Tag: Penn Avenue

  • Point Breeze Presbyterian Church

    St. Paul Baptist Church

    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.)

    Point Breeze Presbyterian 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.

    Porch
    Porch roof with terra cotta
    Side of the porch
    Tower
    Side entrance

    The side entrance also gets a big arch, and even the basement door gets a stony arched porch.

    Basement entrance
    Rear of Point Breeze Presbyterian Church
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

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  • Wildberg Building

    Wildberg Building

    “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.

    Architect’s drawing of the Wildberg building

    “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.

    Entrance
    Perspective view
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    1. “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.” ↩︎

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  • No Tap-Dancing in Rooms After 9 p.m.

    Hotel Roosevelt

    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.

    Ad for Hotel Roosevelt
  • Keech Block

    Keech Block
    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:

    Keech Block

    Probably in the 1890s, an addition was put on the right-hand side of the building, matching the original as well as possible.

    Keech Block with addition

    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.)

    Detail of the Keech Block
    Romanesque capital
    Romanesque foliage
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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  • Let Spear Feather Your Nest

    Spear & Company

    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.

    Terra Cotta
    Terra cotta
    Blue and white terra cotta
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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  • Pittsburgh Brass M’f’g Co., Strip

    Pittsburgh Brass M’f’g Co.

    Now known as the Brass Building, this is a well-preserved example of high-class industrial architecture from the turn of the twentieth century.

    Perspective view
    Left side of the building
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    By good luck, space was available when the building was converted for an addition to house elevators and stairwells.


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  • Row of Houses on Penn Avenue, Strip

    Row of houses on Penn Avenue, Strip District

    At the turn of the twentieth century, the Strip was a chaotic and lively mess of huge industries, small business, and rowhouses. Few of the houses remain; here is one of the surviving rows. These are what old Pa Pitt calls Baltimore-style rowhouses: a row where the houses are all put up as more or less one building, flush up against the sidewalk, with only a set of steps to the front door to separate them from the city outside. These were built as rental houses, probably in the 1890s or very early 1900s; they were still all under the same ownership in 1923, according to old maps. At first they had small back yards on the alley in the rear, but by 1910 those back yards had been filled in with tiny alley houses, which are still there today, and some day when it isn’t so cold old Pa Pitt will walk around to the alley and get their picture, too.

    Rowhouses in the Strip

    Surprisingly, all the houses in the original group survive. The house on the right end had its front completely rebuilt about ten years ago; the fourth house from the left has had a “picture window” installed in the parlor. The rest of the houses look more or less the way they have always looked.

    Row of houses in the Strip
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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  • Phipps-McElveen Building

    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    One of several buildings in this part of downtown put up by Henry Phipps, this is now student housing under the name Penn Commons.

    We have a front elevation of the Phipps-McElveen Building from a few years ago, and in a later article we were pleased to discover that the architects were Longfellow, Alden & Harlow.

  • Penn Avenue in the Cultural District

  • Three Commercial Buildings in the Strip

    1907 Penn Avenue

    Three of the modest commercial buildings typical of the Strip. The Penn Avenue business district grew up when the Strip was a clutter of miscellaneous industry and working-class housing; the same buildings, and others filled in on the same scale, turned into wholesale food businesses when food became the main focus of the neighborhood. In spite of the way the Strip has grown in the past two decades, Penn Avenue has changed remarkably little. Businesses come and go, but many of the old standby food dealers have been here for decades—two kinds of Sunseris, Stamoolis Brothers, Wholey’s, Sam Bok, Labad’s, and so on.

    1905 Penn Avenue
    1901 and 1903 Penn Avenue
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.