Father Pitt

Tag: Renaissance Architecture

Restoring a Commercial Building in Beechview

About twenty years ago, there was an aborted attempt to revitalize the business district of Beechview—aborted because the developer absconded with the money and went back to his native Brazil, whence, according to the Brazilian constitution, he could not be extradited. So neighborhood gossip tells us, at any rate. The project had got as far as partly restoring this building, and a thriving restaurant occupied the ground floor for a while. But then the furnace broke, and the landlord was gone, and the building was tied up in legal wrangling and became uninhabitable. Meanwhile, much of the business district more or less revitalized itself, with a big Mexican supermarket and a number of interesting ethnic restaurants moving in.

Now, at last, the restoration is beginning again, and this time it seems very thorough. It’s an attractive building that deserves a long future. Old Pa Pitt hopes his readers will pardon these hasty cell-phone pictures, taken as he happened to be passing by without his usual big bag of cameras.

Although Father Pitt has no evidence other than the style and the location, he suspects the building was designed and built by local architect and contractor William J. Gray, who was responsible for the Boylan Building on the opposite corner of the same intersection and for a now-vanished building on one of the other corners—and quite possibly for the building on the fourth corner as well.

These arches framed inset balconies for the upstairs apartments. It looks as though they are to be filled in, which may be necessary to make the building rentable, but will take away a distinctive feature.

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July 15, 2025
New Business Block in Beechview by William J. Gray

Pittsburg Press, December 4, 1910. Thanks to David Schwing for pointing out this article.

This elevation appeared in the Pittsburg Press (a paper that left the H off “Pittsburgh” until 1921) on December 4, 1910. The building went up shortly afterward and opened in 1911; by the time it was open, or shortly after, it was known as the Boylan Building. (Old Pa Pitt doesn’t know what happened to Welsh.)

The architect and contractor was William J. Gray, who was so local that his address was literally across the street. Gray worked on several buildings in the Beechview commercial district, and he designed some of Beechview’s better houses as well. When this building was finished, he moved his office into it, and it would have given prospective clients a favorable impression. The building is now beautifully restored as the Beechview Community Center.

We do not know whether the Renaissance parapet in the drawing was ever built. The high-ceilinged hall upstairs was used for pool, bowling, dancing, and other “amusements,” as we see in this picture from 1930 by a Pittsburgh city photographer.

If you looked closely at the architect’s elevation above, you might have noticed that it shows a building with two floors, but the caption refers to it as a “four-story building.” Is that a misprint? No; it’s just Pittsburgh.

Broadway in Beechview runs along the crest of a ridge, with steep slopes away from the street; and the upstairs auditorium is as tall as the two floors behind it.

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July 11, 2025
Odd Fellows Lodge, Hazelwood

W. Ward Williams was the architect of this fine hall, built in 1912 for the local lodge of the International Order of Odd Fellows. Like most lodge halls, it was built with the meeting hall upstairs, so that the ground floor could be given over to rent-paying storefronts. The building has been neatly restored and is now home to Community Kitchen Pittsburgh.

The three-link chain is the emblem of the Odd Fellows.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Map.

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June 28, 2025
Woodwell Building

Rutan & Russell designed this building for a hardware company that had already been on this corner—Wood Street and Second Avenue (now the Boulevard of the Allies)—for sixty years when the new building opened in 1907.¹ It belongs to Point Park University now, and it is so thoroughly integrated with the buildings around it that most people probably pass it by without noticing it. But it is a unique survivor, as we’ll learn in a moment.

The first Joseph Woodwell hardware store was opened in 1847, and it looked like the engraving above, which was published in Fahnestock’s Pittsburgh Directory for 1850.

A larger building was put up only ten years after the first one, and then this small skyscraper in 1907. Obviously the company was prospering, and it would continue to prosper for quite a while. The frontispiece to a Joseph Woodwell catalogue from 1927 shows us the all the Woodwell buildings up to that date.

You notice the main Woodwell Building in a picture from 1907, and then the same building surrounded by newer construction in 1927. But although it’s the same building, it’s not in the same place.

Until 1920, Second Avenue was a narrow street like First Avenue or Third Avenue—streets that would count as alleys in most American cities. But in 1920, when the Boulevard of the Allies to Oakland was being planned, the city began widening Second Avenue by tearing down all the buildings on the north side of the street.

All but one. The Woodwell Building was not demolished: instead it was moved, all eight floors of it, about forty feet to the right. That makes it the sole surviving complete building on the north side of the street from before the widening project. (The Americus Republican Club survived in a truncated form.) The building gained a four-floor addition (now replaced with a more modern building) to the right on Wood Street, and yet another new building went up for the prospering Woodwell firm behind the relocated building on the Boulevard of the Allies.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

So the next time you walk down the Boulevard of the Allies, pause briefly to acknowledge the Woodwell Building. It’s a stubborn survivor as well as an attractive design by one of our top architectural firms, and it has earned some respect.

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June 24, 2025
Jr. O. U. A. M. Building, Oakland

The Junior Order of United American Mechanics is a fraternal order that was originally the young people’s division of the Order of United American Mechanics. Since it has its own Wikipedia article, old Pa Pitt will send you there for information about the order. For this building, however, he is happy to be your source of information. It was built to be the national headquarters of the organization, which had previously been in the Wabash Building downtown. “The new five-story building of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics at Forbes and Halket sts., was completed last June at a cost of about $350,000, exclusive of the site. The national headquarters of the order, which formerly were in the Wabash building, occupy the entire fourth and fifth floors of the new building, while the lower floors are given over to offices and store rooms.” (Pittsburgh Press, Monday, January 4, 1926.) This building was designed by Louis Stevens, best known for elegant homes for the well-to-do, but also the designer of all the public buildings in the borough of Overbrook (now part of the city of Pittsburgh).

The cornerstone was laid in 1924, but the building was completed in 1925.

It will come as no surprise that the building now belongs to the University of Pittsburgh.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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June 17, 2025
Hartje Brothers Buildings

Two nearly identical buildings side by side on Wood Street, both built around the turn of the twentieth century for the Hartje Brothers, a big paper company. Charles Bickel was the architect, and here he compressed the usual American skyscraper formula of base-shaft-cap into seven floors.

The corner building has a long front on the Boulevard of the Allies; we saw it about a year and a half ago, but here is the same picture again.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

A short time after these buildings went up, the Hartje Brothers called on Bickel again to design a twelve-storey skyscraper a block away at Wood Street and First Avenue, which we have used as a textbook example of the Beaux Arts skyscraper.

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June 14, 2025
Centre Avenue YMCA, Hill District

These pictures are more than a year old, but old Pa Pitt just ran across them and realized they had never been published. It’s an important building with its own entry in the National Register of Historic Places, so Father Pitt’s only excuse is that the piles of pictures sometimes accumulate too fast for him to process.

Edward B. Lee was the architect of this YMCA, built in 1922–1923 for the “colored” population of the Hill District. The idea of separating races of human beings gives old Pa Pitt hives, and he wishes it had been repudiated more thoroughly than it has been. But if it was separate, we must at least give it credit for being equal. Few neighborhoods could boast a YMCA better than this one.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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June 11, 2025
Telephone Exchange, East Liberty

Inside the building was a mass of wires and electrical equipment and operators’ switchboards. But the Bell Telephone Company insisted that the outside of every telephone exchange must be an ornament to the neighborhood. They were all Renaissance palaces like this until the 1930s, and it is likely that they all came from the same architectural office—namely, the office of James Windrim, who also designed the 1923 Bell Telephone Building downtown. After Windrim, Press C. Dowler took over as the Bell company’s court architect, and the style changed to refined Art Deco.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens.

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June 2, 2025
Some Details of the Old Presbyterian Hospital, North Side

A few months ago Father Pitt published a view of the front of the old Presbyterian Hospital on the North Side, which is where Presby lived before it moved to Oakland to become the nucleus of the medical-industrial complex there. Since he was walking by the building again the other day, old Pa Pitt thought he would add a few more details.

Taken in January, 2025, with a Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

After Presby moved out, this site was used as Divine Providence Hospital for many years. The last we heard, the building was mostly vacant, but was being considered for conversion to “affordable” apartments.

We can just make out the ghosts of letters spelling out “DIVINE PROVIDENCE HOSPITAL.”

If we cannot find a use for a building, Mother Nature will.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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May 15, 2025
Husler Building, Carnegie

Samuel T. McClarren, a very successful Victorian architect and a resident of nearby Thornburg, designed this landmark building, which was put up in 1896.

A small alteration to the front gives us an example of how important the little details are to the appearance of a building. The arched windows in the top floor have been shortened, as we can see by the slightly different shade of brick where they have been filled in. The original design would have created a single broad stripe from the arches at the top to the storefront below. Interrupting that composition makes the building look awkward and top-heavy. The ground floor has also been altered in a way that obscures the vigor of the design. Once we have said that, however, we should acknowledge that the building is generally in a good state of preservation and praise the Historical Society of Carnegie for keeping it up.

This building has a very difficult lot to deal with, and the architect must have found it an interesting challenge. First, the lot is a triangle. A kind of turret blunts the odd angle on the Main Street end and turns it from a bug into a feature.

The second challenge is that one long side of the lot is smack up against Chartiers Creek, a minor river that is placid most of the time but can be a raging torrent when storms make it angry. The foundations would have had to take all the moods of the river into account, and the fact that the building has stood through disastrous floods suggests that Mr. McClarren knew what he was up to.

A view from across Chartiers Creek shows us the sharp point of the triangle in the rear.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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May 9, 2025