Leo McMullen of Comès, Perry & McMullen was the architect of the grandest church in his hometown of Bellevue. We have seen this church in detail before, including the front, the interior, the carvings of Adam and Eve at the entrance, the gargoyles, the curious grotesque brackets, and the stained glass. But a cathedral-sized church like this always has more to show us, and the changing season brings us the added delight of fall color.
The main building of North Catholic was put up in 1939. The architect was Edward J. Hergenroeder, a disciple of Benno Janssen, who became one of the favorite architects for Catholic institutions around Pittsburgh in the middle twentieth century.
From Janssen, Hergenroeder seems to have learned the art of making every line count. His style departed from the master’s, however, toward the modernistic, whereas Janssen retired to Charlottesville, the land of his favorite architect Thomas Jefferson, before he was forced to come to terms with modernism altogether.
The school has been given up by the Catholics, but fortunately was taken over and is well maintained as the Provident Charter School.
Charles Bradley Warren did the reliefs on the school. This one, Pursuit of Knowledge, shows us monks performing all kinds of scientific experiments and passing their knowledge on to children. (The same relief is reversed on the other end of the building, so that the monks are always gazing out from the top of the bluff at the vast panorama of the Allegheny valley before them.)
A smaller relief shows a monk cultivating a bonsai Tree of Knowledge with an open Bible in his lap.
For half a century a trip to Buhl Planetarium was one the most enduring childhood memories of anyone who grew up in Pittsburgh. The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science was most famous for its star shows—with its massive Zeiss projector, it was touted as the most sophisticated planetarium in the world—but it had many other scientific exhibits as well.
The building was designed by Ingham & Boyd, who specialized in educational buildings—Ingham & Boyd, and later Ingham, Boyd & Pratt, had the franchise for all the school buildings in Mount Lebanon for decades, and designed numerous others in the city and suburbs. Their style for institutional buildings was purely classical into the 1930s, and then began to take on an Art Deco hue. But they kept their classical mania for symmetry, and the front of Buhl Planetarium is typically symmetrical.
The building is decorated with extraordinary sculptures by Sidney Waugh, whose Art Deco sensibilities perfectly complement the Deco classicism of the architecture. He has made use of the symmetry of the building to arrange his sculptures as complementary pairs. Over the entrance are the bronzes Primitive Science and Modern Science, and Waugh shows them as engaged in the same intellectual enterprise. Instead of placing the modern scientist in a superior position, Waugh has the American Indian scientist and the lab-coated scientist at exactly the same height and scale admiring each other’s work as intellectual equals. In the most literal sense, they see eye to eye.
Note the three inventions Waugh has chosen to represent the accomplishments of pre-Columbian American thought: smoke signals, which created long-distance communication; the bow and arrow, which were developed to a high degree of accuracy; and snowshoes, an invention that was unique to North America.
The modern scientist has his globe, his microscope, and his test tube. He looks across the ages at the American Indian and sees a peer who knew his onions.
On the front wall of the building are two allegorical stone reliefs: “The Heavens” and “The Earth,” again facing each other at the same scale.
Finally, the exit doors from the planetarium have small reliefs of “Night” and “Day.” Here old Pa Pitt must confess that he failed to capture “Day”; it was obscured by leafy trees when he visited, and perhaps he will be able to get a picture when the leaves come down in a month or so.
When the Buhl Planetarium merged with the Carnegie, the result was the Carnegie Science Center—now Kamin Science Center—which brought a much larger science museum to the North Side, including a new higher-tech Buhl Planetarium. But after a few years of mostly lying fallow, the Buhl Planetarium building was taken over by the Children’s Museum and resumed its mission of educating children by delighting them.
Cedar Avenue, facing the East Commons, was a prestigious address in old Allegheny, and after spending some time looking a bit down in the mouth it is becoming a prestigious address again. Fortunately it lost very few of its splendid Victorian houses. Here are a few of them.
For many years this house has been the headquarters of the Dental Society of Western Pennsylvania.
Heinz Chapel, built over five years from 1933 to 1938, is one of the complex of three great Charles Z. Klauder buildings at the center of the University of Pittsburgh, along with the Cathedral of Learning and the Stephen Foster Memorial. A while ago old Pa Pitt picked out some of the details with a long lens.
The decorations include the arms of various colleges and universities.
Father Pitt began this article by writing, “This house, built in 1884…”
And then he stopped.
The common wisdom says that this house, now the Music Building of the University of Pittsburgh, was designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow and built in 1884. That is the information in the Wikipedia article and in the city architectural survey and the National Register form for Schenley Farms and in the University of Pittsburgh Civic Center Conservation Plan.
But the date is obviously wrong: the firm of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow was founded when H. H. Richardson died in 1886, and an 1890 plat map shows the lot still vacant. (It is possible, therefore, that the universally accepted date “1884” originated as a misprint for “1894.”) As for the architects, the building does not appear on Margaret Henderson Floyd’s catalogue of their works in Architecture After Richardson, though we know that Floyd’s vast research missed a few buildings that have since been identified.
So here we have an example of a perfectly good and universally accepted fact that completely unravels when old Pa Pitt pulls at a loose thread. He has nothing yet to offer in its place except the pictures of the whimsical decorations that he originally intended to show you.
This much we know: the house was built for William J. Holland, pastor of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church across the street (designed by Frederick Osterling in a similar Romanesque style), and chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania (later the University of Pittsburgh), and then Director of the Carnegie Institute. He was also perhaps the world’s leading lepidopterist, a teacher of ancient languages, an accomplished paleontologist, and a speaker of Japanese, in case he needed any more accomplishments to impress you.
When the house was built and who designed it will have to remain open questions for the moment.
The house is decorated with Romanesque carvings that have eroded into a medieval softness in Pittsburgh’s harsh atmosphere.
Some details of Hampton Hall, a Tudor apartment building in Oakland designed by H. G. Hodgkins.
The main tower of Allegheny General is one of the few classic skyscrapers outside downtown, and a landmark of Art Deco in Pittsburgh, as well as a landmark of the style Father Pitt calls Mausoleum-on-a-Stick, where the top of the tower is modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. It was designed by York & Sawyer, who made a specialty of hospitals, and built in 1930. Today we’re going to pay particular attention to the grand entrance on North Avenue, which is covered with extravagant terra-cotta decorations, so we have more than thirty pictures to show you.
The striking feature of this modernist synagogue is the huge relief over the entrance that symbolically depicts the Twelve Tribes of Israel surrounding the Tablets of the Law. The architects were Ben Friedman and Nathan Cantor, although Father Pitt has not yet sorted out whether they worked together or at different times.
Ground was broken for the first part of the building on April 20, 1947; first services were conducted September 3, 1948. Ground for the Rabbi Sivitz Memorial Talmud Torah and Main Building was broken August 17, 1952; it was dedicated on August 27, 1955.
This preliminary sketch for the synagogue was published on the cover of the Jewish Criterion, August 23, 1946. The sketch is quite different from the building as it stands, but obviously an early stage in the evolution of the same idea. Through the halftoning, we can just make out the name “Friedman” in the signature.
The symbols are taken from the prophecy of Jacob in Genesis 49:
Reuben, unstable as water;
Simeon and Levi: instruments of cruelty are in their habitations (but Simeon’s sword is mitigated by a wreath of olive, and Levi later became the priestly class, and thus is represented by a swinging censer);
Judah is a lion’s whelp;
Zebulun shall be for an haven of ships;
Issachar is a strong ass, crouching down between two burdens;
Dan shall be a serpent in the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’ heels, so that his rider shall fall backward;
Gad, a troupe shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last;
Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties;
Naphthali is a hind let loose;
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall;
Benjamin shall raven as a wolf.
Instead of a heroic soldier, or—as in more than one First World War memorial—a baffled and scared soldier, we have a shiny plaque with a horse all ready for a rider. This strikes old Pa Pitt as a real soldier’s monument. A member of Troop H would remember the horses above all as what distinguished a cavalry unit. He would look at this relief and feel immediately that he was the soldier who was meant to mount that horse. In a way, the monument also serves as a memorial to the passing away of the horse as an important factor in military operations.
