My wife’s grandfather, pausing on his way to the California gold rush in 1849, wrote to his family in upper New York State: “I have come to a beautiful place at the junction of three rivers, and see no reason for going further.” He sent for his family, settled on Herron Hill, and let the gold go.
    To try to imagine what he saw when he arrived in Pittsburgh leads to some interes-

ting speculations. Perhaps he saw only the wooded hills and the river valleys, the clustered houses and the mills, and had no discriminating eye for the architectural scene; yet below him as he sat on his perch on Herron Hill lay the architectural evidence of a hundred years.
    To the east lay scattered farms and villages, to the south the Monongahela and the hillside barrier with the steel mills and glass works already filling up the flat; to the north the city of Allegheny, already containing the beginnings of its system of internal parks, and to the west the Golden Triangle - the teeming, crowded, lusty city of Pittsburgh, filled with English, Scotch-Irish, and Germans creating an industrial city which has been called the workshop of the world.

    Covered bridges of wood construction spanned the rivers, steamboats plied the waters, and the catfish were moving out in self-defense. The railroads were already exercising their rights of eminent domain on Liberty Avenue and elsewhere, the canal crossed the Allegheny from the North Side in a wooden aqueduct, arriving at a terminal basin where the Pennsylvania Station now stands, and the city was rebuilding after the great fire of 1845.
    It was rebuilding on a crude frontier village plan, with street names like Virgin Alley, originally named Allée de la Vierge by the French. To rename the same “Oliver Avenue” seems a little dull. The city fathers of the time seem a little dull as well. They made no plans for the future, and the citizenry in general had forgotten the lesson of the European cities and New England towns, with their beautiful open spaces surrounded by buildings of architectural importance. This lesson was left behind in Bedford and Ligonier.
    The great fire of 1845 marked the approximate end of an architectural era. Up to this time the buildings themselves were simple structures in the main, with some uniformity of material, being mostly brick or clapboard with an occasional hand-dressed stone building, all with double-hung windows divided into small 

brought the tidewater version reminiscent of the great plantation houses of Maryland and Virginia. The Greek Revival style arrived in Pittsburgh by way of Greece to England, assisted by the brothers Adam and Stuart and Revett; from thence to the States, and then largely by way of upper New York State and the Great Lakes to the Western Reserve in Ohio. The year 1840 seems to mark the end of this elegant style, and the Gothic revival begins. Architecture in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania up to this time is well covered by the book, Early Architecture in Western Pennsylvania, a  project  of  the Pittsburgh chapter   of    the   American   Institute   of 

Architects, and published by The Buhl Foundation. It contains many photographs and measured drawings done by Pittsburgh architects and a scholarly and interesting text by Charles M. Stotz, chairman of the architectural survey which led to publication of the book.
    The sudden and almost complete abandonment of the Greek Revival style has a great mysterious quality. What happened and why it happened seem almost impossible to explain. The Georgian style had a simplicity and decency well suited to its use, and the Greek Revival style with its columns and pilasters was in many cases only a little more elaborate, and retained the elements of simplicity and decency found in the Georgian. The Gothic revival started with a severe English style, using plain pointed-arch openings and almost no tracery in the windows, but this style was to become over-embellished, with bad imitations of stone tracery copied in wood.
    Here, perhaps, is one of the clues. The love of fakery and imitation, of tasteless over-decoration, became a part of the architectural scene. Not only was the external  appearance of  buildings degenerating, but the plans of the buildings themselves were unskillful and unknowing. Mr. John Q. Citizen wanted 

new and great store of undigested information on architectural matters, but architecture reflected the confusion of the times -the rapid change from an agricultural civilization well expressed, to an industrial scheme of things where a proper architectural expression had yet to take form. The transplanting of the farmhouse to the city with very little change created a phenomenon only witnessed in the United States. The farmhouse porch faced the lonely road in order to make contact with the rest of the world, and it was moved to the city without change, facing the busy, noisy, dusty street, and creating a new architecture, the Great American Porch Style - ubiquitous, brazen, and placed end to end ad nauseam.
    The era of Steamboat Gothic, Cast Iron Renaissance, and Victorian had arrived, along with the porte-cochere and the iron deer on the lawn, and it must be grudgingly admitted that the architects had fun. Some of the houses achieved great heights of pure nonsense, and there were many entertaining frills and furbelows to charm the eye. Even now the cult of the Victorian is upon us, and Grandma’s horsehair sofa with its bowlegs and oval back is much prized by certain members of the gentler sex.

loped, flavored with the folk memories of their inhabitants, marked by the onion-shaped domes of the Polish churches or the Teutonic-appearing breweries of the Germans. Buildable land in Pittsburgh was scarce, transportation was difficult, and decentralization had not yet become an idea, so that houses built in solid rows or on 20-foot lots were the economic solution of the times.
    To write about this period of architecture without including the Romanesque revival instigated by Henry Hobson Richardson would be a serious oversight. Richardson, after designing Trinity Church in Boston, came to Pittsburgh and made the designs for and supervised the construction of the Allegheny County courthouse and jail, one of the great architectural masterpieces of the country. It is an honest, sturdy, and 

bold conception with the quality of great dignity, and  deserves  careful  scrutiny.  The  tower, which is swamped by surrounding buildings, and the three main arches flanked by two marvelously carved stone lions, achieve together a soul-satisfying composition that is worthy to be called architecture. The beautiful incised inscription over the three entrances gives the date of the structure. Here it is. Figure it out for yourself: "Post vetus conftagratum Hoc Aedificium justitiae sacrum A.D. MDCCCLXXXIT7 coeptum.”
    Richardson's masterpiece was the forerunner of many other buildings in the Romanesque style, and many of them are good and worth seeking out. The Carnegie Library on the North Side is one, and the Shadyside Presbyterian Church on Amberson Avenue in the East End is another.
 

    They are all marked by an honesty and boldness of conception, a characteristic of Richardson’s own work. After an archi- tectural spree lasting fifty-five years comes the dawn of the twentieth century, with its inevitable hangover. In a forth-coming issue, if the editor permits, the writer will take an aspirin and examine this hangover which persists to the present day, and he might even take a bleary look into the future.

Robert W. Schmertz is a member of the firm of Fisher and Schmertz, architects, who have recently designed the building which will house the 400-million-volt synchro-cyclotron now under construc- tion for Carnegie Institute of Technology at Saxonburg, north of Pittsburgh. He has been engaged in the private practice of architecture since 1927, and during the same period has been on the faculty of Carnegie Tech, from which he was graduated in 1921. He is a member of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club and the American Institute of Architects. Handy with the banjo, he has composed a number of lively but little known songs about Pittsburgh institutions and legendary river personalities, six of which have been issued in a record album just this summer under sponsorship of a group of his friends.

1949