill and other neighborhoods in the East End by that time. The Beth Hamedrash Hagodol congregation had not. It had stayed in its 1892 building right next to Epiphany School, where downtown workers could easily walk to prayers.
From a Hopkins plat map at Pittsburgh Historic Maps. At this time the congregation was known as B’nai Israel.
When the Lower Hill was demolished (except for Epiphany Church and School, which we’ll be seeing shortly), the old synagogue was one of the buildings in the way. But the congregation didn’t give up. It built a new synagogue just around the corner on Colwell Street, taking the elaborate Torah ark from the old building.
The new synagogue lasted for about forty years, but then it, too, found itself in the way. It was torn down when the new arena was built.
Still the congregation didn’t give up. Architect Harry Levine remodeled an abandoned building into a new synagogue, and in 2010 the congregation, after meeting in borrowed space at Duquesne University for a couple of years, moved into its current home on Fifth Avenue at Diamond Street. Here it is still convenient for downtown worshipers, and here it stands, a block away from its Lower Hill location, an indomitable survivor.
