What was once a rather flamboyant exercise in provincial Rundbogenstil has been tamed by multiple alterations, but we can still see some of the characteristic ornaments—such as the varied crenellations along the cornice and the heavily emphasized eyebrows over the originally arched windows.
The building has a new life as apartments, which at least keeps it standing, even if the conversion did dilute much of its original character.
Update: Thanks to our alert correspondent David Schwing, we have this old postcard that shows the building when it was young and Romanesquer. It was put up in 1908; the architect was E. W. Milligan of Swissvale.1
The Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, Andrew Carnegie’s first donation (and the second one to open, after Braddock), set the pattern for many of the larger libraries to come: it included not only a library but also a music hall, so that the building gave the people of the city a palace of culture. This is the first Carnegie Hall ever: the one in Braddock was a later addition to the library. The architects of this building were Smithmeyer & Pelz, who had earned their library-drawing credentials by winning the competition to design the Library of Congress. First Smithmeyer and then Pelz would later be thrown off the Library of Congress job, because it’s hard to work on a huge government project that’s eagerly watched by every newspaper in the nation and supervised by the entire United States Congress. They probably found it much easier to deal with Mr. Carnegie. Nevertheless, all Mr. Carnegie’s other libraries in Pittsburgh were designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, or just Alden & Harlow, who became his preferred firm and knew exactly what he wanted.
The music hall is now in use as the Hazlett Theater.
The main library was damaged years ago by a lightning strike, which provoked the library to move out to a new building on Federal Street; but the Children‘s Museum has taken over and restored this historic building and uses it as the Museum Lab.
The perspective of this picture has been adjusted on two planes to make a more natural view of the building, at the cost of distorting some of the other things in the picture.
Thomas D. Evans was the architect of this towering warehouse, built just as the age of skyscrapers was dawning in 1896. It has kept its Romanesque decorative details, and the ground floor has been restored and lightly modernized with sympathy for the original lines of the building.
O. M. Topp, the favorite architect of Lutherans in Pittsburgh for a generation, designed this magnificent Romanesque church, which was built in 1927–19281 and seems almost like a tribute to the late John T. Comès, who had died five years earlier. Topp almost always designed churches in the Gothic style, but here he takes up Romanesque and shows that he can be a master of it, right down to the polychrome stripes that Comès loved so well.
The entrance on the Stewart Avenue side is perhaps the stripiest ecclesiastical structure in the city of Pittsburgh.
The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation identifies Topp as the architect of the main church. The Sunday-school wing was built shortly afterward. Source: The Charette, October, 1927: “359. Architect: O. M. Topp, Jenkins Arcade, Pittsburgh, Pa. Title: Stewart Ave. Lutheran Church, Sunday School. Location: Stewart Ave. and Brownsville Road. Ready for bids Sept. 19th. Approximate size: Two stories; brick, wood and steel. Cubage: 125,000 cu. ft.” ↩︎
This building stands out among the skyscrapers that surround it like a strange relic of a lost civilization—the pre-skyscraper age. It was built in 1890, and the architect was young Frederick Osterling. He would soon master the Richardsonian Romanesque style and become one of our most accomplished practitioners of it, but this is pre-Richardsonian Romanesque. The weighty but graceful eyebrows over the arches, the complex and irregular rhythm of different sizes, and the surprising but flowing curves all remind us of Osterling’s old master Joseph Stillburg, whose Romanesque ideas went back to his native Austria.
These pictures are very large composites; expect 24 megabytes of data if you enlarge the one above.
Commercial electric light was only a few years old when this power station was built in 1889. It was built in a restrained Victorian classical style that seems meant to make electric power look tame and respectable. But just a few years later, a new building was added next door that conveys quite a different architectural message.
The Irwin Avenue Substation was built in 1895, but it has the look of something built shortly after the Norman Conquest. The architectural message here seems to be that electricity is such a mighty force that only a medieval fortress can keep it under control. This building still belongs to Duquesne Light, and it is still called the Irwin Avenue Substation, even though Irwin Avenue has been called Brighton Road for more than ninety years.
St. Ann’s was built in our most Hungarian neighborhood for Hungarian Catholics. The cornerstone was laid in 1919; the congregation worshiped in the basement of the unfinished building for a few years, and finished the church in 1925. The church closed in 1998, and the building was sold; its current owners have kept it from falling down.1 That is as much as old Pa Pitt knows about the church, other than what you see in these pictures.
From the front, the church seems extremely tall, with its sanctuary upstairs from the main entrance. However, Hazelwood is a neighborhood mostly built on a slope, and the altar end of the sanctuary is at ground level. The cross in a circle on the façade was originally a rose window.
