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—
Here is a drawing of Rowe’s department store that was published in 1907, when East Liberty was booming as it became the business hub for rapidly developing East End neighborhoods. The building, put up in 1898, still looks much the same today, though it has been many years since it housed a department store. By choosing Alden & Harlow, the most prestigious firm in the city, as his architects, Mr. Rowe declared to East End residents that he would offer them as high a class of merchandise as they could find anywhere downtown.
The drawing came from a lavishly illustrated book published in 1907 by the Pittsburg Board of Trade—a book that, oddly, has two titles: Up-Town: Greater Pittsburg’s Classic Section/East End: The World’s Most Beautiful Suburb. Here is what the book tells us about Rowe’s:
C. H. ROWE CO.
To the residents of the East End the department store of C. H. Rowe Company, at Penn and Highland avenues, is a household word. Little can be said of it which every woman and child does not already know, yet no history of the development of the East End would be complete without mention of this enterprising company.
It was in 1898 that C. H. Rowe Co. began to relieve the residents of the East End of the necessity of going down town to meet any requirements they had in the matter of dress goods, undermuslins, white goods of every description, millinery, children’s outfittings, all that the feminine domestic economy required.
Such enterprise as the firm of C. H. Rowe Co. has shown has naturally received a hearty response from the residents of the East End. The aim of this section of the city is to provide every want that its citizens require. So far as the dry goods business is concerned that is what this company has done.
It takes a modern four-story establishment, with 58,000 square feet of floor space to accommodate the company’s stock of goods. It requires 125 persons in the dullest season to attend the wants of the customers of C. H. Rowe Company and many delivery wagons are employed in distributing the goods to such customers who prefer that accommodation.
The directors of the company include Messrs. C. H. and W. H. Rowe, D. P. Black, H. P. Pears and J. H. McCrady. James S. Mackie is the general manager.
It is little wonder with such attention to all the requirements of the East End public that C. H. Rowe Company’s store has become the veritable center of the East End trade, and that its growth is so much a matter of pride not only to the members of the firm but to the residents of the entire East Liberty community.
In some ways the Strip has changed enormously in the past quarter-century. In other ways it hasn’t changed at all. Penn Avenue between 17th and 22nd Streets is still a permanent street fair, and many of the old businesses are still there. This picture, taken in July of 2000, includes the accordion player who used to be a regular character on Saturday mornings. It was taken with a Lomo Smena 8M, and it wasn’t perfectly focused or perfectly steady, so be a little forgiving if you enlarge it.
Ralph Adams Cram considered this church his greatest accomplishment, and it would be possible to argue that it is the greatest work of Gothic architecture in North America. Cram was intensely aware of the Gothic tradition, but he was not an imitator: he was as unique and original among the Gothicists as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among the modernists. The tower of this church is a feast of Gothic detail, but it also takes inspiration from American skyscrapers, and it looms higher than the Highland Building, a steel-framed skyscraper across the street.
Cram himself was a high-church Episcopalian, a monarchist, and a member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, so it is one of history’s amusing little jokes that his greatest work was built for Presbyterians. But the Mellons, Richard Beatty and Jennie King, gave him complete freedom—a privilege seldom granted even to the greatest architects. The Mellons poured so much money into this church that locals still call it the Mellon Fire Escape, and the late Franklin Toker guessed that it was probably, per square foot, the most expensive church ever built in America.
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.
A picture of the Loew’s Penn, now known as Heinz Hall, that got stuck in here by accident. Father Pitt would have taken it out, except that a kind commenter identified it, and old Pa Pitt does not like to disappear his mistakes,Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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.
