Father Pitt

Tag: Smithfield Street

  • Kaufmann & Baer Department Store

    Kaufmann & Baer building

    “The Kaufmann & Baer department store is an enormous shiny white terra cotta building, filled with windows and probably good for its purpose.” So the architect Aymar Embury II (did ever an architect have such an architecty name?) dismissed this building in his article about Pittsburgh architecture in 1915,1 when the building was new. It was put up for Kaufmann & Baer—the Kaufmanns being members of the same family as Morris Kaufmann, who ran that other department store with a similar name on Smithfield Street. Most older Pittsburghers remember it affectionately as the Gimbels Building, because Gimbels bought Kaufmann & Baer in 1925 and this building was Gimbels for most of its life as a department store. Starrett & Van Vleck, New York specialists in department stores, were the architects.

    From southward on Smithfield Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
    1. Architecture, April, 1915, p. 107. ↩︎
    Comments

  • Entrance to the Oliver Building

    Entrance to the Oliver Building

    Impressive fat columns tell us that this is a colossal building even if we’re too close to see how colossal it really is. The architect was Daniel “Make No Little Plans” Burnham.

    Perspective view
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    Comments

  • Oliver Building from Mellon Square

    Oliver Building with fountains of Mellon Square in foreground
    Composite of two photos from the Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

  • Terra-Cotta Front on Smithfield Street

    643 Smithfield Street
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    The ground-floor storefront was replaced at some time in the modernist era, but the upper two floors preserve two-thirds of a fine terra-cotta front.

    Comments

  • Some Details of the Triangle Building

    McCance Block or Triangle Building

    Originally called the McCance Block after its owner, this came to be known as the Triangle Building for obvious reasons. As Father Pitt has mentioned before, it fills what may be one of the smallest downtown city blocks in the country, so that every side of a relatively small building faces the street.

    Andrew Peebles was probably the architect—but old Pa Pitt has not sorted that out completely yet, because he has also heard of Thomas Scott as the architect. His current hypothesis is that the building rose in two stages: the first four floors by Peebles, and the top two floors, which are simpler and built with brick of a very slightly different shade, by Scott some years later. The building has recently been refurbished for (you guessed it) luxury apartments.

    Smithfield Street entrance
    Lantern
    Capital
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    Comments

  • Mellon National Bank Building

    Mellon National Bank Building
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

    Trowbridge & Livingston, Andrew Mellon’s favorite architects, designed this block-long palace of finance. The legendary interior was destroyed in the 1990s for a blink-and-you-missed-it department store, but the exterior is almost completely unchanged from the day the building opened in 1925.

    Comments

  • Two Aluminum Firsts

    Spire of the German Evangelical Protestant Church
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    The spire of the German Evangelical Protestant Church (now Smithfield United Church of Christ), designed by Henry Hornbostel and finished in 1926, was the first structural use of aluminum. Behind it, the Alcoa Building, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz and finished in 1953, was the first skyscraper entirely clad in aluminum.

    Comments

  • A Relic of the Middle 1800s

    628 Smithfield Street

    Here is a remnant of the old middle-nineteenth-century commercial Pittsburgh, when a large part of the population lived downtown and shopkeepers often lived above their shops. In addition to being an unusual relic of the mostly obliterated past of downtown, this particular building is famous for its mural, “The Two Andys,” by Tom Mosser and Sarah Zeffiro.

    Building with The Two Andys
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    Comments

  • Chamber of Commerce Building

    Chamber of Commerce Building
    From The Chamber of Commerce Building, 1917, published just before the building opened.

    The Chamber of Commerce Building seems to be neglected in Pittsburgh lore; nobody mentions it, and in fact the Skyscraper Page Pittsburgh skyscraper diagram skips right over it, ignoring it completely, though the diagram includes a number of considerably smaller and shorter buildings. Even old Pa Pitt has never featured this building before, mostly because it is difficult to get a picture of the whole building. So here is an illustration of the building when it was new; it has changed very little. It is easier to pick out details with a versatile lens, so here are a few of the interesting decorations. The architects were Edward B. Lee, who moved his office into the building when it was finished, and James P. Piper.

    Entrance
    Pilaster capital
    Terra-cotta decorations
    Pilaster base
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    Comments

  • Spire of the German Evangelical Church

    Spire of the German Evangelical Church
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    Now the Smithfield United Church of Christ, and it has had several other names. This lacy spire has an honored place in history as the first structural use of aluminum. (The aluminum point on the Washington Monument was just a lump of aluminum set on top, not a structure.) The architect Henry Hornbostel’s other experiment in this building, the use of decorative concrete panels on the exterior walls, has not held up as well; for years the rest of the building has been shrouded in netting to prevent bits of concrete from raining on pedestrians. Below is a picture Father Pitt took of the tower in 2000, before the shrouds went up.

    Tower of Smithfield United Church in 2000
    Lomo Smena 8M.