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 original Edgewood Public School was built in 1891, as the keystone of its great entrance arch tells us. Old Pa Pitt was not able to find the architect of the school, but he would not be surprised to hear that it was Frederick Osterling. The picturesque and asymmetrical Romanesque of this building reminds us of his early style, which was influenced by Richardsonian Romanesque but also reached back into the pre-Richardsonian Romanesque of his master Joseph Stillburg.
In 1914, Ingham & Boyd were commissioned to design a new high school for the growing borough,1 which was built the following year. The style could hardly be more different. This is a typical Ingham & Boyd building in every way, with a simple and dignified classicism (and no columns, because Ingham & Boyd disapproved of columns) and a completely symmetrical façade. Today both schools, connected by a newer entrance (so that the old entrances are blocked in), are in use as the Edgewood Elementary STEAM Academy. The builders of the original 1891 school would probably have agreed that a well-educated citizen ought to have some familiarity with the marvelous properties of steam technology.
The new high school was featured in the April, 1917, issue of the Architectural Forum. This photo shows us that the entrance has been eliminated, and the windows replaced with blank expanses of glass. In the main, though, the general appearance of the school has not changed.
Here we see how the entrance looked when it was an entrance.
The floor plans show us that, as a high school, the building was small, but up to date with all the latest features. The accompanying text describes the school thoroughly:
Edgewood High School, Edgewood Park, Pa. Page 102. The High School at Edgewood Park, Pa., is located adjacent to a grade school building, with which it is connected by a covered and enclosed passage, so that the grade school pupils may use the gymnasium and auditorium of the high school building, the connection being made through the first floor main corridor on the left of the plan. It is intended to enlarge the building, when necessary, by an additional corridor and class rooms at the rear of the auditorium, leaving one side of the auditorium and gymnasium free, the lighting being maintained substantially as at present. The exterior walls are of mottled gray brick and terra cotta. The floors and roof are built fireproof, of reinforced concrete and hollow tile. The floors of corridors and locker rooms are of terrazzo, tile being used in toilet rooms and maple flooring elsewhere in the building, except in the chemical laboratory, where the floor is of asphalt. The interior trim is of oak, except on the ground floor, where pine is used. The heating and ventilating are by a combined motor driven supply and exhaust fan system, supplemented by direct radiation. The steam plant is in the adjoining grade school. The class rooms seat from 35 to 40 pupils each, a total of 310. The cost of the building was 17 cents per cubic foot.
“Higher education leads to higher ideals, to greater wisdom, and to contentment.” It is a typical Ingham & Boyd touch to add an inspiring quotation to the front of a school.
But where did the quotation come from? This is a curious mystery. It must have been familiar, or it would not have been enshrined in terra cotta. But old Pa Pitt’s diligent searches in the world’s digitized libraries have found it in only two places:
So we have a quotation that was well known in 1915, but has left no trace in print before 1949 across the millions of digitized books, magazines, and newspapers on line. If anyone can give us a hint as to where this quotation came from, old Pa Pitt would be very grateful.
The South Side Market House, designed originally by Charles Bickel, and given its current form by Stanley Roush, taken on film in glorious black and white. We also have color pictures and some historical photos of the South Side Market House.
This little church—now converted to a private home—presents a bricky front to the world in a typically Pittsburgh Romanesque style.
But the front is only a few feet deep; it is attached to a modest frame building.
If you are looking for a distinguished church building, here is one for sale, and in very good shape. It was built in 1906 as Zion Evangelical Church; the architect was Chauncey W. Hodgdon.1 For many years it was the Albright Methodist Church.
The building had more than one narrow escape from death. It was owned by the Methodists who also had the cathedral-sized First United Methodist Church right next to it; since this church was redundant, they proposed to sell it to a developer who would demolish it and build something profitable. When a city historic designation made that more difficult, the church sat abandoned and decaying for several more years, exchanging the fast death of redevelopment for the slow death of neglect. But about three years ago it was restored, including cleaning off the decades of accumulated soot.
This was the tower when old Pa Pitt passed by in 2008; he published this picture under the heading “The Vanishing Black Stones of Pittsburgh.” We may add this building to the list of previously black buildings whose blackness has vanished.
Or at least mostly vanished.
In the background we can see the massive lantern of First Methodist.
Father Suitbert Mollinger was the founding pastor of of Most Holy Name of Jesus parish on Troy Hill. He was also rich: he had inherited a good bit of money, and he used it in travels through Europe to buy up saints’ relics that were otherwise being tossed out in the waves of revolutions that were washing across the continent in the middle 1800s. He built this chapel to house the collection, which is probably the largest accumulation of relics in one building in the world. He dedicated it to his patron St. Anthony of Padua.
Here is St. Anthony of Padua himself, shown as he often is in art with a book on which the Christ child is sitting, referring to the story that Anthony was once meditating on Scripture when the child Jesus himself appeared to him.
Building in honor of St. Anthony of Padua…
…erected 1882, enlarged 1890.
The South Side Market House was built in the heart of old Birmingham in 1893. The architect was Charles Bickel.
Originally the building was much more elaborate:
However, in 1915, a fire gutted the building, leaving only the outer walls standing.
Mr. Bickel was still alive at the time, but the reconstruction was designed by the city’s own talented Stanley Roush.
This bovine cartouche commemorates the death and resurrection of the South Side Market.
The fire was not the end of the building’s adventures. In 1950, public markets having become obsolete in Pittsburgh, the building was remodeled as a recreation center under the supervision of Button & McLean, who left the exterior almost unchanged from Roush’s 1915 design.
It was refurbished again in 2012 as a “Healthy Active Living Center” for senior citizens. Father Pitt does not yet know who supervised that remodeling, but he would be delighted to hear from anyone who has information.
S. A. Barr was the architect of this house, built in 1894 for Mrs. Clara Morris.1 A woman’s home is her castle, and this one looks as though it might be a very effective defense against Mrs. Morris’ neighbors the Fricks.
Three buildings of St. Ambrose parish (now part of Holy Wisdom parish) are lined up along Haslage Avenue on tiny lots. We begin with the church, built in 1894, when the parish was going by the Latin version of the name. (If the atmosphere in these pictures seems a bit murky, that is because they were taken on one of the recent days of Canadian smoke in the air.)
The church has been crusted over with so many additions and alterations that it is hard to imagine what it looked like when it was built. It seems, however, to have been a typical small Romanesque church of the late 1800s, with the usual decorative brickwork and an outsized tower in front. Father Pitt did not succeed in finding the name of an architect.
These chimneys and the cross-bearing crest were obviously meant to be seen, but they are now almost completely invisible behind later construction.
The next building to be put up was the convent, in 1911. It was designed by Edmund B. Lang,1 who (along with his brother Herman) designed many buildings for German Catholics.
Finally, in 1928, the school was built. The architect was William P. Hutchins,2 who matched his design to the round arches and crenelated brick ornamentation of the church.
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.
