Robert J. Worsing was both the developer and the architect of this good-looking six-unit building, put up as condominium apartments in 1977. Among the amenities was “a 36-inch wide log-burning fireplace” in each unit, which explains the prominent chimneys with their modernistic chimney pots. A Press article showed the architect’s model, which includes the fabric awnings that—surprisingly—are still maintained over the front windows.1
A modernist building typical of the postwar apartment boom, including the tall stairwell light made of glass blocks—a Pittsburgh product much employed in the middle twentieth century. To old Pa Pitt’s ears, “Castletone” sounds like the name of a third-string record company, but the apartments are in a very convenient location, just down the street from the Mount Lebanon subway station on the Red Line.
Now the BNY Client Service Center, after some intermediate years as the BNY Mellon Client Service Center. The picture is made from three photographs at different exposures, so that we can see a bit of the interior through the windows.
The base of the U. S. Steel Tower is where all the drama of the building is concentrated. From a distance, it’s a black slab dominating the skyline, but at the base, the impossibly spindly supports make the building seem to hover like something in a René Magritte painting.
Built as a branch bank, this tidy little modernistic building seems to be succeeding in its second life as a little neighborhood grocery. It is one of several “flatiron” buildings in Sheraden, and old Pa Pitt had to stand in the middle of a fairly busy intersection to get this picture of the sharp end:
An apartment tower that was part of the original Chatham Center complex, designed by William Lescaze with Pittsburgh’s Harry Lefkowitz as the local architect. It opened in 1966.
The striking feature of this modernist synagogue is the huge relief over the entrance that symbolically depicts the Twelve Tribes of Israel surrounding the Tablets of the Law. The architects were Ben Friedman and Nathan Cantor, although Father Pitt has not yet sorted out whether they worked together or at different times.
Ground was broken for the first part of the building on April 20, 1947; first services were conducted September 3, 1948. Ground for the Rabbi Sivitz Memorial Talmud Torah and Main Building was broken August 17, 1952; it was dedicated on August 27, 1955.
This preliminary sketch for the synagogue was published on the cover of the Jewish Criterion, August 23, 1946. The sketch is quite different from the building as it stands, but obviously an early stage in the evolution of the same idea. Through the halftoning, we can just make out the name “Friedman” in the signature.
The symbols are taken from the prophecy of Jacob in Genesis 49:
Reuben, unstable as water;
Simeon and Levi: instruments of cruelty are in their habitations (but Simeon’s sword is mitigated by a wreath of olive, and Levi later became the priestly class, and thus is represented by a swinging censer);
Judah is a lion’s whelp;
Zebulun shall be for an haven of ships;
Issachar is a strong ass, crouching down between two burdens;
Dan shall be a serpent in the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’ heels, so that his rider shall fall backward;
Gad, a troupe shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last;
Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties;
Naphthali is a hind let loose;
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall;
The shopping arcade at Fifth Avenue Place, like almost all indoor shopping arcades and a good many enclosed shopping malls, withered and emptied, so advertising it on the Liberty Avenue entrance no longer made sense. The new entrance is much more restrained, modernist rather than postmodernist. This, in case you don’t remember, is what it used to look like:
Father Pitt will not fault the tasteful modernism of the new design in isolation—in fact he thinks it makes a good picture—but it does not fit the spirit of Reagan-era excess in the building itself. It would have been better to leave the old entrance, with its gold-foil arch and its giant clock, and just remove the signs.
It is a rule, however, that the style of the previous generation is always the most embarrassing, and the style of the generation before it is always to be preferred. It seems to old Pa Pitt that today’s architects and builders are embarrassed by the exuberant postmodernism of the 1980s, and are taking every opportunity to remold it into fussily correct International Style modernism, exactly the same way their ancestors of a century ago were embarrassed by the exuberant Victorianism of the 1880s and were taking every opportunity to remold it into fussily correct classicism.
