Tag: Modernist Architecture

  • U. S. Steel Tower

    U. S. Steel Building from Ross Street

    A slightly distorted wide-angle view from Ross Street.

    U. S. Steel Tower
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Comments
  • First Christian Church, Allegheny West

    First Christian Church

    This interesting modernist church was built in 1963, as we find from the attractive plaque by the entrance:

    Date plaque with date 1963

    The balance of modern design and hand-crafted artisanship in the lettering is very appealing.

    Front of the church

    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.

    First Christian Church from across the street
    Left side of the church
    Right side of the church
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Comments
  • Community College of Allegheny County

    Milton Hall and the library
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    An abstraction with part of Milton Hall and the campus library at the Allegheny Campus of CCAC. Tasso Katselas was the architect.


    Comments
  • A Stubborn Survivor from the Lower Hill

    Beth Hamedrash Hagadol–Beth Jacob Congregation
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    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.

    Father Pitt’s information in this article comes from the article on Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Congregation at the Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania, along with the story “ ‘A Hidden Gem’: The history of Beth Hamedrash Hagodol-Beth Jacob Congregation” at the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.


    Comments
  • 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.

    Comments
  • Highland House, Highland Park

    Highland House

    Designed by Tasso Katselas, this 22-storey apartment tower opened in 1962. It has reverted to its original name, Highland House, after some years as “the Park Lane.”

    Highland House

    Many projects for skyscraper apartments or hotels were proposed for Highland Park, but this is the only one that ever succeeded. “A dramatic use of the Miesian glass cage formula applied to a 22 story apartment house” was how James D. Van Trump described it in “The Stones of Pittsburgh.” “Located on the edge of Highland Park it seems to float above a nearby reservoir.”

    Ground floor

    Miesian is a good term for it: the building adopts the colonnade of stilts that became the signature of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Many imitators of Mies seem to lose courage and make the peripteral colonnade a narrow and useless space; see, for example, the Westinghouse Building. Katselas, on the other hand, if anything exaggerated the width of the porch, so that the ground floor is reduced to a little entrance cage, leaving a big broad outdoor space under the shelter of twenty-one floors of steel and glass.

    Base of Highland House
    Stilts
    Highland House
  • Federal Building

    Federal Building
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Altenhof & Bown, a Pittsburgh firm that also designed the State Office Building, were the architects of what is now officially called the William S. Moorhead Federal Building. It’s a good example of mid-century modern architecture—distinctive in its vertical-blind curtain of aluminum panels, yet somehow easy to ignore.


    Comments
  • Skyscraper Apartments for the Postwar Era

    Doubletree Hotel
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    This was one of the major developments in postwar Pittsburgh—a $5,500,000 skyscraper apartment house financed by the FHA. Tennyson & Van Wart were the architects—a partnership of Arthur Tennyson, of Mount Lebanon, and John Van Wart, a successful New York architect who had been lured here in the 1930s by a job with Westinghouse. For many decades it has been a hotel under various owners, currently as the Doubletree.

    From the Pittsburgh Press, March 3, 1950.

    “The Federal Housing Administration has insured a mortgage loan to build a 19-story, H-shaped structure on Webster Ave. on the site of St. Mary’s High School and Home for Girls at Webster Ave. and Tunnel St,” the Press reported.

    “It will cost approximately $5½ million and provide housing for 465 families. Construction is expected to begin in June and be completed by June, 1951.”

    Mr. Van Wart died unexpectedly in June of 1950, while this building was under construction. Tennyson continued the practice alone, and would end up designing many more modernist apartment blocks in the Pittsburgh area. We’ll see more of his work.


    Comments
  • Immaculate Conception Church, Bloomfield

    Immaculate Conception Church

    This modernist church was dedicated by Cardinal Wright in 1960. The architects were Belli & Belli of Chicago. The stained glass was by Pittsburgh’s Hunt Studios; the scribbly outlines visible from the outside are typical of their postwar work. The church was abandoned by the diocese, but the last old Pa Pitt heard it was being worked on for another use. (In fact there was a stop-work order pasted on the window when Father Pitt walked by in February, but he assumes that is just a minor misunderstanding that will be cleared up.)

    Panorama of Immaculate Conception Church
    Turret
    Immaculate Conception Church
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Canon PoaerShot SX150 IS.

    Map.


    Comments
  • Rockwell Hall, Duquesne University

    Rockwell Hall
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Built in the 1950s as the Duquesne University Hall of Law and Finance, this building was featured in the Alcoa advertisement “How Many of These Pittsburgh Skyscrapers Can You Name?” as an example of the new ultra-modern sort of aluminum-clad skyscraper.


    Comments