Thomas D. Evans was the architect of this towering warehouse, built just as the age of skyscrapers was dawning in 1896. It has kept its Romanesque decorative details, and the ground floor has been restored and lightly modernized with sympathy for the original lines of the building.
The picture above was taken in September of 2023; we append it to show the strong impression the building makes from half a block away.
The front of green terra cotta is unique in Pittsburgh. Frederick C. Sauer designed this building, and when it was done he moved his office into it. It is the only one of Sauer’s buildings, as far as old Pa Pitt knows, that bore his name on the building itself, though at some point some workman, doubtless thinking he was doing a splendid job of renovating the building, did his best to obliterate the letters:
Addendum: As we might have guessed from looking at the front, the building rose in two stages. Three floors were added in 1909.1
Doubtless built for very pedestrian commercial uses—with huge windows that provided bright light from the south all day—these two buildings nevertheless could not be seen in public until they were dressed in the proper Beaux-Arts fashion. Other more recent buildings grew up around them and then were torn down, but these have survived, and seemed to be getting some work when Father Pitt walked past them recently.
Both buildings pull from the same repertory of classical ornaments in terra cotta, but mix them up in different ways.
No. 819 is more heavily ornamented—both in the sense of the abundance of ornaments and in the sense that the individual ornaments seem weightier:
No. 821, on the other hand, is decorated with a lighter and more Baroque touch:
One of the few first-generation skyscrapers outside downtown, this was originally the warehouse for the Bernard Gloeckler Company, a prosperous dealer in “butchers’ supplies & tools, store fixtures, refrigerators, etc.,” according to a 1913 city directory (where the name is spelled Gloekler; we have also seen Glockler and Gleckler). It was later called the Pennrose Building, and of course it has been adapted as luxury apartments. It was built in 1906; the architects were the Philadelphia firm of Ballinger & Perrot.1
The building was reinforced concrete throughout, and Ballinger & Perrot literally wrote the book on reinforced concrete: Inspector’s Handbook of Reinforced Concrete, by Walter F. Ballinger and Emile G. Perrot (New York: The Engineering News Publishing Co.; London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1909).
A century ago, if we read our old maps right, this building was a garage—and probably warehouse—for the Pennsylvania Motor Sales Corp. (Addendum: It was built in 1919, probably finished in 1920; the architect was Thomas Hannah.1) The ground floor now houses a large Asian market full of delicious things; the upper floors still seem to be used for storage. The original windows are still in the upper floors, making this an unusually well-preserved example of commercial architecture of the First World War period.
The utilitarian square front (whose proportions are already dignified) is livened up by brightly colored tile decorations.
Alternating bands of brick and stone make this fantasy French cottage more than usually picturesque.
The history of the Horne’s building is a complicated one. The original building was one of the last works of William S. Fraser, one of the most prominent Pittsburgh architects of the second half of the nineteenth century. Only a few years after it opened, a huge fire burned out much of the interior. Some of the original remained, but, since Fraser had died, Horne’s brought in Peabody & Stearns, a Boston firm that also had an office in Pittsburgh, to design the 1897 reconstruction. Another fire hit the building in 1900, but most of it was saved. You can see a thorough report on the fire, with pictures, at The Brickbuilder for May, 1900.
In 1922, a large expansion was added to the building along the Stanwix Street side, with the style carefully matched to the 1897 original. The new building was taller by one floor, but all the details were the same, including the ornate terra-cotta cornice.
The Horne’s clock, a later addition, is not as famous as the Kaufmann’s clock, but it served the same purpose as a meeting place for shoppers. It is once again keeping the correct time.
A splendid industrial building on Penn Avenue. The offices and showrooms were placed in a single row in the front, making an impressive and ornamental face for what would otherwise be a drab factory building.
No longer a firehouse, but the building has been adapted to other uses with care to preserve as much of its original stocky Romanesque look as possible.
Built in 1922, the Parkstone Dwellings are the most astonishing double duplex in Pittsburgh. The architect was Frederick Scheibler, who had come through a period of prophetic modernism into a period of romantic fantasy.
The tenants upstairs are airing out their rugs. No, wait—
—that’s a mosaic!
The Scheibler Treasure Hunt blogger had the good luck to stumble on an estate sale here back in 2013, so you can run to that site for interior shots of one of the Parkstone Dwellings.
