#flat denny

               When we think of architecture in Pittsburgh, our minds jump to some likely suspects: the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, the Cathedral of Learning, PPG Place. What’s noticeable about this list? The fact that there isn’t really a cohesive or dominant “style” in town; modernist structures like the Alcoa Building sit side by side with Romanesque, Italianate, and Gothic buildings in the Golden Triangle. Outside of downtown, residences range from the mansions of Fifth Avenue, to the Victorians of Shadyside, to the row houses of Lawrenceville, to the single frame homes that cover the slopes of Mt. Washington. Why, exactly, is Pittsburgh’s architectural history so eclectic?

Denny posing in front of the Allegheny County Courthouse- the third, and most recent, incarnation, dedicated in 1888. An example of the Romanesque Revival style favored by Bostonian architect H. H. Richardson, the building’s design resulted from a solicitation of submissions from 100 architects.  

Pittsburgh History and Landmark Foundation writer and historian Walter Kidney attempts an explanation in his 1997 book Pittsburgh’s Landmark Architecture. Citing other East Coast cities as being “less violent to their environments than the Pittsburgh-area industrial town,” Kidney suggests that since Pittsburgh’s history of economic strength lay more in industry than in the commercial trading centers of, say, New York and Boston, our architecture developed in a less planned fashion. He mentions that the great accomplishment of architecture in Pittsburgh is in the way the buildings accentuate our unique physical landscape, “serrating the skyline of a hill, clinging to a distant slope, or riding the edges of a street that dips and rises with the land.”

               The assertion that Pittsburgh’s architectural history has been greatly influenced by the city’s economic development seems to hold a lot of weight. In Denny’s era, the style of buildings was changing in stature with the newly-declared city itself, evolving from log cabins to more Georgian-style structures as the city developed the necessary trade, wealth, and resources to do so. Throughout the 19th century, more “classically” styled buildings appeared, like the Gothic Trinity Episcopal Church built in 1824 (which was replaced in 1872 with the similarly Gothic building that stands today, in order to accommodate the growing congregation), and the Greek Revivalist Allegheny County Courthouse which stood from 1841 to 1882. The second Courthouse fell victim to a fire, which was an all too common fate for many Pittsburgh structures in the 1800s, including the first buildings of the Western University of Pennsylvania, and approximately a third of the entire city in the Great Fire of 1845.

The Burke Building, located across from PPG Place on Fourth Avenue, is downtown’s last surviving example of Greek Revivalism. Built in 1836 by John Chislett, Pittsburgh’s first professional architect, it was a key office building in Pittsburgh’s early economic center. Today it is Pittsburgh’s oldest surviving commercial structure, and was placed on the National Register of Historic places in 1978.  

Pittsburgh’s industrial heyday saw the development of very divergent types of construction. Two buildings associated with Henry Clay Frick exemplify two types of architecture that reflected the nature of industrial city. Grant Street’s Frick Building was built by the magnate as the center of his business enterprises- purposefully overshadowing an adjacent building owned by his former partner and later foe Andrew Carnegie. This turn-of-the-century skyscraper, designed in the Chicago School style, exemplified the growing might of the “robber barons,” which wasn’t a unique trait to Pittsburgh. The downtown building complemented the Gilded Age Italianate mansion named Clayton, today the home of the Frick Pittsburgh, which Frick had remodeled to showcase his wealth and stature. How the other half lived, though, was nowhere near as grand; smaller single frame homes, tenements, “patch houses,” and imposing but dangerous steel mills were facts of life for most Pittsburghers.

Housing for the majority of Pittsburghers was less grandiose than that of the Fricks, Mellons, and other industrialists. The above image shows a row of tenement housing in the South Side in 1917, with the Wabash Bridge in the background. Later, companies did try to improve conditions for their workers, such as when Jones and Laughlin hired architect Ralph Griswold to make improvements to its company towns. The below photograph shows such construction done for workers at the American Steel & Wire Company in Donora at the same time period.        

The 20th century saw changes in both the public and private spheres. Attempts at improved middle-class housing, such as Chatham Village in Mt. Washington, were successful, but never replicated on the same scale. Many Pittsburghers spread out into more outlying city neighborhoods and the suburbs, where California bungalows, Foursquare style, and post-war houses quickly dominated the landscape. Downtown, modern industrial buildings began to look more like advertisements for company products than the skyscrapers of the Frick era. The Alcoa Building, Steel Tower, and PPG Place all served to demonstrate the functional and aesthetic possibilities of aluminum, steel, and glass, respectively.

United States Steel’s new office building at 525 William Penn Place was designed specifically to be sleek, “strikingly modern,” and, above all, demonstrate that steel could be beautiful as well as strong. An early 1950s brochure declared the tower “unlike any other building in the world.” Within 20 years, the company would move its headquarters, this time to its current home at the U.S. Steel Tower. Again, they made a point of showcasing product innovation, this time by placing the weather-resistant Cor-ten steel beams on the outside of the building.

               The Pittsburgh Renaissance heavily impacted the city’s skyline, in some ways for the better, and some for the worse. The development of the Point from a railyard to a public park, for instance, highlighted Pittsburgh’s ambition to shed its smoky, industrial past. However, some victims of the redevelopment raised public ire, including the demolition of the Fort Pitt Hotel, the Smithfield Methodist Church, and Syria Mosque in Oakland. The razing of large swaths of the Hill District raised an outcry from the neighborhood community that was cleared to build the Civic Arena in the 1950s; in turn, the Arena’s demolition in 2012 was met by consternation and an unsuccessful effort to get the building certified as a National Historic Landmark.

No discussion of architecture in Pittsburgh would be complete without mentioning the Cathedral of Learning, the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere. Architect Charles Klauder’s design wasn’t perhaps as well-received as one would think, especially now that the Cathedral is one of Pittsburgh’s most recognizable landmarks. In an era before the Pitt campus had overtaken Oakland, neighborhood residents- and even some University officials- disapproved of the grandiose design.

Today, Pittsburgh is at the forefront of the green building movement, among the top 10 in the country in cities with LEED-certified buildings. The David Lawrence Convention Center, for example, was certified as the first green convention center in the nation. Suburban growth continues outward, with tract homes and developments stretching from Allegheny into the surrounding counties. In the city itself, residential housing has increasingly focused on redevelopment of existing structures, particularly in neighborhoods like Lawrenceville. Gentrification in places like East Liberty, on the other hand, has become a matter of contention, with the destruction of older neighborhoods making way for newer, more modern, and more expensive apartments and condos. As always, the look of Pittsburgh is constantly changing, reflecting the development of the city itself.

Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the completion of the Union Arcade, now called the Union Trust Building. A Flemish Gothic building designed by one of Pittsburgh’s most famous architects, Frederick Osterling, the building was intended to compete with New York City’s Woolworth Building. Osterling’s signatures can be found in a multitude of other Pittsburgh structures, including Henry Clay Frick’s Clayton, Allegheny Middle School, Armstrong Cork Company (now the Cork Factory Lofts), and additions made to the Allegheny County Jail.

- Ashley Taylor

Denny visiting Frick Park, the largest of the Pittsburgh Park Conservancy’s eight urban parks. With 644 acres spreading across multiple eastern neighborhoods, it’s a popular destination for Burghers looking for some greenery close at hand.

The history of Pittsburgh is very closely tied to its geographical location. The trade and settlement opportunities afforded by the prime location at the forks of the Ohio made it a key piece of land for both English and French settlers. The rivers helped make it a center of commerce in America’s youngest years, and the area’s natural resources- namely, coke and coal- helped propel Pittsburgh to its pre-eminent position in industry in the 19th century.

However, many of us know where this story is headed. With the amount of trade on the rivers, they were polluted by refuse from ships and runoff from the city itself. Being a center of trade and transportation was a huge part of Pittsburgh’s success, but the amount of smoke put out by the trains in the endless railyards and the smokestacks of the ever-larger steel mills earned Pittsburgh some nasty epithets, like “the blackest place which I ever saw” and “hell with the lid taken off.”

In 1940s Pittsburgh, 8:30 AM was a time for headlights on cars and very low visibility. This image is just one of many from the Smoke Control Lantern Slide Collection, which we’ve highlighted before.

Pittsburgh in Denny’s era wasn’t exactly spotless, but it certainly wasn’t the smoke-blackened city that Burghers celebrating the city’s centennial were probably more familiar with. A study done by the Mellon Institute from 1912 to 1913 found that nearly 2,000 tons of soot fell from the sky in just a year. The city’s environment was destructive solely due to pollution; the 1936 St. Patrick’s Day Flood is among one of Pittsburgh’s costliest natural disasters.

Liberty Avenue underwater the morning after the 1936 flood, from the Walter J. Teskey Photograph Collection.

The post-World War II era saw the beginning roots of environmentalism in the city. The Allegheny County Conference on Community Development formed in 1943 to address issues ranging from employment to housing, but also identified smoke and flood control as primary goals of their early efforts to improve the county. Official investigative and action-oriented bodies such as the city health department’s Bureau of Air Pollution Control (founded 1941) and the Allegheny County Air Pollution Advisory Committee (founded 1959) showed that Pittsburgh was starting to get serious about the environment. Improvements did slowly start to come around.

However, it was nonprofit organizations and community groups that had an even larger impact than government initiatives. Groups like the Concerned Residents of the Youghiogheny, the Group Against Smog and Pollution, and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy focused on efforts to clean up specific pollutants and reclaim areas for environmental protection; for example, the WPC preserves areas from small city green spaces to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Passionate citizens, including Marilyn Skolnick, Maurice Shapiro, and Patricia Pelkofer, lobbied for change within community groups, at the local government level, and in academic circles. Two Carnegie Mellon University fellows were responsible for two large environmental projects within the city: first, the Nine Mile Run Greenway Project in the late 1990s, and then the Three Rivers Second Nature Project in the early 2000s.

When establishing the Nine Mile Run Greenway Project, project leaders were thorough about soliciting input from the communities closest to and impacted by the development.

Today, the environment still plays a large role in Pittsburgh and the Western Pennsylvania region. One of the largest environmental focuses of the past decade has been the growth of the natural gas industry and the use of hydraulic fracking to get at the resources of the Marcellus Shale underlying the region. Combined with the coal mining industry headed by CONSOL Energy, this is a familiar story in Pittsburgh’s history: the complex relationship between bountiful natural resources, potentially damaging ways of extracting them, and concerns about health dangers to residents. However, Pittsburgh is also home to a huge number of companies adopting increasingly “green” business practices, and environmental groups like the WPC and GASP still going strong. Whatever the outcome, our surroundings will continue to shape our city well into the next century.

For more information on Pittsburgh’s environmental history, CMU Professor Joel Tarr collected a group of essays on the topic in his 2004 book Devastation and Renewal.

In Pittsburgh and the rest of the country, the history of African-Americans has been a constantly changing one since the days of Ebenezer Denny. While we can’t do the story of an entire community justice in the space of a blog post, we wanted to give Denny an overview of Pittsburgh’s African-American experience in honor of February as Black History Month. Throughout and at the end of the post, we’ll be pointing to more resources that are available for you if you want to learn more.

Early black settlers in Pittsburgh arrived for a variety of reasons. Some came as soldiers, laborers, and servants with the armies of Braddock and Forbes, though many came in bondage. Slavery never gained a strong foothold in the region, particularly after a plan for gradual abolition was passed by the state in 1780, though it certainly did exist; the 1790 census showed that out of the 168 blacks in Allegheny County, 159 of them were slaves. This number dropped sharply in the early 19th century, with only one remaining in 1820. In Denny’s era, he would have seen the African-American community as being made up primarily of freedmen beginning to migrate north, working in agriculture and in the city’s new industries of steamboat building and glassmaking.

The 19th century saw a huge growth in the population of African-Americans in the city. In 1837, the population had grown to 2,400, but would be over 20,000 by 1900. The earliest black communities centered in what is now the Lower Hill District in a neighborhood called Arthursville, or Prospect Hill. Later concentrated communities included the Webster Avenue District, illustrated below, though many other people lived throughout the neighborhoods that became part of Pittsburgh over the century, living alongside those of other backgrounds and nationalities. Pittsburgh was a center of abolitionist sentiment and, thanks to its river traffic, an important location on the Underground Railroad.

Prominent African-American neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. The earliest community, Arthursville, is outlined in blue; in green is the Webster Avenue District.

Black Pittsburghers quickly became an important part of the city’s overall atmosphere of growth and development. The Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church founded in 1818 was the first AME church established west of the Allegheny Mountains. Though originally downtown, it moved to the heart of the growing community in the Hill District in 1845, and is still going strong on Webster Avenue. Black artisans and entrepreneurs flourished as the city entered the 20th century, though segregation kept them out of many factories due to their being excluded from union membership. This would all change during the First World War, when the Great Migration’s first wave brought increased black employment in factories and increased acceptance into formerly segregated unions.

The 20th century saw even greater improvements for the African-American community in Pittsburgh. Organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League were founded to help improve the lives and opportunities of blacks. The Civil Rights movement touched Pittsburgh and helped to improve chances for equality, though, Pittsburgh was like many major cities in experiencing setbacks. One such occasion was in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the day after the assassination, the Hill District was gripped by riots. However, only days later, the spirit of Dr. King’s non-violent protest prevailed, culminating in a Peace March through the city on April 7th, 1968.    

Mourners marching down Centre Avenue as part of the 1968 Peace March.

An exhaustive list of prominent and accomplished African-Americans from Pittsburgh in the last two centuries would be far too long to compile here, but they contributed in many ways to art, business, culture, sports, and civil rights. A near contemporary (and near neighbor!) of Denny’s would have been Martin Delaney, who was an abolitionist, one of the first blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School, and the first black field officer in the US Army during the Civil War. Robert Vann and Edwin Harleston founded the Pittsburgh Courier in 1907, which eventually became one of the most influential African-American newspapers in the country and employed well-known photographers and journalists such as Frank Bolden and Teenie Harris. Erroll Garner became one of the most well-known jazz pianists of the 20th century, just as August Wilson became an award-winning playwright. In fact, the Wylie Avenue jazz scene was nationally lauded, particularly from the 1930s through the 1950s. The Pittsburgh Crawfords would go down in history as one of the nation’s leading baseball teams in the Negro National League, while Pitt student Bobby Grier’s appearance in the 1956 Sugar Bowl helped pave the way for integrated football teams. Pittsburgh was also home to politicians such as Homer S. Brown and K. Leroy Irvis, who became the first black Speaker of a state legislature since Reconstruction.

Denny at the historical marker for Martin Delaney, located at Third Avenue and Market Street.

While this is just a very brief overview of the history of Pittsburgh’s African-American community, a wealth of resources exists for those of you who want to learn more than what we had time to tell Denny. Particularly helpful sources include The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh, A Legacy in Bricks and Mortar, African American Historical Sites Survey of Allegheny County, Double Burden: The Black Experience in Pittsburgh, and Free At Last? You may also want to check out a selection of African-American family history and Pitt-related materials available at the Archives Service Center.

- Ashley Taylor

Welcome to the year of Pittsburgh’s bicentennial! Two hundred years ago Pittsburgh was incorporated as a city. Of course the city has seen a lot of change during that time and we wondered what our first mayor would have thought about today’s Pittsburgh. So throughout 2016, we will “show” Mayor Ebenezer Denny around the city and explain to him the history of Pittsburgh throughout the last 200 years. How do we propose to do this? Using our own take on the popular school children’s exercise Flat Stanley, we introduce you to Flat Denny.

A painting of the borough of Pittsburgh by George Beck in 1806 and Flat Denny recreating the painting with the city of Pittsburgh in 2016. Ebenezer Denny was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1761. His first trek to the area now known as Pittsburgh occurred when he was thirteen years old while serving as a dispatch rider between Carlisle and Fort Pitt. In 1778 he was commissioned into the Continental Army and was promoted to captain by 1781 when his regiment reached Yorktown, Virginia, to battle the British forces led by General Cornwallis. Denny’s detailed journal describing the British defeat at Yorktown has become a popular manuscript describing Cornwallis’ surrender firsthand.

At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Denny quickly found himself back in service during the Northwest Indian War as the new nation sought to exercise its control over the Northwest Territory. Serving under Generals Harmar and St. Clair, Denny was present at two major United States losses against the British-backed Native Americans and, as a result, he was tasked with traveling to Philadelphia to report on the battles. After making his report to the Secretary of War, Denny was sent to Fort Le Boeuf to help lay out what would become the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, but was turned back by resistance from the Native Americans before he could get to work.

Monument to Ebenezer Denny and his wife, Nancy, at Allegheny Cemetery. By the end of 1794 Denny resigned his military commission and settled near Pittsburgh with his wife, Nancy Wilkins. In 1797 he was elected Allegheny County Commissioner and in 1803 he was elected as the first Allegheny County Treasurer. Denny invested in glass manufacturing in Pittsburgh in 1801 and took up banking as the local director of the Bank of Pennsylvania in 1804. As his work began to focus in Pittsburgh, he sold his farm and erected a three story brick house located at Market and Third Streets. During the War of 1812 Denny, now a major, found himself serving another important war-time role as he was responsible for supplying troops on the Erie and Niagara frontier.

In March 1816 Pittsburgh was incorporated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a city and on July 19 Denny was elected the city’s first mayor by the city councils. While he only served for one year, Denny’s term as mayor is marked by improvements to Pittsburgh’s roads and wharves. Denny’s interest in improving the city’s infrastructure was apparent prior to his election as mayor, having been named a director of the Allegheny Bridge Company, the first company organized to erect a bridge across the Allegheny River, earlier that year. After retiring from politics, Denny’s prominence allowed him to remain active in the growth of the city and its institutions, as evidenced by his serving as a trustee of the Western University of Pennsylvania when it was established in 1819.

Flat Denny visits the grave of Ebenezer Denny at Allegheny Cemetery, Section 11. Denny died on July 21, 1822, after falling ill while visiting Niagara with his daughter, Nancy. While Denny was likely initially buried at the First Presbyterian Church, he is now interred in the family plot at Allegheny Cemetery. His son, Harmar, continued the family’s legacy by serving as a Representative in Congress from 1829-1837 and Pittsburgh continues to thrive and evolve, just as it did during his term as the city’s first mayor. We look forward to showing Mayor Denny how Pittsburgh built on his initiatives for the last two centuries.