The Stanley was designed as a silent-movie palace, but opened in 1928, just as talkies were making a revolution in the movie business. The architects were the Hoffman-Henon Company of Philadelphia. It was the biggest theater in Pittsburgh when it opened, and as the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts it is still our biggest theater now.
The skyscraper behind the theater is the Clark Building, which was built at the same time and designed by the same architects as part of the same development package.
Poe’s “Purloined Letter” taught us that the best place to hide something is in plain sight. Here is a building that has been sitting here on Penn Avenue for more than a century and a quarter, where thousands walk past it every day, but the biographer of Alden & Harlow was unable to find it when she looked for it.
That, of course, is because she was looking for it. Father Pitt almost never finds things when he looks for them. He finds them when he is looking for something else. In this case, our frequent correspondent, the architect and historian David Schwing, had sent an article about the many buildings under construction in late 1896, and among them was this little item:
The Henry Phipps’ store building, on Penn avenue, corner Cecil way, to be finished January 1, is a massive steel structure 60×120, with Pompeiian brick front, ornamented with stone and terra cotta, thoroughly fireproof in construction; will be heated by steam; supplied with an independent electric plant of its own; electric elevators, and lighted by both systems of arc and incandescent. Alden & Harlow, architects.
There is little doubt about the identification. The Phipps-McElveen Building stands on the corner of Penn Avenue and Cecil Way—the corner that plat maps show belonged to Henry Phipps. The plat maps also show that the front of the building is sixty feet wide.
This building does not appear in the gorgeous book Architecture After Richardson by Margaret Henderson Floyd, which exhaustively catalogues all the known buildings of Alden & Harlow (and Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, and the other variations of the firm). However, there is a building that the author could not account for: an “as yet unlocated hotel for L. C. Phipps.” Lawrence C. Phipps was a nephew of Henry who would move to Denver in 1901 and go into the senatorial business. “The brick and terra cotta hotel for L. C. Phipps was eight stories high,” says the book, “but no visual records have been found.”
The brick and terra cotta Phipps-McElveen building has eight floors.
Thanks to the research of Mr. Schwing, who often does find things when he looks for them, we can put together what happened. It appears as though the plans for the property changed more than once. In the middle of 1895, it was announced that a twelve-storey hotel would be built on Penn Avenue from plans by D. H. Burnham & Company. But by early 1896, the hotel plan had been abandoned. “Longfellow, Alden & Harlow have the bids for the erection of an eight-story storeroom building on Penn Avenue, for Henry Phipps, between Marshell’s store and Cecil alley. It was the intention to put up a large hotel on the site, but this scheme has been abandoned. Work had started by early June. During the construction, Longfellow, Alden & Harlow decided to divide their firm, with Mr. Longfellow staying in Boston and Alden & Harlow taking all the Pittsburgh work.
So it looks as though we’ve found the missing building that Margaret Henderson Floyd couldn’t find, and old Pa Pitt offers this visual record in humble appreciation of her meticulous research and engaging writing.
A quarter-century ago, the O’Reilly opened with a brand-new play by August Wilson (King Hedley II). That makes it a newcomer by Penn Avenue standards. But Penn Avenue has been the heart of the theater district for a century and a half, and the O’Reilly stands on the exact site of Library Hall, whose auditorium was used as the Bijou, Victorian Pittsburgh’s most prestigious theater, where touring stars like Dion Boucicault played. The site had been a parking lot for more than sixty years before the O’Reilly was built, but we can think of this theater as continuing the Bijou tradition.
The building was designed by Michael Graves, the postmodernist whose brand of neoneoclassicism was influential in the movement. Mr. Graves also designed Theater Square next door, which houses the Greer Cabaret and a well-dressed parking garage.
Nikon COOLPIX P100.
Old Pa Pitt has been dumping quite a load of pictures in these pages for the past few days. He realized that the pictures have been backing up and decided he ought to try to catch up with them. But how backed up were they? Here is a picture of the O’Reilly taken with a Kodak Signet 40 in June of 2000, when the building was only six months old. Father Pitt has never published it here before.
This fashionably Romanesque house was probably built in the 1890s for a W. Snively. It has been converted to apartments, but the original outlines of the house are still evident. If, by the way, you are embarrassed by the soot stains on the stone of your house, old Pa Pitt suggests overcoming your embarrassment and embracing the history that soot represents. The alternative of painting your stone grey is not a success.
Now St. Paul Baptist Church. Built in 1887, it was designed by Brooklyn architect Lawrence B. Valk, whose church designs can be found all over the country. (In about 1900, Valk and his son moved to Los Angeles, where they became bungalow specialists but continued turning out the occasional church.)
The tower with its huge open Romanesque arch dominates the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Penn Avenue. After the tower, the most eye-catching thing is the porch, with its even huger arch and its crust of terra-cotta tiles.
The side entrance also gets a big arch, and even the basement door gets a stony arched porch.
“Penn avenue always has been and seems to continue to be the Mecca of furniture houses,” wrote George Esterhammer in the Pittsburg Press in 1905,1 and indeed Penn Avenue between Ninth and Tenth was lined with huge furniture dealers on both sides for more than a century. (See Spear and Company, for example.) Mr. Esterhammer was the architect of this building, which was designed to the latest fireproof standards, including a 10,000-gallon tank on the roof and sprinklers throughout.
“The fireproof floors will be covered with narrow white maple,” Mr. Esterhammer continued, “thus allowing to display to better advantage the beauty of carpets and rugs. The front on Penn Avenue will be of plate glass, Cleveland sandstone, buff brick and ornamental fire flashed terra cotta. The main entrance and the stories above are a special feature, highly ornamented and will, in the opinion of the writer, be striking and attractive.”
The architect’s elevation was published with the article, so we can compare the building as designed to the building as it stands now. The crest has been lost, but other alterations have been minimal. The ground floor has been sensitively updated for a restaurant and storefront, but overall the building makes very much the same impression it must have made when it was new. “Altogether,” said Mr. Esterhammer, “Mr. Wildberg’s new building will lift up its head proud among its neighbors,” and it still does.
“Penn Avenue Improvement,” Pittsburg Press, June 18, 1905. The name is spelled “Easterhammer” above the article, but “Esterhammer” in the illustration caption and in other construction listings we have seen. He was a member of the Deutsch-Amerikanischen Techniker-Verband, and in their membership listings his first name is spelled “Georg.” ↩︎
The Hotel Roosevelt, as it appeared in a 1928 advertisement in the National Vaudeville Artists Year Book. The advertisement was designed to appeal to performers on the vaudeville circuit (which was just about to come crashing down and would be nearly extinct in five years), and it was certainly a convenient location, within a block’s walk of at least five theaters. The Roosevelt still stands today, converted to apartments, and it is still surrounded by theaters.
The ad carries the name of L. Fred Klooz, President and Managing Director, and it includes a bit of doggerel so awful that we can only presume it was written by Mr. Klooz himself.
This picture has been manipulated on two planes to match the perspective of the 1889 image below. It is no longer possible to stand in exactly the same place, because other buildings have sprouted in inconvenient places.
W. H. Keech was a dealer in furniture and carpets. In the 1880s he built this towering six-floor commercial palace on Penn Avenue at Garrison Place in the furniture district. The main part of the building has hardly changed since the photograph below was published in Pittsburgh Illustrated in 1889:
Probably in the 1890s, an addition was put on the right-hand side of the building, matching the original as well as possible.
This building is festooned with decorative details in just the right places, including some Romanesque carved stone above the entrance. (Addendum: The architect of the original building and additions, including one to the right later destroyed by fire and another one after that, was James T. Steen, according to a plaque on the Conover Building three doors down, which was originally part of the expanded Keech Block.)
For a century, this section of Penn Avenue was the furniture district, and Spear and Company had one of the largest stores. The building was designed by Charles Bickel, who festooned it with terra cotta in blue and white.
The picture above comes from 1915. The original is at Historic Pittsburgh; Father Pitt has brightened the shadows a little to bring out more detail.
