The design of the House Building, with its unusual middle section, is explained by the fact that the upper six floors were added some time after the lower seven were put up. This rendering shows the cornice and parapet at the top, without which the building looks a little too casual.
The Highland Building looms behind the tiny shops of Ellsworth Avenue.
The Gulf Tower is one of those buildings of the style old Pa Pitt calls “Mausoleum-on-a-stick,” where a skyscraper ends in a top modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Trowbridge and Livingston, who designed the Gulf Tower (with Edward Mellon as local architect of record), were the originators of the style, as far as Father Pitt can determine: the Gulf Tower is a Moderne reimagining of their original Mausoleum-on-a-Stick, the Bankers Trust Company Building on Wall Street, New York.
A two-color rendition of the Cathedral of Learning.
Built by the Peoples Union Bank & Trust Company in 1906–1907, this is a perfect miniature Beaux-Arts skyscraper, with base, shaft, cap, and even the bosses’ floor (the third floor) outlined to mark its social importance. The building was abandoned for some time, but its latest buyer seems at least to have stabilized it. We’ll see pictures in natural color later, but for now, old Pa Pitt decided to render it in black and white with a red filter (simulated in the GIMP, which saves ever so much money on optical equipment), giving us a view that almost makes McKeesport look like a thriving and important metropolis again.
Addendum: The architects were Mowbray & Uffinger, New York specialists in bank buildings.1 The rest of the article follows as originally written when old Pa Pitt did not have that information.
The history of this building is obscure, like many McKeesport things. Father Pitt was not able to find the architect, though it must have been some well-known figure; and although he has not read of any expansion, it seems clear that the original building had four bays along Fifth Avenue, with the two bays to the right added later. Subtract those two bays, and the Fifth Avenue face would be perfectly symmetrical, with the roof ornament right in the center.
Most of the people who mention the Peoples Bank on the Internet add the obvious apostrophe to the name, but it appears that the company itself, in line with many similarly named companies, always left out the apostrophe, as we see in this 1894 picture of its earlier building:
The picture comes from The First One Hundred Years of McKeesport, where it is captioned “The People’s Bank,” with the apostrophe, because sensible people can’t help themselves and feel compelled to correct the name.
