If you look closely, you can see that there is a seam right down the middle of the Isabella Street face of this building. It was put up in two stages: the left half in 1906, the right half after 1910.
Kerr & Snodgrass were wholesale wallpaper dealers—obviously very successful ones. They commissioned William J. Shaw of Bellevue to design this building, and it was announced in the Gazette for October 15, 1905, with a reproduction of Shaw’s rendering.1 (Note that the building grew a ninth floor by the time it was actually constructed; apparently Kerr & Snodgrass could hardly keep up with their own prosperity.) The rendering shows the front on Isabella Street and the side along Vulcan Way. According to the news story, this building was to be very similar to the one on the other side of Vulcan Way, which has since disappeared, replaced by a bigger building.
This building has prospered with the rise of the North Shore as a desirable address; it is now known as Four North Shore Center. Its next-door neighbor on Sandusky Street is the Andy Warhol Museum.
Kerr & Snodgrass were willing to spend more than usual for a mere warehouse: the two lower floors are stone, not brick, and festooned with fine carved decorations.
Now known as the Cardello Building, this was one of several locations of the National Casket Company, a concern that, by combining the leading casket makers into one conglomerate, nearly cornered the market on death.
The lens on this old Ansco camera is a “normal” lens that sees the world about the way your eyes see it, so that acute angle is not a lens artifact. It really is an acute angle.
The building is actually a complex of connected buildings put up over the course of twenty years, from 1900 to 1920. The same architect was responsible for all of them: R. Maurice Trimble, who came from a family of contractors and fed work back to various Trimbles whenever he had a chance. (See the end of this article for the citations that mention Trimble as architect.)
We found multiple listings mentioning Trimble as architect of various parts of the National Casket Company building. Here are three of them.
Record & Guide, July 18, 1900, p. 463. “Maurice Trimble, Ferguson Buliding [sic], has made plans for a three-story brick warehouse to be erected on Chartiers street, Allegheny, for the National Casket & Coffin works. The owners are receiving bids for its construction.” Chartiers Street is now North Point Drive. By the time it was built, the warehouse had grown to four floors. The 1910 Sanborn map shows that this was the section between the five-storey section that faces Beaver Avenue and the five-storey section at the south end of the complex. Now known as the Cardello Building.
Record & Guide, December 17, 1902, p. 835. “R. M. Trimble, Ferguson Building has awarded to John H. Trimble & Bro., 2022 Chartiers avenue, Allegheny, the contract for the erection of a five story brick and stone warehouse and office building for the National Casket Company at Seventh street and Duquesne way.” This probably refers to the five-story section at the south end of the National Casket Company warehouse on Chartiers Street; the downtown address would be the offices of the company. Other listings confirm, however, that John H. Trimble & Brother were located at 2022 Chartiers Avenue, right next to the National Casket Company which is very convenient. We note Maurice Trimble’s habit of keeping the construction in the family if he could manage it.
“Casket Company to Build,” Post, August 31, 1920, p. 7. “The National Casket Company has given D. T. Riffle a contract for an addition to a building on Reedsdale street, Northside. R. M. Trimble is the architect.” This is the most recent section, filling out the building to Reedsdale (now part of Beaver Avenue).
Since Trimble was the architect of the first section of the warehouse and the most recent section, and since everything matches the one or the other in style, we can be fairly confident that he designed all the stages of construction, however many there were.
This was a warehouse and looks like a warehouse. It was built for Rosenbaum’s, one of the big department stores downtown; the architect was William E. Snaman, who had made a specialty of the department-store business.
As a building it is not a great work of art: it is one of those buildings that, as Philip Friedman said of his own works, “are admittedly far less esthetic achievements than economic realities.” But it is a bit of Pittsburgh history that will disappear at some point, as its neighbors have already done.
These piles of rubble mark the graves of two warehouses—one of which belonged to Donahoe’s grocery, and therefore might also have been designed by Snaman, since he designed the Donahoe’s building downtown. They have been demolished to make way for the immense Esplanade development, which is scheduled to eat up this building as well.
Some of the original casement windows, usually the first things to go when a building is renovated, are still in this building.
It would be hard to make a case that the Esplanade development will not be a better use of this land than a plain old warehouse, or even that this would be a good building to restore for apartments or offices. It will not be much regretted when it is gone; but as one of the last relics of a once-mighty department store, it is worth remembering with these pictures.
An industrial streetscape in Chateau, which is still a busy industrial and warehouse district. A railroad spur formerly ran along the street and under the projecting roof of the Heyl & Patterson building in the foreground.
According to a Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1924, this warehouse was built in 1917 with fireproof construction, brick curtain walls, concrete floors and roof. It belonged to Swift & Co., a wholesale meat dealer; later it seems to have passed to a produce dealer, and that 1924 Sanborn map has “Produce W. Ho.” neatly pasted over whatever was marked on the outline of the building before.
The perspective of this picture has been adjusted on two planes to make a more natural view of the building, at the cost of distorting some of the other things in the picture.
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 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.
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).
