Category Archive: News Wire Services
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Heinz factory conversion creates lofty living on North Side
By Alison Conte
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, October 9, 2004The transformation of the old H.J. Heinz factory on the North Side into luxury apartments could be called the new Industrial Revolution.
Heinz Lofts includes the Bean, Meat, Cereal and Reservoir buildings, which were named for the commodities that were produced or stored inside them. More than 150 of the planned 267 apartments will be available this month.Boasting great views of the Allegheny River, the Strip District and Downtown, the complex — which formerly housed manufacturing rooms, shipping docks and test kitchens — also will have a cafe, convenience store, community room and fitness center. The varied amenities will make Heinz Lofts “a town within a town,” says Debbie Roberts, property manager for Amore Management Co. of Monroeville, which handles leasing.
“This is precedent-setting in terms of the magnitude of the project,” says Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., president of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. “It is one of the most historically significant industrial complexes in Pittsburgh.”
Renovating challenges
This kind of industrial renovation and historic reuse is the specialty of the Ferchill Group of Cleveland, which is undertaking the $70 million project. Chief executive officer John Ferchill developed the Bridgeside Point Building at the Pittsburgh Technology Center and also is remodeling the Pabst Brewery in Milwaukee, Wis., into a residential and entertainment complex.
“We do a lot of renovations of old warehouses,” says Michael Wellman, project manager. His firm, Sandvick Architects of Cleveland, is familiar with the building codes that can be applied to older buildings and the challenges in historic preservation.
“The factory doesn’t naturally lend itself to a layout for housing,” says Jonathan Sandvick, principal of the firm. “We need to accommodate long, deep spaces and high ceilings.”
The challenge led to unusual floor plans. Because of the width of the building, each apartment has a long hallway leading in from the central corridor. In some units, the bedrooms, laundry and baths are off these hallways. Others feature a galley kitchen along the hall. Think of an ocean liner without interior cabins, where every stateroom has a porthole.
At the end of the halls, the living areas are saturated with natural light from the large square or semi-round arch windows that fill the exterior walls.
“We use borrowed light from these spaces, and interior windows to bring light to the bedrooms,” Wellman says.
This design leaves plenty of room for large living/dining areas with high ceilings, some of which include a fireplace, den or roof deck. For easy entertaining, many models have a kitchen and breakfast bar as part of the living rooms.
The architects faced a hefty challenge of working with the factory’s original equipment and structural elements such as pipes and columns, exposed brick, ductwork and steel beams.
“We celebrated these features, used them as sculpture in the spaces throughout,” Sandvick says. The 15-foot-high ceilings offered height to spare, so multiple levels with steps up or down to bedrooms have been incorporated.
Keeping the past intact
Because the Heinz factory is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the developer is eligible for a 20 percent tax credit if it follows certain conditions regarding reconstruction, Wellman says. This includes preserving the original exterior and one-third of the window frames.
Along with extensive cleaning of the masonry work, Roberts says, 2,000 new windows had to match the look and feel of the existing ones.
Two of the towers that the factory used will be brought back to serve as a gateway to the site. “We are also saving or reconstructing six of the bridges that connect all the buildings on the third, fourth or fifth floor,” Wellman says.
In the fifth-floor penthouse apartment of the Cereal Building, builders are using a window for a door. To get to their private roof deck, residents will mount a short staircase and duck through 4-foot-tall windows that have been converted to 4-foot-tall doors. The quirky arrangement is part of the charm.
Other remnants of the buildings’ past will be found in reconditioned stairwells, where the wood railings, terrazzo tile and ironwork are being cleaned and painted. To preserve the Heinz legacy, Sandvick says, some of the common areas will be decorated with Heinz 57 memorabilia and artifacts found during the construction.
Bridges that connect the buildings will allow residents to walk from one of the 500 garage parking spaces in Shipping, pick up mail and dry cleaning in Cereal, and stroll to their home in Reservoir, unencumbered by weather. Indoor parking is just one of the features drawing potential tenants to the site.
“People at all stages of life like the location, the amenities and the variety of floor plans,” Roberts says. “They can get public transportation to the city or walk over the bridge to the Strip.”
The Cereal building will be the “town square” for Heinz Lofts, where residents can gather in a community room with a kitchen, TV and fireplace. There also will be an indoor/outdoor cafe, mailboxes, convenience store, dry cleaning pickup and coin-operated laundry.
A business services center offers a conference room, fax, wireless Internet and conference call capabilities. Exercise equipment, a sauna, individual lap pool and hot tub are features of the fitness center.
For the ultimate Heinz Lofts living experience, one of the newly reconstructed towers will be part of a two-bedroom apartment. Another apartment will be incorporated into the rebuilt bridge and suspended three stories off the ground.
The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which has been involved in the factory restoration, further protected the buildings by accepting a facade and development rights easement from the Ferchill Group. Nothing can be built over or above them — the exterior must continue to look like the historical buildings of the factory. Landmarks has permanent control over any changes to the exterior, foundation President Ziegler says.
Because the easement restrictions diminished the value of the property, Ziegler says, John Ferchill was able to take a charitable contribution, obtaining substantial dollars in federal tax deductions that helped his funding needs.
“The factory will look the same — the fine arched windows and red brick,” Ziegler says. “But it is better because people will be living in it. It brings housing close to town, to the river and the North Side, helping development in all these areas.”
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Renowned architect designed Scaife Gallery
By Jerry Vondas
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, September 24, 2004Edward L. Barnes, who designed the Sarah M. Scaife Gallery at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, once said that most architectural ideas can be expressed on the back of an envelope.
“He was not terribly concerned about getting credit, just concerned about doing the job right, and he did do it right,” Carnegie Museum of Art board member James L. Winokur said in a magazine published by the Carnegie Museums.Edward Larrabee Barnes, of Cambridge, Mass., died from complications of a stroke on Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004, in Cupertino, Calif. He was 89.
Arthur Ziegler, president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, called the Scaife Gallery, which opened in 1974, “a fine example of a contemporary, later 20th century design in Oakland.”
Richard M. Scaife, the son of Sarah M. Scaife and owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, praised Mr. Barnes’ talents.
“I was delighted that it turned out as well as it did,” he said of the gallery.
Mrs. Scaife died in 1965, and her family and the Scaife Foundation presented the gallery to Carnegie Institute in her memory.
“I had a lot of adventures with Ed Barnes, and I came to have great respect for him,” said Winokur, who visited the construction site several times a week in the early 1970s. “The Scaife building fell right into place. It couldn’t have been done at a better time, and it couldn’t have been done better.”
Richard Armstrong, Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, told the Carnegie magazine, “Of the many museums built in the 1970s, this is among the half-dozen best.”
“It receives people well, it functions very cleanly, and its greatest attribute is the incomparable light in the galleries. It’s not dated. It is truly very sophisticated architecture. It simplifies and elevates the Beaux-Arts ideals in the Alden and Harlow building next door.
“It expunges decoration and exalts the idea of the building as a container and a noble stage.
“Its strength, in fact, is evident in the graciousness with which it accommodates changing attitudes toward exhibiting works of art, a graciousness characteristic of the architect who created it.”
In the 50 years since the end of World War II and his discharge from the Navy, Mr. Barnes designed the IBM corporate building in Manhattan, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, D.C., among others.
His master plans also included work done at Williamsburg, Va., the New York and Chicago botanical gardens and the National University of Singapore.
Born in an Episcopal family in Chicago, Mr. Barnes was the son of Cecil Barnes, an attorney, and Margaret Helen Ayer Barnes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Years of Grace.”
He entered Harvard University in 1934 and studied English before focusing on art history and then the history of architecture.
After graduating, Mr. Barnes taught English at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, his alma mater. But his interest in the works of Walter Gropius, his mentor at Harvard, and Marcel Breuer convinced him that architecture was his true calling.
Mr. Barnes is survived by his wife, the former Mary Elizabeth Coss, an architect whom he married in 1944; a son, John Barnes, of Davenport, Calif.; and two granddaughters.
Jerry Vondas can be reached at jvondas@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7823.
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Winchester Thurston needs expansion space at its Hampton campus – This barn free for the taking
By Jill Cueni-Cohen
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Wednesday, September 08, 2004Since opening its doors in 1987, the Winchester Thurston School in Hampton has retained the feel of a charming little farm.
“This area used to be an old horse farm, and the upper field used to be the outdoor arena,” said Nancy Rogers, director of the campus on Middle Road, which houses kindergarten through fifth grade. “The farmhouse holds our fifth-grade class, and they’re known as the Farm House Gang. [The property] also has a springhouse. … We had it renovated, and it’s used as an auxiliary science center, now called the Pond House because it’s down by the pond.”
A white, 4,000-square-foot Dutch-style barn with a gambrel roof completes the pastoral scene.
But it won’t be there for long.
Eighty pupils attend the Hampton location of the independent day school, which has its main campus in Shadyside. But more are expected, so the school plans to expand — and the barn has to go.
Rather than tear it down, though, school officials are offering to give it away — as long as the taker complies with several requirements, the most important being that the barn is dismantled and removed from the site in its entirety.
Although the barn is used only for storage, the pupils enjoy having it on their campus and have been preparing for the loss by drawing pictures and writing poems about it, Rogers said.
“Everyone’s attached to the barn because it’s part of our landscape and is visually nice to look at,” she said. “One day there was a science class going on, and our janitor was in the hay loft, helping them do an egg-drop experiment. It was such a cute thing to see.”
Inquiries about the barn, which was built around 1940, have come from as far away as Oklahoma in response to an e-mail that was circulated by the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, said Eric Harrison, program and construction manager for both Winchester Thurston campuses.
Gwyneth Windon, culture and heritage programs manager at Oklahoma’s tourism department, said the group was hoping to save the barn from destruction.
“We love barns, but we don’t have the money to move it,” she said. “I wish I was a philanthropist and could just say, ‘Move it here,’ but it’s not old enough to be of interest to certain people. I called because I just wanted to see if there was a chance we could help.”
The majority of the inquiries have been from local people. “Most are people who need a barn for their working farm,” Harrison said, “and some are parties affiliated with the Amish, who are experts in this field.
“One individual has a cut-flower business and wants it to become a part of their operation; another lost his barn in a fire and needed it to be replaced,” he added. “There’s a whole spectrum of people in the business of agriculture and commerce that need it to fulfill some of their business requirements. The response we’re getting indicates that people are seeing a great deal of value in the barn.”
Harrison said Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy, who has a farm in the northern suburbs, called him about the possibility of removing the barn. Indiana Township engineer Jim Mitnick considered but then dismissed the notion of taking the barn. “I looked at the barn, but because it’s 100 percent nailed, it would be [too difficult] to take down and rebuild. It’s also made of nothing but 2x4s and 2x6s, and there’s absolutely no value there.”
Mitnick added that he has had some experience in barn relocation, but it’s preferable to work with a barn that’s been assembled with a combination of pegs and nails. “With a peg barn, you can pull the nailed members off easily and disassemble the barn. It took my barn four days to take apart. It would take four months to get all the nails out of the barn [at Winchester Thurston], and you would end up ruining 50 percent of the wood.”
Mitnick said he thought the school should bulldoze the structure and be done with it. “There’s nothing historical about it and not one decent piece of wood in the entire barn.”
Despite Mitnick’s assessment, Harrison is still optimistic that the barn will find a good home.
“It has a second floor and a first floor, which opens onto grade,” he described, “and its condition is rated from good to excellent. There’s been no penetration of the elements to cause deterioration in the structure, and no break or deterioration in the frame work or the roofing. I think it’s very attractive, and with some work, it can be made even more so.”
The school plans to construct a building that will contain a large multipurpose room, a music room and a glass-enclosed art room that will overlook the pond.
“This is part of the construction we have planned for both campuses,” Rogers said, adding that the school expects it to be finished for the 2004-05 school year.
The new building will retain rural, country elements, she said.
Jack Miller, director of gift planning for the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, commended the school for trying to save the barn.
Miller said that the foundation, which runs a rural preservation network, looked at adapting the barn to become a visitor center for its historic Neville House in Collier, but its style was not of the right period.
“We saw that we couldn’t make an adaptive use for the barn, but we didn’t want to see it destroyed,” said Miller. He and the foundation’s preservation expert went through the barn and did not see any problems with the wood, which could be used in a number of ways.
“Wood is expensive,” he said. “And if the structure can be adapted, who’s to say you shouldn’t do that? Who cares what anyone says?”
“Harrison has received all these calls, and my guess is that someone will take him up on this offer. For decades, people have told us that historic preservation doesn’t make sense, and for years we’ve been proving that it does,” added Miller, noting that Station Square, the location of the foundation’s home, is a perfect example of preservation gone right. “If a person can find a creative way to use something, it makes sense to encourage them.”
Miller said it’s heartening to hear how many people are interested in saving the barn. “Just the fact that there’s a barn left [in Pittsburgh] is amazing. What this tells me is that people have a sense of the significance of preservation. Adaptive use is really the key to our future.”
(Jill Cueni-Cohen is a freelance writer.)
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Highland Park’s grandeur reborn – Fountain at center of renovated entry
By Ervin Dyer,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Saturday, August 28, 2004In Highland Park, the past is present.
In the early 1900s, a grand Victorian entryway greeted visitors with imposing bronze sculptures, clustered Ionic columns, a fountain, reflecting pool and lush formal gardens.
Just beyond the entry of the twin stone pillars, there is evidence that that world is returning: polished stone work; sweat-soaked contractors; and the most refreshing sign, a gush of sparkling water 15 feet in the air.
Decades after its demise, the Highland Park Fountain is almost back.
The water seen spouting this week comes from crews testing new pipes that have been laid. Over the next few weeks, the fountain may be on or off, depending on the testing schedule.
According to city workers, no official opening has been scheduled yet.
But under yesterday’s sunny skies, walkers, residents and passers-by caught an early peek.
“It’s beautiful,” beamed Annette Marks, 67, a lifelong resident of the East End neighborhood that was laid out over 300 acres in 1778. “It’s going to be just like it was.”
As a child, Marks remembers Sundays in the park. There were plenty of picnics and leisurely walks with her parents. As a mother, she and her husband, Ron, took their own children swimming and strolling there. The fountain then, in the late 1960s, was in such disrepair it was taken down and covered in soil. Marks’ husband can’t recall there ever being a fountain.
At one point, the pond where the fountain was centered held lilies and, some remember, goldfish.
To see it gurgling again gave Annette Marks, a local museum fund-raiser, a flash of yesteryear. “They’re bringing it all back, reverting to what we had originally. It’s going to do a lot for this neighborhood.”
The spruce-up of the park began six years ago when the Highland Park Community Development Corp. received a $75,000 state grant to help pay for restoration of the garden, fountain and reflecting pool.
To receive the grant, the group raised an additional $75,000 in matching funds in foundation and private donations. Financial assistance also came from Allegheny Regional Asset District funding earmarked to aid the city’s parks.
It is estimated the completed project will cost about $700,000.
“It is quite lovely,” said Maxine Jenkins, a schoolteacher who lives in nearby Stanton Heights and regularly walks near the fountain.
Jenkins did not initially know the fountain was there, but watched its rebuilding. “I haven’t seen anyone sitting down there,” she said of the fountain’s new benches, “and it seems a little impractical to use funds when the city could be doing other things.”
Phase two of the project is expected to begin shortly. It will involve more horticultural work to restore the Victorian Gardens, which will offer a rainbow of seasonal color, said Philip Gruszka, a director with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, a group working with the city and Highland Park community groups to rebuild the park.
The city has four grand parks — Highland, Schenley, Riverview and Frick. Highland Park, when it opened in 1896, was the most formal and grand, said Arthur Ziegler, of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
It had a promenade, with the fountain and a lily pond, he said. “It was important” because it helped the newly developed community attract people and traffic to the East End.
It is believed the park was designed by German-born Berthold Froesch, a parks designer who lived in Morningside.
The 500-acre park, with the zoo and open-air reservoir, continues to be one of the city’s most well-used parks for walkers, runners and retirees. “To enter the park with less than an optimum image was not good,” said Ziegler. “This will give everything a new life and set the tone for other restoration in the park.”
As the temperature steamed toward 86 degrees, the fountain was one of the coolest spots at the park yesterday.
“It is certainly tranquil,” said Marette Simpson, a minister from Monroeville, jogging past the babbling fountain on her 3-mile run. “I’m ready to take a dip in it.”
(Ervin Dyer can be reached at edyer@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1410.)
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Bicycling: Hot Metal Bridge plans to be well connected
Sunday, August 22, 2004
Eliza and the South Side. Oh, the talk that was generated by that hot and heavy relationship.
The long separated pair are scheduled to be linked again in 2006 when the Hot Metal Bridge over the Monongahela River is scheduled to re-open for bicyclists and pedestrians.
I can just hear the stoop comments.
“Look, she’s still has her curves — all the way from Downtown to Hazelwood.”
“And did you see his posture coming across the river — straight as an arrow after all those years.”
The re-connection of the pair will permit the wheeled and well-heeled — bicyclists, in-line skaters, runners, joggers and walkers — to cross the Mon and continue on trails — upstream and downstream — on both sides of the river.
Eliza and the South Side were introduced in 1882 when the aptly-named Monongahela Connecting Railroad built a bridge a few feet downstream from its “Mon Conn” bridge.
The new bridge was designed to carry hot metal in ladle cars or torpedo-shaped cars from the Eliza and Soho blast furnaces on the Oakland side of the river to the processing mills on the South Side. Hot metal is freshly smelted, slag-free iron stewing at about 3,000 degrees.
Ferrying the fiery iron in its molten form across the 1,052 foot long bridge saved money for the Pittsburgh Works of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Otherwise, it would have had to cast the hot metal into ingots and reheat them to make steel.
“It saved J&L a lot of money,” said Walter C. Kidney, architectural historian of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and author of “Pittsburgh’s Bridges: Architecture and Engineering.” In the book, he concluded his comments about the side-by-side spans by saying:
“The bridges are destined to be an important traffic link between the cleared land of the J&L sites [on both sides of the river] as they develop.”
The importance of the Hot Metal Bridge to bicyclists and pedestrians was reaffirmed Wednesday evening at an Open House meeting organized by the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration.
Instead of a formal presentation, the public had an opportunity to look at a series of comfortably spaced easel-mounted drawings and plans for the bridge and an expansion of East Carson Street from 25th Street to 33rd Street and then speak to the professionals working on them.
Bicyclists were drawn to two renderings of what the Hot Metal Bridge will look like in 2006. They were prepared by Rod Walker, the head of the 3D Modeling and Visualization Department for Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, a major planning, engineering, program and construction management organization.
One rendering shows a curved ramp that bicyclists and pedestrians will use to descend to street level on the South Side of the bridge and connect with the Three Rivers Heritage Trail.
The other shows a new truss bridge that will be built over Second Avenue. It will connect the Oakland side of the Hot Metal Bridge and the Eliza Furnace Trail. The bridges will be lighted and their 14-foot wide bikeways will have picket-style railings.
John Coyne, director of engineering and construction for the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, said the work is scheduled to begin next summer and take about a year. The federal government is paying for most of it, but Coyne pointed out that the Allegheny Trail Alliance contributed about $750,000 to the project.
“I am so delighted with the design work,” said Linda McKenna Boxx, president of the alliance that represents seven rails-trails organizations. “It is sensitive to the nature of the project and is really neat.” The alliance is credited for providing the impetus for the project.
Coyne said the connection from the Hot Metal Bridge to the Eliza Furnace Trail “was important to the biking community.” Yes, it is, especially since it will be heavily used by riders from the city’s three largest biking neighborhoods — Oakland, Squirrel Hill and the South Side.
“This meeting was well done,” said Mary Shaw as her husband, Roy Weil, nodded his head in agreement.
“There was good notice, the description of what they were going to do was based on reality, the [I.B.E.W. Building] was easy to find and there was plenty of parking.”
Shaw and Weil, who have pedaled thousands of miles on bike trails, are the authors of “FreeWheeling Easy in Western Pennsylvania” and “Linking Up: Planning Your Traffic-Free Bike Trip Between Pittsburgh, Pa. and Washington, D. C.” They and other leaders in the biking community were the type of people the meeting planners wanted to attract.
“The people we spoke to were willing to listen to what we had to say,” Weil said.
They singled out Patrick Hassett, assistant director of development, design and transportation for the city planning department, for his “knowledge about the projects, where they were going, what was possible [in terms of any changes] and what wasn’t.”
Although delays are always possible, if not inevitable, Eliza and the South Side should be together again in 2006. It will be worth the wait.
(Larry Walsh can be reached at lwalsh@post-gazette.com and 412-263-1488.)
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Barn to re-create old homestead’s look
By A.J. Caliendo
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Wednesday, August 18, 2004The fifth generation of the Miller family was not very happy when Allegheny County informed them in 1927 that their farm was being bought to establish a county park, which today is South Park.
Though it was small consolation to the Millers, some of their land and their stone farmhouse have been preserved as part of the Oliver Miller Homestead, a historical attraction at the park. And now, because of a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, a barn will be built to replace the one that was torn down when the county took over the land.
The grant request process started in 2001, when then state Sen. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, who is now in Congress, visited and noticed that much of the homestead was in disrepair and that modern day intrusions, such as exposed electrical wires, interfered with the ambience. Murphy thought the homestead should have more of the flavor of the time when Scots/Irishman Oliver Miller settled the land in 1772.
Murphy asked the Oliver Miller Homestead Associates if that group would oversee the renovation and building of the barn if he could persuade state lawmakers to get the money to cover the project. The nonprofit group, established in 1973 to tend to the property and conduct educational tours, agreed and the lawmaker went to work.
Murphy’s efforts resulted in a $500,000 grant from the DCED to Allegheny County, which, in turn, appointed the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation to oversee spending.
That news was music to the ears of Kathleen Marsh, president of the Oliver Miller Homestead Associates, who said the money would be put to good use, particularly the portion that will be used to build the barn.
“[The grant] means a great deal, ” Marsh said. “We will be able to display many of the things we haven’t had room to display.”
Those items include farm implements and furniture, along with “a lot of the smaller artifacts” that have remained in storage.
Most of those items have been collected by volunteers over the years, said Marsh, who acknowledged, “We don’t have a lot things that belonged to the Millers.”
Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation Property Manager Tom Keffer puts the total cost of raising the barn, designed by Landmarks Design Associates of Pittsburgh, at about $388,000. That amount includes some very specific guidelines of authenticity.
“Bidders had to base their bids on a barn that used no metal fasteners,” Keffer said, adding that the frame would be put together using the old-style mortise and tenon connectors.
Amish Timber Framers, of Doylestown, Ohio, will erect the frame. The company also cuts and mills the white oak trees that will be used.
While $388,000 might seem like a lot to erect an old-fashioned barn, OMHA Publicity Director, Paula Bowman, said it was not as simple as it was when the Millers settled here.
“Code issues and the [Americans with Disabilities Act] uses up a lot of the money,” she said.
The official ground breaking takes place at 4:30 p.m. Sunday on the homestead grounds.
“This will be a symbolic thing,” she said of the ceremony. Hopefully, when [the barn] is up, we’ll be able to have a much bigger party.”
Construction will begin soon, but there is no start date. It will take about three months to complete.
The barn will house a meeting room on its lower level. Currently, the 70-member associates meet in the homestead’s small stone house, which was built in the early 1800s to replace the original log cabin occupied by the Millers.
Other projects to be completed with grant money are the renovation of electrical wiring in the stone house and purchase of educational materials to help visitors understand the day-to-day existence of farmers in that time period.
The group will buy tools for a working blacksmith shop on the grounds.
(A.J. Caliendo is a freelance writer.)
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New ‘Then and Now’ book is less nostalgic than predecessor
By Patricia Lowry,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, July 22, 2004America loves a good makeover, which may help explain the fascination with “Then and Now” books documenting changes in cities over time.
Of course, not all of the makeovers in these books are good ones, and that is especially true of “Pittsburgh Then and Now,” published in 1990 by and still available from the University of Pittsburgh Press ($39.95).
The late Chatham College history professor Arthur G. Smith was the author of that volume; he also shot the “now” photographs between 1986 and 1989. The majority of the “then” pictures — 87 of them — were taken between 1920 and 1939, with another 48 shot before 1910. The work of some of the city’s best-known photographers is in the book, including Luke Swank, Clyde Hare and Harold Corsini.
While Smith’s book chronicles positive evolution, it focuses heavily on change for the worse, from the massive 1960s urban renewal in East Liberty and the North Side to the prevailing ugliness that set in after hundreds of elegant little frame houses lost their original details to casement windows and siding that, in some neighborhoods, seems to grow grimmer and grimier each year.
The transformations in Walter Kidney’s new book, also called “Pittsburgh Then and Now,” are not, on the other hand, lamentations for Lost Pittsburgh.
“I had no feeling of nostalgia to impart,” said Kidney, historian for Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. “But there were interesting things I wanted to convey, like ‘the Combine’ ” — a nickname for the Monongahela River Consolidated Coal and Coke Co., about 100 businesses engaged in the shipping of coal around the turn of the 20th century. It owned a now-demolished cast-iron-front building on Water Street, now Fort Pitt Boulevard.
The captions are a little more substantial than those in Smith’s book. Kidney wrote all of the “then” captions, with other PHLF staffers helping out with the “nows.” In the new book, the contemporary photos, shot by London freelancer Simon Clay, are in color, while all of the photos in the Smith book are black and white. But the earlier volume is more comprehensive and more than twice the size of Kidney’s book — 325 pages compared with 144.
The new book, which retails for $17.98, is part of a series of 28 “Then and Now” books published by San Diego-based Thunder Bay Press.
Fourteen years after Smith’s book came out, its comparisons, especially in the neighborhoods, still have the power to shock and dismay. There are few such moments in Kidney’s book, in part because it often focuses on more familiar and less radically overhauled sites and because much of the evolution is positive.
What may come as a surprise, for those who think nothing ever changes here in the capital of Appalachia, is that so much has since the late 1980s, for better and worse, large and small. Gone are the Lawrence Paint Building, the East Liberty Sears, the South Hills trolleys, the cobblestones on Smallman Street and the soot on Carnegie Institute. The North Shore and large swaths of the South Side have been made over. Stadiums and convention centers have gone and come.
The Smith book is not so much outdated as it is a valuable record of the city at a point in time, as Kidney’s book no doubt will seem in years to come. The new “Then and Now” complements the older one, but it in no way replaces it.
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Historic designation on the books for local libraries
By Tony LaRussa
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, July 19, 2004Preservationists long have considered the libraries built by Andrew Carnegie in the late 1800s and early 1900s to be historic landmarks.
Pittsburgh City Council has made it official.Council recently voted unanimously to designate the branch library buildings in Mt. Washington, Homewood, the West End, Lawrenceville and Hazelwood as City Designated Historic Structures.
Cathy McCollom, executive director of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, believes the designation is an important step toward preserving Pittsburgh’s heritage.
“These buildings were built as centers of the community,” said McCollom, whose organization nominated the buildings for the designation. “They were beautifully constructed and should be treated as community assets.”
Designation by the city as a historic structure means a building cannot be demolished or have its exterior changed without approval of the Historic Review Commission of Pittsburgh. The designation does not affect what is done to the interior of a building.
While historic designation provides a building with a certain level of protection, it does not guarantee that it will be used for its original intent.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh abandoned the Hazelwood branch and handed it back to the city, which owns the property. The library was moved to a new commercial complex along Second Avenue, the neighborhood’s main artery.
On the other hand, library officials opted to spend about $3.5 million to restore the Homewood branch following federal guidelines for historic landmarks because it was in a convenient location, had sufficient parking and was accessible to public transportation.
Library officials neither lobbied for nor opposed the historic designation of the buildings they lease from the city.
“We have no problem with the designation since we respect these buildings, too,” said Herb Elish, the library’s executive director. “The designation will not influence our future course of actions. The decisions we will make will be in keeping with, and centered on, the best results for serving the community.”
Angelique Bamberg, the city’s historic preservation planner, said public buildings such as libraries, firehouses, police stations and government offices that were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s often had highly stylized architectural features.
“There was a desire for such buildings to create a civic presence in the neighborhood, so they typically had more architectural expense lavished upon them than typical commercial and residential structures,” she said.
The library buildings were designed by prominent Pittsburgh architects Frank Alden and Alfred Harlow, who are best known for designing the Duquesne Club, Downtown.
The five buildings that recently received historic designation are among the nine original libraries Carnegie donated to the city. The main branch in Oakland, built in 1895, was followed by Lawrenceville, 1898; West End, 1899; Hill District, 1899; Hazelwood, 1900; Mt. Washington, 1900; East Liberty, 1905; South Side, 1909; and Homewood, 1911.
The South Side branch is protected because it is in the Carson Street Historic District. The original East Liberty branch was razed in the late 1960s as part of a sweeping urban renewal plan in that neighborhood. The original Hill District building no longer is used as a library.
Under Historic Review Commission guidelines, any alterations that were made to a building before receiving historic designation can be replaced with the same material, Bamberg said.
“For instance, if a building’s windows already were replaced with vinyl or aluminum windows, they can be replaced with the same type of windows,” she said. “It’s only when changes are proposed that the commission requires the design and materials match what originally existed.”
Bamberg said it is getting easier to do historic restoration because building material manufacturers increasingly are offering “off-the-shelf” products that match historic designs.
“We’re seeing more and more products such as vinyl and aluminum windows made with historic profiles and colors, and roofing material that matches the color and texture of slate,” she said.
Tony LaRussa can be reached at tlarussa@tribweb.com.