Rutan & Russell were the architects of this Renaissance palace, which opened in 1905. It’s also known as the Oppenheimer Building, and today as Aria Cultural District Lofts.
You can still see the sign for the Gerber Carriage Co. at the top of the building.
Map.
“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.
“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.
A North Side landmark for just about a century now, the Allegheny YMCA on North Avenue was designed by R. Maurice Trimble and built in 1926. It did not hide its light under a bushel: the letters YMCA are picked out in light bulbs at the top of the North Avenue façade.
Charles Bickel was the architect of this factory and warehouse, which, like many industrial buildings of the time, takes its inspiration from the Marshall Field’s Wholesale Store by H. H. Richardson. Bickel, however, added his own sensibilities, and made it an impressive and distinctive building. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Built in 1906, this was the main building of Presbyterian Hospital until it moved to vastly larger facilities in Oakland in the 1930s. The building was later part of Providence Hospital, and now is used for offices.
The architects’ rendering of the Pittsburgh Athletic Association Building. It was published as the frontispiece to the Catalogue of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club’s Fifth Exhibition, March, 1910.
Since we were looking at department-store warehouses a week ago, here is another one. This one was built in 1901 for Kaufmann’s department store, and as a work of architecture it is the most pleasing of the department-store warehouses we’ve seen. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, with the architect listed as D. H. Crisman; but old Pa Pitt, with all due deference to the experts, thinks that attribution is a mistake.1 Crisman was probably the contractor. He is listed in a 1900 city directory as a carpenter, and in 1902 we find him hiring an architect to design an apartment building, strongly suggesting that he was not an architect himself.
If Father Pitt had to make a guess, he would guess that Charles Bickel was the architect. Bickel designed the store for the Kaufmanns downtown, so he would be an obvious choice. He was also our most prolific producer of warehouses, so he is the safest bet. The style of the building is similar to that of Bickel’s colossal Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse & Transfer Company on the South Side.
The architect gave the bricklayers a workout. The bricklayers were up to the challenge.
Other department-store warehouses: Frank & Seder and Rosenbaum’s, Gimbels.
This building seems to date from before the Civil War, possibly the 1850s. It was designed in the very free interpretation of Italian Renaissance that was popular at the time; later architects would have studied their historical precedents more closely, and later architects than those would have repudiated historical precedent altogether.
The building originally belonged to the Fulton Bell Foundry, which made bells for decades in downtown Pittsburgh. It’s a remnant of Victorian Second Avenue. All the remnants of Second Avenue downtown are on the south side of the Boulevard of the Allies; the street was widened in the 1920s by tearing out the buildings on the north side.
The well-preserved carved stone lintels have been lovingly cleaned.
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.
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.
