Old Pa Pitt’s New Year’s resolution is to bring you more of the same, and to try to get better at it.
The May Building was designed by Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, and a versatile one as well.
The famous Sicilian Greek mathematician and philosopher and inventor and scientist Archimedes was nicknamed “Beta” in his lifetime, because he was second-best at everything. That was Charles Bickel. If you wanted a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this one, he would give you a splendid one; it might not be the most artistic in the whole city, but it would be admired, and it would hold up for well over a century. If you wanted Richardsonian Romanesque, he could give it to you in spades; it might not be as sophisticated as Richardson, but it would be very good and would make you proud. If you wanted the largest commercial building in the world, why, sure, he was up to that, and he would make it look so good that a century later people would go out of their way to find a use for it just because they liked it so much.
The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.
Here is another architectural mystery solved by recognizing a Second Empire mansion under a radical exterior alteration. We saw such a house made into an apartment building in Highland Park; here, the transformation has been managed with much more elegance. “Pittsburgh House Histories” on Facebook explains that this was originally the home of James Rees, a builder of riverboats and steam-powered industrial engines, built in the fashionable Second Empire style with a central tower much like the one at Baywood. In 1919, the house was bought by John H. Hillman, Jr., and by that time the Second Empire style was already a mortal embarrassment. Mr. Hillman hired the architect Edward P. Mellon, who prospered through his connections to rich Mellon relatives, to remodel the house. Mellon’s taste was staidly classical, but within that taste he could manage some very attractive effects. He amputated the top of the tower and refaced the house with stone, adding Renaissance trimmings. The result was a house that looked almost new and quite up to date for 1919.
If you wanted your house to convey the message “I’m rich ppttttttthhht,” then Paul Irwin was the architect to hire. This Renaissance palace uses every trick in the architect’s vocabulary to tell the world that a millionaire lives here, and he is richer than you are. It was built in 1914 on the Fifth Avenue Millionaires’ Row, where, although it is not the biggest of the surviving mansions, it somehow manages to look like the most expensive.
Chartiers Avenue is the main business street of downtown McKees Rocks; and although it has lost some important buildings, enough remains to form the basis of a revival that seems to be in its early stages already. Above, a typically Pittsburgh commercial interpretation of the Italian Renaissance.
This little building has an interesting combination of details. The upper windows have round arches, but the lintels above them are fattened into incipient Gothic arches. The multiple decorative patterns in the brick add a rug-like texture to the front.
This building is marked “HALL” on old maps, suggesting that it belonged to a lodge of some sort. It has been altered so much that it is hard to see what it originally looked like. Nevertheless, it presents a neat front, if not a well-proportioned one. The vast expanse of side wall, exposed when a more interesting neighboring building was demolished about ten years ago, cries out for a huge mural of Cubist guitars.
“Cute” is a word old Pa Pitt seldom employs, but it is hard to think of a better term for the Gothic front on this little building. It appears to be a later addition to an older building. The Gothic peak is a thin false front with nothing behind it, and it was made a little too insubstantial: it is leaning backward slightly and will probably have to be stabilized by the next owner.
The ground floor has been altered, but the original character of this corner building is otherwise well preserved. Until very recently, its neighbor was one of the finest buildings in McKees Rocks, the McKees Rocks Trust Company, a sumptuously Ionic bank that loomed paternally over the whole block. As you can see, Father Pitt was just a little too late.
Finally, this union hall is a fascinating example of contemporary architecture. The building was an undistinguished little storefront from the 1950s or so, altered so much that it was impossible to guess its original character. In 2016, however, this impressive classical front was put on, which changed the look not only of the building but even of the whole street around it. Father Pitt has seen many examples of “New Classical” architecture that make him want to hide under an Edwardian sofa, but this one does exactly what it set out to do. It has classical dignity and a little ostentatiousness without lapsing into parody. The exposed girder above the column is a wry wink at modernist architecture, but the metal canopy makes the girder seem appropriate.
In its prime, this Renaissance palace on Island Avenue had four storefronts on the ground floor and three floors of apartments above. The storefronts have also been turned into apartments, but in a cheap way that could probably be reversed when McKees Rocks is prosperous again. The building is still in pretty good shape, and the details are worth appreciating, for which reason we give you a very large picture above. Old Pa Pitt especially likes the round and oval windows in the stairwells.
Across the street is a smaller building whose storefronts have also been turned into apartments, but with even less alteration. The big display windows are still there. It’s easy to imagine the ground floor becoming trendy little shops again in that rosy future when Island Avenue is a busy commercial street once more.
The Carnegie Lecture Hall is designed to put a large number of people close enough to hear a single lecturer. It was filled to capacity today with people who came to hear poetry, which makes the literate think good thoughts about Pittsburgh. The International Poetry Forum is back after fifteen years of silence, and the first poet to speak was its founder, Samuel Hazo, who at 96 years old seems to be aging backwards.
The dome is the star of this extraordinary building, which was put up in 1904 and is now slowly crumbling. The school behind it, heavily altered, is in use as a personal-care home; the church would be hard to find a use for even in a prosperous neighborhood. It ought to be preserved, but its most likely fate is to continue to crumble until it finally becomes too dangerous to leave standing.
