A commercial building on Penn Avenue with a well-preserved terra-cotta front whose distinctive Art Deco decorations were worth picking out with a long lens.
Thomas Scott designed this palatial waterworks, which stands in a little enclave of the city of Pittsburgh on the north shore of the Allegheny just outside Aspinwall. As he did with the Mission Pumping Station on the South Side Slopes, he decorated this one with elaborate grotesque heads and other classical effusions.
This Renaissance palace was designed for Rachel and Mortimer Miller by Maximilian Nirdlinger, whose name is at the top of old Pa Pitt’s list of architects whose names are the most fun to say.1 It was built in 1904, when Nirdlinger was still young; with eye-catching but respectable designs like this one, he established himself as a favorite house designer among the Social Register set.
Pittsburg Press, February 2, 1904, p. 12. “A $30,000 residence will be erected on Morewood avenue, Twentieth ward. The plans for it have just been completed by Architect M. Nirdlinger for Mortimer C. Miller. The structure will be three stories high of ornamental brick with terra cotta trimmings.” The land is shown on plat maps as owned by Rachel McM. Miller. ↩︎
Two doors up the street from St. Michael’s School is this colorful little building, of whose history old Pa Pitt knows nothing. Perhaps someone better informed can reveal it to us in the comments. Father Pitt thought it might have been part of St. Michael’s parish, but old maps do not seem to suggest that it was. Whatever it was, its colorful tile arches and terra-cotta ornaments are worth preserving, and we are happy to see it so well maintained.
Father Pitt will admit right away that he is not sure this was the convent, and perhaps a well-informed reader could enlighten us. He arrived at his conclusion by elimination. There was a church, a school, a rectory, and a convent in the old Sacred Heart parish before it moved out of Braddock. The school still stands; the church was demolished; the rectory was a house the church bought on Talbot Avenue; and so we are left with this building facing 6th Street, on the grounds of the church, which was probably the convent.
The style of the building is unusual and interesting, and we suspect it might have been designed by one of the local Mon Valley architects about whom Pa Pitt knows too little.
The entrance is surrounded by decorative terra cotta in a good state of preservation.
The wrought-iron fence in front of the building is original, and an exceptionally well-preserved example of its type—though probably not for too much longer.
Old Pa Pitt would love to know how that room over the entrance looked before it was glass-blocked.
The polygonal side and rear dormers are unusual and attractive.
When the church next to the building was demolished, it left a big flat lot that some daring urban pioneer who bought the building could turn into a splendid formal garden.
The main tower of Allegheny General is one of the few classic skyscrapers outside downtown, and a landmark of Art Deco in Pittsburgh, as well as a landmark of the style Father Pitt calls Mausoleum-on-a-Stick, where the top of the tower is modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. It was designed by York & Sawyer, who made a specialty of hospitals, and built in 1930. Today we’re going to pay particular attention to the grand entrance on North Avenue, which is covered with extravagant terra-cotta decorations, so we have more than thirty pictures to show you.
The front of green terra cotta is unique in Pittsburgh. Frederick C. Sauer designed this building, and when it was done he moved his office into it. It is the only one of Sauer’s buildings, as far as old Pa Pitt knows, that bore his name on the building itself, though at some point some workman, doubtless thinking he was doing a splendid job of renovating the building, did his best to obliterate the letters:
Addendum: As we might have guessed from looking at the front, the building rose in two stages. Three floors were added in 1909.1
S. S. Kresge was never the presence in Pittsburgh that Murphy’s was, but all the five-and-dime stores had outlets downtown. Murphy’s, Kresge’s, McCrory’s, Woolworth’s—they were all similar operations, and all the founders knew each other. G. C. Murphy, in fact, had worked for S. S. Kresge and John G. McCrory before setting out on his own.
The S. S. Kresge Company is better known to younger people (meaning under the age of seventy or so) as the parent corporation of Kmart.
The whole front of the building is done in terra cotta, including this inscription.
The giant Kaufmann’s department store grew in stages over decades. This part of it was designed by Charles Bickel, who decorated it with exceptionally fine terra-cotta ornaments.
