Category Archive: Preservation News
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Places Around Pittsburgh: Façade in Your Face
Fourth Avenue still contains a few “swagger banks,” with facades contrived to give a small-but-O-My! impression even though the properties are diminutive. One of these is Number 337, now the Pittsburgh Engineers’ Building, once the Union Trust Company, a work of 1898 by D. H. Burnham & Co.Now, street architecture downtown in any case is very likely to strut its lithic stuff, make a grand display despite the drab structural facts, and in this regard a swagger bank is not to be left behind. But 337’s facade is most frankly a work of fictive architecture, a gratuitous composition shoved well out from the glazing line. A Grecian Doric temple stands on a thin imitation of a rusticated basement with a lot of batter. The order is in antis, and the antae are set against the granite-faced end walls, which rise above the pediment to terminate in antefixes (antephiges?) and go back to a little-detailed pediment-like feature that echoes the real pediment. The whole composition has one door and eight window openings, and the front as a whole keeps the weather out somehow, but it is panache that spent the money—wisely and functionally in its own way.
—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: A Detail
The Conestoga Building stands at Wood Street and Fort Pitt Boulevard, a work of about 1890 by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow. It has a steel frame within solid masonry walls, and its ground-floor openings have a detail that is enlivening in an almost subliminal way. The openings are squarish, and are shaped at the upper corners by little corbels flush with the picked-sandstone facing. The corbels and the lintel they help carry are not plausible as masonry bearing elements, but look good. The shaping of the corbels is particularly subtle. From bottom to top, they go out horizontally, go upward in quarter-rounds, then vertically. The edges begin right-angled, turn into quarter-rounds, then finish as right angles again. A quiet but well-considered modulation.
—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: A Moderate-Income Fantasy Life
When you live in a building element that takes the form of a tower, you can imagine yourself in a castle if you wish—if you can keep objectivity at bay. A party-wall castle with a front porch, after all, merely suggests a dwelling with identity problems. But on Alpha Terrace in East Liberty, a row of quasi-chateaux faces a row of quasi-Queen Anne villa—the fantasies going only a few inches deep. But the whole thing works out pretty well. This block of Beatty Street has won the hearts of the people, and is now a City Historic District. -
Places Around Pittsburgh: Some Assembly Required
George B. Post’s Bank of Pittsburgh (1895) adhered to the Temple of Finance cliché in full, with a hexastyle Corinthian order boldly confronting Fourth Avenue. When the bank as a whole came down in 1944, replaced by nothing more than a parking lot, the architect Edward F. Griffith prevailed on the lot owner to let the colonnade and the façade behind it stand. Around 1960, the opportunity for re-use came, and Griffith and another architect, Maximilian Nirdlinger, acted. The elements were erected as a hypaethral tholos (a temple round and roofless) at Jefferson Memorial Park in Pleasant Hills. The old bank doorway admits you, and above rise the columns and some wall elements. -
Places Around Pittsburgh: Squeezed Villa
We are not really sure what happened at 5510 Centre Avenue, but the story seems to go like this. Someone had an old house, dating from the 1860s to judge from the concave sides of its mansard and gambrel roofs. It stood back from the street some 20 feet apart, and about 1930 someone decided to build two store blocks right on the street, one quoined and one crenellated to give the ensemble some class. This led the owner of the house, whether different or not, to create a villa-like effect with an arcaded portico, a horseshoe stair to street level, a miscellany of Classical decoration, and a little shrubbery, so that an air of graciousness resulted despite everything. The Japanese have perfected the art of simulating a full landscape in a little courtyard, and this beset property in Bloomfield had made a nice try at the same thing.—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: How to Terminate a Tall Building
Go to Forbes Avenue behind Warner Centre on a bright morning around 10 o’clock, and look toward Fourth Avenue: splendid architecture rises before you, the upper flourishes of tall buildings as these were conceived in the 1900s. Here is a variety of capitals in the old base-shaft-capital formula of tall-building design—the ultimate bit of fantasy on a tall building that still encloses workaday space for the most part but that in addition concludes the composition and announces the building from afar. Here, to the far right, the bright metal muntins and reflective glass of PPG Place suggest an alternative means: tracery that pierces, and seems to be penetrated by the sky.
—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: Gothic Terminations
A view down Ellsworth Avenue, when the trees are bare, gives quite a Gothic impression. Closest is the more or less Tudor tower of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, 1898, by the brilliant and short-lived Halsey Wood. Gothic was not really inspiring to Wood; he liked to fantasize in Romanesque. Here though, he did a burly variation on the 1500-period tower of a church in Wrexham, Wales.
Further away is a more correct Gothic termination, the twin spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1906 to designs of Egan & Prindeville (Chicago). The cathedral is a transitional building, faced in limestone, a new material to Pittsburgh, rather than customary materials of red brick and sandstone that were resigned to the local soot. Yet this is a Victorian building in basic ways. The detailing seems attached to rather than integrated with the basic masses, and the voulting inside is false.
The Cathedral of Learning was concluded in 1937 with rising masses not intended at first but that are just right for its tall, tapering form, letting it stop of its own accord.
With any shortcomings, the three buildings, and the tracery of winter trees, are a lovely sight.
—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: He Did It Himself
The Eclectic period, from 1900 to 1940 say, witnessed a good bit of excess, not surprisingly since architecture as a whole was pretty histrionic. One has the impression, looking back, that architects, clients, and developers egged each other on and that the sense of the ridiculous quietly faded away, especially toward the end. Hyeholde, built in Moon Township between 1931 and 1938, was an Olde Worlde fantasy of a type familiar from 1925 on, but different from most in that the restaurateur William Kryskill, designed it himself. The fake half-timber, the crazy brickwork, the ravaged slating of the steep roofs, all tell of naïve peasant work that the elements have assaulted: ergo, it seems to be thoroughly professional work as it might be done by an Eclectic architect. But the stove, rather than the drawing board, was the place where William Kryskill practiced his true art.—Walter C. Kidney
