Not that long ago, this interesting Romanesque building was the King’s Court movie theater; but, as the inscription shows, it was built as a police station. From cops to movies to noodles must have been a very interesting journey. The style is Romanesque, but with the overlapping round arches that some architectural historians regard as the origin of Gothic pointed arches.
If you love architecture, Fourth Avenue gives you a more varied aesthetic experience per block than any other street in the city. Here we have the Richardsonian Romanesque style as it applies to a proto-skyscraper: the Fidelity Building, designed by James T. Steen. It opened in 1889, when Richardson’s courthouse on Grant Street was brand new. Its seven floors are close to the limit for pre-steel-cage architecture. Only a year after this building opened, construction began on the Conestoga Building on Smithfield Street, the first steel-cage building in Pittsburgh.
The photograph is huge, by the way: at full size it’s 8.88 megabytes, so don’t click on it on a metered connection. Once again, old Pa Pitt has put it together from multiple photographs, which was the only way to get the whole front of the building from across the street.
Designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, the successors to H. H. Richardson, this church has an honest Richardsonian pedigree to go with its Richardsonian Romanesque style.
Can you tell that old Pa Pitt is enjoying his new software toy? The picture above is a wide-angle shot stitched together from nine separate photographs. The fisheye view below is stitched together from six; if you click on it, you can have it at about 38 megapixels.
Finally, here’s a picture from the north side of the church, where there is room to get far away enough to take the picture all in one shot.
Old Pa Pitt has done his best to make this picture look like an old colored postcard. Henry A. Macomb won a design competition for this gatehouse, whose tower is clearly influenced by the tower of the Allegheny County Courthouse downtown. The entrance buildings were finished in 1889, just after the courthouse opened, and some last-minute changes to the tower were probably intended to make it look more like Richardson’s work on the courthouse.
The old adage that “a man’s home is his castle” is given a literalist interpretation in this Richardsonian Romanesque mansion from 1893. It stands out on a street of standout houses.
