Note that this picture is more than 13 megabytes if you enlarge it.
Old Pa Pitt can only say this is not bad for a first try. He has always admired this little masterpiece of industrial architecture (which surprisingly still houses a pipe, valve, and fittings company), and set himself the task of getting a picture of the Sidney Street face, which covers the entire block between 20th Street and 21st Street on the South Side. The evening sun was not kind to him, so he may try again on a cloudy day; but this is still the only picture of the whole Sidney Street face on the entire Internet, so Father Pitt gives himself credit for that much. Below, a more conventional (and much easier) view from the corner of 20th and Sidney Streets, with the usual utility cables.
This charming little church was most recently used as a law office; but the lawyers are moving out, and here is your chance to have an architecturally unique studio, office, or even residence on the South Side. It is about the same height and depth as the rowhouses next door, but comes with its own corner parking lot.
This building began its life as the First Methodist Protestant Church; it later passed into the hands of the Seventh Day Adventists, and now belongs to a nondenominational Korean congregation. It is a work of Frederick Osterling in his typically florid Romanesque style. Obviously the spire has had a bit of bad luck, but the rest of the exterior is in pretty good shape.
This modest but tasteful house seems to be the parsonage for the church, and Father Pitt can easily imagine that it was designed by Osterling as well. He would be happy to have his speculation corrected or confirmed. Update: Father Pitt’s speculation was wrong. The architect of the parish house, built in 1914 or so, was H. E. Kennedy.1
Source: The Construction Record, May 2, 1914: “Plans are being prepared by Architect H. E. Kennedy, Home Trust building, tor the erection of a stone parish house on Howe and Aiken streets, for the First Methodist Protestant Congregation. Cost $15,000.” ↩︎
The Duquesne Brewery mushroomed into a titanic operation after the Second World War, and then rapidly collapsed in the 1960s and was gone by the 1970s. At its peak it took up three blocks on the South Side, and of course it was famous for the largest clock in the world. This 1899 building, the center of the empire, was abandoned for some time, then taken over by artist squatters, and finally, as the Brew House, became lofts and studios. It is an architectural curiosity, added to over the course of the brewery’s history with some regard for consistent style but no regard at all for symmetry.
This was a very tall building when it opened in 1892. It’s certainly stretching a point to call this a skyscraper, yet it is in some ways the seed of all subsequent skyscrapers in Pittsburgh. This was the first building in Pittsburgh, and one of the first in the world, built with steel-cage construction, which makes practically indefinite height possible. Below we see the Conestoga Building with a couple of its great-grandchildren behind it: One PPG Place and Fifth Avenue Place.
Henry Hobson Richardson’s design for the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, from the book Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, published shortly after Richardson’s death. The last paragraph of the lengthy description of this work, Richardson’s greatest, is worth quoting.
“Taken as a whole the design of this vast and complex structure, both inside and out, is a marvel of good sense as well as of architectural beauty. None of the faults which appear in some of Richardson’s other buildings can be found in this. It seems as simply yet completely right in execution as in first conception. We may take the Court-house as Richardson wished it to be taken—as the full expression of his mature power in the direction where it was most at home. Had he not lived to build it his record would still have been a surprising one and would still have entitled him to be called a man of genius in the full meaning of the term. But it would have been an incomplete, a broken record, while now we see the best of which he himself felt capable; and seeing it we believe that no possible problem which a long life might have brought him would have been too difficult for him to solve. It proves that he was more firmly convinced than ever that in the precedents of southern Romanesque he could find his best inspiration, but that he had worked his way to a very different attitude towards them from the one he had first assumed. The Court-house is the most magnificent and imposing of his works, yet it is the most logical and quiet. It is the most sober and severe, yet it is the most original and in one sense the most eclectic. Although all its individual features have been drawn from an early southern style, its silhouette suggests some of the late-mediaeval buildings of the north of Europe, and its symmetry, its dignity and nobility of air, speak of Renaissance ideals. To combine inspirations drawn from such different sources into a novel yet organic whole while expressing a complex plan of the most modern sort—this was indeed to be original. There is no other municipal building like Richardson’s Court-house. It is as new as the needs it meets, as American as the community for which it was built. Yet it might stand without loss of prestige in any city in the world.”
Above, one of the towers of St. Augustine’s in Lower Lawrenceville. Below, a view down 36th Street from Penn Avenue, with the startling forms of St. Augustine’s illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. These pictures were taken in 1999, back when the neighborhood was forgotten and practically invisible to most outsiders.
Currently part of Holy Apostles parish, St. Basil’s occupies a splendid hilltop site from which its great rose window can be seen for miles. St. Basil himself presides over the façade, imprisoned in a cage that keeps the pigeons out and St. Basil in.
