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.
The picture above was taken in September of 2023; we append it to show the strong impression the building makes from half a block away.
The central warehouse for the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad’s freight depot, now converted to offices and other uses and known as Commerce Court. These two pictures were taken just about a year apart, but nothing significant changed during that time. While he was donating the newer one to Wikimedia Commons, old Pa Pitt ran across the older one and realized he had never published it here.
Built in about 1925 (which is when this address starts appearing in the company’s advertisements), this was a warehouse for a prosperous moving company. Like most buildings along this stretch of West Liberty Avenue, it was later adapted to the car-dealing business.
The letter W for White appears in four cartouches on the front of the building.
Even a warehouse entrance ought to impress your customers, and that is what terra cotta is for.
A car dealer (selling Studebakers) was attached to the left side of the building; it has been replaced by a parking lot.
One of the few first-generation skyscrapers outside downtown, this was originally the warehouse for the Bernard Gloeckler Company, a prosperous dealer in “butchers’ supplies & tools, store fixtures, refrigerators, etc.,” according to a 1913 city directory (where the name is spelled Gloekler; we have also seen Glockler and Gleckler). It was later called the Pennrose Building, and of course it has been adapted as luxury apartments. It was built in 1906; the architects were the Philadelphia firm of Ballinger & Perrot.1
The building was reinforced concrete throughout, and Ballinger & Perrot literally wrote the book on reinforced concrete: Inspector’s Handbook of Reinforced Concrete, by Walter F. Ballinger and Emile G. Perrot (New York: The Engineering News Publishing Co.; London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1909).
Charles Bickel was the architect of this factory and warehouse, which, like many industrial buildings of the time, takes its inspiration from the Marshall Field’s Wholesale Store by H. H. Richardson. Bickel, however, added his own sensibilities, and made it an impressive and distinctive building. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Since we were looking at department-store warehouses a week ago, here is another one. This one was built in 1901 for Kaufmann’s department store, and as a work of architecture it is the most pleasing of the department-store warehouses we’ve seen. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, with the architect listed as D. H. Crisman; but old Pa Pitt, with all due deference to the experts, thinks that attribution is a mistake.1 Crisman was probably the contractor. He is listed in a 1900 city directory as a carpenter, and in 1902 we find him hiring an architect to design an apartment building, strongly suggesting that he was not an architect himself.
If Father Pitt had to make a guess, he would guess that Charles Bickel was the architect. Bickel designed the store for the Kaufmanns downtown, so he would be an obvious choice. He was also our most prolific producer of warehouses, so he is the safest bet. The style of the building is similar to that of Bickel’s colossal Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse & Transfer Company on the South Side.
The architect gave the bricklayers a workout. The bricklayers were up to the challenge.
Other department-store warehouses: Frank & Seder and Rosenbaum’s, Gimbels.
Frank & Seder was never our biggest department store, but it was a pretty big store. Like all the other department stores downtown, it needed a big warehouse to hold the merchandise until it was ready to delight downtown shoppers. This colossus on the Bluff was designed in 1923 by William E. Snaman,1 an architect who had already had a long and prosperous career and by this time in his life was specializing in large warehouses and other industrial buildings. The Boulevard of the Allies runs past on a course that is not perpendicular to the side streets, so that the front of the building is at an odd angle to the rest of the building.
Just a little later, Snaman was designing another warehouse on the North Side for Rosenbaum’s, another big downtown department store.2 This is a slightly blurred picture from the window of a car stopped in traffic on the approach to the West End Bridge, but it will have to do for now.
This was a warehouse, with offices and showrooms, built in 1907 for a company that sold a wide variety of products, from ball-bearing grinders to home appliances—including, according to a comment below, an automobile called the Duquesne, which never made it into full production, and about which Father Pitt would like to hear more from anyone who has information. (Note, by the way, that the company’s owners were among the many stubborn Pittsburghers who kept the H at the end of the city’s name through the dark days when it was officially banned.) Its 1913 catalogue is more than two thousand pages, and the title page shows us why so much effort went into making this industrial building attractive: because it had to look good in the engraving.
This picture—which is probably the architects’ rendering, since the same picture shows up in other sources even before the building was completed—shows the building before it was expanded. The architects were the William G. Wilkins Co., designers of numerous warehouses and industrial buildings in Pittsburgh, including the Frick & Lindsey Co. warehouse, now the Andy Warhol Museum. The addition to the left of the building was built in 1919 or 1920; the same architects supervised it, so it matches the rest very neatly. William Glyde Wilkins was an engineer; to do the architecting in his firm, he had the very capable Joseph F. Kuntz, who loved terra-cotta decoration.
One important line the company sold was the Gainaday brand of home appliances. In the early part of the twentieth century, middle-class families were learning to live without servants. It meant the housewife had to do the work previously done by maids and housekeepers. But this was the mechanical age: a machine could take the place of a servant. It was so efficient, in fact, that you could gain a day over the course of your week of housewifely duties.
The building was promoted as a “model warehouse,” a shining example of what could be done with this sort of building, and Pittsburgh’s Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, the biggest name in toilets (which later merged with American Radiator to form American-Standard), took out a full-page ad in a journal of the toilet trade to boast that the plumbing fixtures were all Standard brand.
The magazine Rock Products for November 22, 1907, gave a detailed description of the building as it was going up, with—once again—the same illustration.
The immense building now being erected by the Pittsburg Gage and Supply Company at Thirtieth Street and Liberty Avenue, Pittsburg, Pa., is constructed of steel, brick and concrete fireproofing, equipped with automatic sprinklers throughout, and when completed will be the largest, most modern and thoroughly equipped supply house in the world.
For the concrete work Lehigh Portland cement was used throughout. The W. G. Wilkins Company, Westinghouse Building, were the architects, and the George Hogg Company the contractors.
The first floor will be used as a general salesroom; the second floor will be taken up by the offices and shipping departments of the company. All the other floors and the basement will be used as storage space for their mammoth stock. A notable feature of the main building is the central_tower rising more than forty feet above the roof. In this tower will be located water tanks holding 65,000 gallons, which will be used for the house supply and the automatic sprinkler system.
In connection with the building there is being erected a six-story fireproof building, in which will be manufactured the Pittsburg steam specialties. It will also contain a thoroughly modern brass foundry and pipe shop. Electric cranes are to be used throughout, and all machinery, elevators, etc., will be electric-motor-driven.
A joint siding of the Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Ohio and Pittsburg Junction railroads will afford excellent shipping facilities. Adjoining this siding they are constructing a large iron, steel and pipe warehouse, in which will be carried the largest stock in Pittsburg, if not in the Central States. Adjoining this building there is a vacant frontage of almost 100 feet, which will be used for storage and switching purposes.
The present stores and warehouses of the Pittsburg Gage and Supply Company are located at 309-321 Water Street, and its manufacturing plant at Thirty-first Street. The officers are: W. L. Rodgers, president; J. Lee Rodgers, secretary; R. F. Ramsey, treasurer; A. F. Maxwell, assistant treasurer; M. R. Porter, sales manager, and H. E. Haller, superintendent.
This Romanesque warehouse appears from old maps to have been built around the turn of the twentieth century for the Allegheny Transfer Company. It later belonged to Donaldson Transfer, as a ghost sign at the top of the building testifies (enlarge the picture to examine it closely). It has been a few things since then, and it was for sale when old Pa Pitt visited it. If you want a distinctive commercial or even residential space in one of our most pleasant neighborhoods, here is your opportunity.
A few years ago, Father Pitt took a picture of this building in sunset light, but it looks as though he never published it. So here it is now.
This building seems to have been put up for Allen Kirkpatrick & Co., but for years it was the home of the Pittsburgh Tag Co., as this ghost sign tells us. It has been vacant for some time.
The Pittsburgh Tag Company was founded in 1927, as we find in the Paper Trade Journal, December 15, 1927:
Pittsburgh, Pa.—The Pittsburgh Tag Company, care of Charles F. C. Arensberg, 834 Amberson street, Pittsburgh, recently organized with a capital of $50,000, plans the operation of a local plant for the manufacture of paper tags and kindred specialties. Mr. Arensberg will be treasurer of the new company; James M. Graham and Jonathan S. Green will be directors.
