This impressive portal, wide enough to drive a large delivery wagon through, leads to the central courtyard.
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Fifth Avenue Portal, Allegheny County Courthouse
Samsung Digimax V4.
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County Office Building
Stanley Roush, the county’s official architect, designed this building to hold the offices that were spilling out of the Courthouse and the City-County Building as Pittsburgh and its neighbors grew rapidly. It was built in 1929–1931, and it is an interesting stylistic bridge between eras. Roush’s taste was very much in the modernistic Art Deco line, but the Romanesque Allegheny County Courthouse, designed by the sainted Henry Hobson Richardson, was a looming presence that still dictated what Allegheny County thought of its own architectural style. Roush’s compromise is almost unique: Art Deco Romanesque. We have many buildings where classical details are given a Deco spin—a style that, when applied to public buildings, old Pa Pitt likes to call American Fascist. But here the details are streamlined versions of medieval Romanesque, right down to gargoyles on the corners. Above, the Ross Street side of the building; below, the Forbes Avenue side.
One of the entrances on Forbes Avenue.
Moses with the tablets of the Law. His beard obscures the Tenth Commandment, so go ahead and covet anything you like, except—if you are Lutheran—your neighbor’s house, or—if you are Catholic—your neighbor’s wife or house. Counting up to ten is harder than it looks when it comes to Commandments, and you may need to refer to Wikipedia’s handy chart to find how the numbering works in your religious tradition.
The bridge in this medallion looks a lot like the Tenth Street Bridge, which by pure coincidence was designed by Stanley Roush.
Decorative grate with an Allegheny County monogram.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Some very expensive columns, smooth and classically proportioned but with elaborate Deco Romanesque capitals.
We have more pictures of the decorations on the County Office Building, including those gargoyles we mentioned.
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First Methodist Episcopal Church, Carnegie
Built in about 1893, this church was designed by James N. Campbell, who gave it his usual outsized corner tower with enormous open arches for the belfry. It was later known as Carnegie United Methodist Church, which left it a few years ago. But it appears to have been adopted as a community center by the prospering Attawheed Islamic Center next door in the old Presbyterian church, which the new owners obviously treasure and pour a lot of labor into, so we hope the future of the building is secure.
Olympus E-20N; Canon PowerShot SX150IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Double Presbyterians in McDonald
McDonald was a very Presbyterian town, with at least four Presbyterian churches all within an easy walk of one another. In 1897, two Presbyterian churches went up in McDonald side by side—a Presbyterian church and a United Presbyterian church. They seem to have been called First Presbyterian and First United Presbyterian at first, but later took the names Trinity and Calvary. After the denominations merged, so did the congregations—but they kept the two buildings, now called the Calvary Center and the Trinity Center of McDonald Presbyterian Church.
The United Presbyterian church, now Calvary Center, was the larger of the two. The architect was James N. Campbell.
Behind the church is a neat and prosperous-looking foursquare parsonage built of matching brick.
The smaller Presbyterian church, now the Trinity Center, was designed by the Washington (Pennsylvania) firm of McCallum & Ely.
Sony Alpha 3000.
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Engine House No. 16, North Point Breeze
No longer a firehouse, but the building has been adapted to other uses with care to preserve as much of its original stocky Romanesque look as possible.
Sony Alpha 3000.
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Oakdale Public School
High-school dropout James E. Allison would go on to have a long and distinguished career as an architect, much of it with his younger brother David in California as Allison & Allison. When he designed this little school,1 though, he was 24 years old, and he had just set up his own practice. Although he had no diplomas, he had worked for the Pittsburgh office of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge (the successors to the sainted Richardson), and then for Adler & Sullivan in Chicago. No one needs more education than that.
The Romanesque style was all the rage in 1894, and Allison made sure his clients got their fill of round arches, emphasizing them with darker brick. It looks as though he had a lot of fun drawing the belfry.
Whoever designed the inscription—possibly some high-school dropout—made an elementary mistake in Roman numerals that has persisted for 131 years. There is no sane way to read the date “MDCCCICIV.” But change the incorrect subtractive notation to MDCCCXCIV, and it gives us the date 1894, which matches our source.
The school has been turned into apartments, but the exterior appearance has been kept close to original. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The rear section seems to have been a later addition, carefully matched to the original in style and materials.
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Deutche Vereinigte Evangelische-Protestantische Johannes Kirche, Carnegie
This old church was built in 1872, just a few years after the Civil War. It is now (according to neighbors) used for storage of lumber and building materials. Because money is not spent on extensive alterations, storage is, from a preservation point of view, one of the best uses that can be found for a church. Several Southern churches from the 1600s were preserved because they were turned into barns in the late 1700s, when the future Bible Belt was the most irreligious section of the country.
Inscription: “St. John’s German United Evangelical Protestant Church, A. D. 1872.”
Olympus E-20N; Samsung A15 5G.
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First Presbyterian Church, Ingram
Built in about 1898, this church was designed by James N. Campbell,1 and it displays all the usual quirks of his style, including the corner tower with tall, narrow arches and the half-round auditorium made into the most prominent feature of the building: compare, for example, Beth-Eden Baptist Church in Manchester. It has been a Masonic hall for quite a while now. There are, however, still Presbyterians right across the street: the First United Presbyterian congregation was there, and the two denominations merged in 1959.
In this case the Masons have not blocked in most of the windows the way men’s clubs usually do when they take over a building. An old postcard from the Presbyterian Historical Society collection shows that the basement windows have been filled with glass block, and the open tower has been bricked in. But the stained glass is still intact through most of the church.
Olympus E-20N; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
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Allegheny County Courthouse
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St. Agnes Church, Oakland
This church at the eastern end of the Great Soho Curve is one of our endangered landmarks. It is a great masterpiece of ecclesiastical architecture by the Pittsburgh genius John T. Comès, who died at the age of 49 but had already built a legacy of glorious churches and schools across the country. However, it belongs to Carlow University, and universities hate historic buildings with a burning passion—Carlow more than most. All that stands in the way of a multimillion-dollar building with a rich donor’s name on it is this stupid church, which isn’t doing anybody any good. All it’s useful for is assembling large numbers of people for some sort of religious observance, and what good is that to a Catholic university?
So we document its details as well as we can. There is a strong movement to preserve the church, but universities usually win these fights in the end.
The martyrdom of St. Agnes.
In the center: a Chi-Rho monogram with the Alpha and Omega. Left to right are the symbols of the four Evangelists: the lion of Mark, the eagle of John, the human face of Matthew, and the ox of Luke.
There’s still a bell in this tower.
The rectory next door is designed to match the church. It shows the Art Nouveau influence that Comès could combine effortlessly with historical models to produce a style uniquely his own.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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