The “diagrid” construction of the United Steelworkers Building (originally the IBM Building) is unusual, both from an aesthetic and from an engineering standpoint. The grid is not just decorative: it holds up the building from the outside. The piers on which all that weight rests are dramatic from close up. The architects were Curtis and Davis of New Orleans; as far as old Pa Pitt knows, this is their only building in Pittsburgh.
St. Henry Church has been abandoned for years, and it is slowly rotting away. Yet the neighborhood still remembers it as a point of pride: when Father Pitt was taking pictures along Arlington Avenue the other day, some locals stopped to talk and immediately asked, “Did you see our church?”
And, of course, our utility cables.
St. Henry was designed by Marlier & Johnstone and built in 1952, when the neighborhood was thriving.
Each of those squares had a symbolic relief at its center, with a big metal cross in the middle of the façade. Those have all been taken away, because when Catholics abandon a building, they generally preserve whatever is unique and valuable about it and place it in another parish if possible. It does leave the building looking stripped, but we can understand the impulse.
The entrance is sharply drawn in a style that flavors modern with just a bit of late Art Deco.
An abstract cross-topped cupola.
An exhibition of utility cables.
The rectory is older than the church; it is hard to guess the age of it, and it has been added to in various eras and various styles.
The school next to the church has been abandoned twice. It was a public primary school for a while after the parochial school closed, but the public school closed a few years ago.
Dowler & Dowler, father-and-son architects, designed this building for the Bell System’s western headquarters in Pennsylvania. We have seen the building from this angle before, but we have not seen it with a bus coming toward you, which is always an improvement.
The Stanwix Street front has a Miesian colonnaded porch, with a cheerful abstract mosaic ceiling.
Those cheerful square polka dots also show up in other parts of the building.
The cornerstone, with its late-Art-Deco lettering and date.
Edward J. Schulte was a master of the modern in ecclesiastical architecture. Wherever he went, all over the United States, he left churches that were uncompromisingly modern in their details, but also uncompromisingly traditional in their adaptation to Christian worship. St. Anne’s, which was finished in 1962, is a fine example of his work.
A date stone on the grounds.
The details are modern, but the form of the church is perfectly adapted to the ancient Christian liturgy. Too many modern architects expected the liturgy to adapt to the building, but Mr. Schulte obviously knew Christian tradition.
We might point to the baptistery as an illustration of what we mean.
It’s a strikingly modern building, bang up to date for the Kennedy administration. But in its form and position it reminds us of…
…the Baptistery of Neon in Ravenna, seen here in a photograph from A History of Architecture in Italy by Charles A. Cummings (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1901). Built in the late 300s or early 400s, it was originally an extension of a large basilica, just like this baptistery. The one in Ravenna is one of the oldest Christian buildings still standing; Mr. Schulte reached right back to Roman imperial days to find his inspiration.
The most striking feature of the church is a detached bell tower more than a hundred feet high.
The tower was donated by the United Steelworkers of America in honor of Philip Murray, the union’s first president. St. Anne’s was his home parish, and he is buried in St. Anne’s Cemetery.
A relief of St. Anne and St. Mary is accompanied by a quotation from Psalm 44 in the Vulgate numbering (Psalm 45 in the numbering used in Protestant and newer Catholic Bibles).
The (liturgical) west front of the church1 is a balaced composition in geometry and symbolism.
Some roof work was going on when old Pa Pitt visited. (Update: A parishioner informs us that the work was in the basement, including an elevator, which is doubtless why we saw workers on the roof.)
In traditional churches, the altar end is always referred to as “east,” even when it is not in the east by the compass. The end opposite the altar, where the main entrance is traditionally placed, is thus the west, and if—as in this case—the compass says the west front faces northeast, then the compass is entitled to its opinion. ↩︎
After years of neglect and decay, this apartment building in the otherwise prosperous neighborhood of Highland Park is finally condemned.
And it will be a tragedy to lose it, because it is an extraordinary work by an extraordinary architect.
Frederick Scheibler is possibly the most-talked-about architect Pittsburgh ever produced, and this building—put up in 1906 for Mary M. Coleman—marks a turning point in Scheibler’s style, according to his biographer Martin Aurand. “The facade departs from precedent, however, in the sheer strength of its massing, and in its near total lack of common domestic imagery—even a cornice.… There is virtually no exterior ornament at all. The Coleman facade continues a process of abstraction begun at the Linwood [in North Point Breeze], but the leap forward in Scheibler’s developing style is sudden.”1
Considering the value of real estate in Highland Park right now, restoring this building should be not only public-spirited but also profitable. Is any ambitious developer willing to take it on? That blue sticker isn’t necessarily a death sentence: it will be removed if the dangerous conditions are remediated. To make it easier for you, Scheibler’s original drawings for this building are preserved in the Architecture Archive at Carnegie Mellon, so there need be no guesswork in the restoration.
This stone mansion on Acorn Hill, with its eye-catching combination of Gothic and modernist details, was designed by William C. Young and built in 1937.
Pittsburgh Press, February 21, 1937, p. 50.
“The above drawing by William C. Young, architect and builder, is of the model home being erected at the intersection of Watsonia Blvd. [now Marshall Road] and Norwood Ave., North Side, for Mr. and Mrs. John H. Phillips by the Young firm. The home is a combination of all that is modern in electrical equipment and labor saving devices with all that is charming and quaint from the old Norman English Architecture.” Old Pa Pitt thinks of “Norman” as implying the English branch of Romanesque rather than Gothic, but he will not argue about the charm.
The steps leading up to the house from Marshall Road are a masterpiece of romanticism in landscape design.
Tasso Katselas designed this mixed-use building, an apartment tower on top of a parking garage. It opened in 1966. For a while it was known by its address as 625 Stanwix Tower. Now it has been refurbished and given a spiffy new coat of black, which makes a big difference in its appearance. Compare the picture old Pa Pitt took from across the Allegheny nine years ago:
Back then, Father Pitt was a bit harsh in his criticism: “There is no rhythm to the apartment section, not even a jazzy syncopation,” he wrote. But the new coat of black emphasizes the vertical lines and gives the building exactly the rhythm it was missing—which turns out to be a jazzy syncopation.
Sometimes the false is truer than the true. It is not possible to get a good picture of One PNC Plaza from the ground. The only way to get in the whole building—well, almost the whole building—was to stitch together multiple pictures, which produced a hideously distorted perspective. To create a rendering that looks more like what we perceive (which is not the same as what we see) when we look at the building, old Pa Pitt resorted to complicated trickery for the picture above, making four vertical slices of the picture and adjusting each one of them separately. If you look at the ground level, you can see how everything else has been broken and distorted to make the building look more like itself.
Here is the base of the building without the radical distortions.
One PNC Plaza was designed by Welton Becket and Associates; it opened in 1972. Mr. Becket died at the beginning of 1969; but it is probable that he left drawings of this building on his drafting table, since it had been planned before 1968. The firm continued under his name long after his death; One Mellon Center, which opened in 1980, was also designed by Welton Becket and Associates.
It is a curious fact that One PNC Plaza replaced another skyscraper that was shorter by only four floors: the First National Bank Building, which was designed by Daniel Burnham and ranks at number 35 on Wikipedia’s “List of tallest voluntarily demolished buildings.” It is the tallest building destroyed in Pittsburgh so far.
The First National Bank Building, which One PNC Plaza replaced.
We saw Neville House in color earlier. These three monochrome pictures were taken with a Kodak Retinette made in the middle 1950s. Above, the exit from the porte cochere under the building. Below, the main entrance, including the porte cochere and the patio in front of it.
Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film.
Thanks to Bodega Film Lab for developing the film and making it worth taking the Retinette out for a walk.
This large apartment development between Railroad Street and the Allegheny opened in 2016. WTW Architects were the architects of record, and this is a good example of the type of patchwork-quilt architecture that has been fashionable in the last decade or two. On the one hand old Pa Pitt thinks these buildings are much more interesting than the plain brick boxes that were fashionable after the Second World War. On the other hand, bricks last, whereas Father Pitt fears some of these other materials will begin to look a bit scraggly in about fifteen years.
