University Times

Cabins to Mansions: The University Press reissues a classic work on western Pennsylvania's early architecture– by Mike Sajna

Jim Burke, a staff photographer in Pitt's Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education, says his involvement in the University Press's new reprint of Charles Morse Stotz's classic 1936 work "The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania" was a "labor of love" and "a pretty exciting experience." At the same time, though, he admits there were plenty of days when he could not wait to be finished with a particular batch of negatives from the Carnegie Library's Western Pennsylvania Architectural Survey files.

Burke says there were real problems involved in making prints for the lavishly illustrated book because the Press wanted museum-quality enlargements from the more than 60-year-old cellulose nitrate-based film stock, which requires a lot of special handling.

"First of all, it burns like mad," he says of the film stock. "It is highly flammable." As cellulose nitrate film deteriorates, it also becomes extremely fragile and gives off an explosive gas. Old movies made with the stock and housed in sealed film canisters can explode. Then, too, cellulose nitrate film can contaminate other photographic stock, so it has to be segregated.

Another problem was that a lot of the smaller negatives in the files were taken by people with no training in photography. Many of the negatives were poorly exposed or taken at the wrong time of day, which left significant architectural details in deep shadow or bright sunlight.

"I had to play with the negative to suppress one area and bring another area out," Burke says. "It was a lot of work to do that." Burke also had to work hard to make sure he was using the same photograph as in the original 1936 edition and cropping it in the exact same manner. That may seem like a simple enough assignment, but it was a close call in several cases.

"One negative, for instance, had the drapes in a room closed, while the photograph in the original book had drapes open," he recalls. "Another negative was in the fall, but the photograph in the book was in the summer. You had to have your eyes open all of the time and pay attention to those small details." Finally, careless handling had left many negatives dotted with spots, fingerprints and other stains. Burke estimates it took about 280 hours and 1,500 sheets of photographic paper to obtain the 416 black and white prints used in the book.

But even an untrained eye can see that the trouble was worth it. Despite the problems associated with the negatives, the photographs in the new reprint, which was supported by a grant from the Buhl Foundation, have a real sense of depth and detail. Technological advances in publishing make it better than either the Press's 1966 reprint, which was done without the use of the original negatives, or the original 1936 edition.

Former University Press Director Frederick A. Hetzel calls Burke's effort "quite an accomplishment" and ranks "The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania" (retail price $60) as one of the five best books ever produced by the University Press.

Along with Burke's prints, the new edition includes a lengthy essay, "The Story of the Book," by Dell Upton, a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the nation's leading architectural historians.

The quality of Burke's prints and Upton's essay aside, "The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania's" number and variety of photographs alone make it compelling even for readers without an interest in architecture. Practically every western Pennsylvanian is guaranteed to know a few of the buildings in the book. And, because of the buildings' unique styles, many people may have wondered about the buildings' history.

"It's a page turner," says Hetzel. "A huge percentage of those houses are gone." Stotz himself was a native western Pennsylvanian. Born in Ingram in 1898, he was a son of architect Edward Stotz, who designed both Schenley High School and Fifth Avenue High School, the latter, the first fire-proof school in the city.

Following a year at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), Stotz served in the army for a year during World War I, and then went off to Cornell University, where he obtained both bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture.

After Cornell, Stotz moved to New York, where he worked for two years at firms that specialized in designing large buildings in historic styles for wealthy clients. The firms helped restore the war-damaged Reims Cathedral and the palaces at Versailles and Fontainebleau, and designed the Detroit Public Library and New York's Woolworth Building.

Returning to Pittsburgh in 1923, he joined his father's firm and in his spare time wrote for the Spectator, "Pittsburgh's Smart Magazine" and the Pittsburgh Architectural Club's Charette magazine. In the mid-1920s, he undertook a study tour of Europe and returned to Pittsburgh with a desire to search out the region's historic structures.

Among the architecture of which Stotz became especially enamored was that of the Harmony Society at Harmony and Old Economy villages. He would later serve as architect for the restoration of Old Economy in Ambridge. Harmony Society buildings figure prominently in "The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania." During the 1920s, Stotz and some of his friends began making measured drawings of western Pennsylvania buildings for the Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Institute of Architects' committee on preservation of historic monuments and sites. The work of that group would grow into the Western Pennsylvania Architectural Survey (WPAS).

The Great Depression may have been a disaster for most of America, but it proved to be a real boom for the WPAS. Armies of highly skilled men and women suddenly found themselves under-employed and available to work on preservation projects. On their own, many of those individuals began traveling throughout western Pennsylvania taking photographs, inventorying historic documents, and making watercolors and drawings of buildings. According to Upton, the WPAS was the largest non-governmental work project of the period. Supported by a $6,500 grant from the Buhl Foundation, Stotz and other members of the WPAS visited some 3,000 sites in the region. Of those sites, they photographed and mapped 524 buildings, all of them built before 1860. They include log cabins, Colonial and Greek revival mansions, schools, churches, banks, courthouses, mills, taverns, offices, toll houses, arsenals, stores, spring houses, forts, bridges, tunnels and tombstones.

Luke Swank, who would later gain fame as a photographer for Life magazine, served as photographic coordinator for the project and also photographed the most important buildings in the book. His photographs make up more than half of those in the book and usually accompany the architect's drawings.

"He made the large format, 5 x 7, negatives, which were just exquisite," says Burke. "They were very well done and a joy to print." Among the Pittsburgh sites featured in the survey are the Allegheny Arsenal in Law-renceville, the Blockhouse in Point State Park, the Neill log cabin in Schenley Park and the Burke Building near PPG Place Downtown, which was recently purchased by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. The group plans to use the building for its new headquarters.

"The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania" appeared to uniformly good reviews in December 1936. It sold out its original printing of 1,000 numbered copies and was followed by a second edition of 500 copies, both of which are valuable collector's items today.

In the wake of the book's success, Stotz went on to work as the architect on a number of very prominent restoration projects in western Pennsylvania. Besides Old Economy, he worked on George Washington's Mill in Perryopolis, the Erie Customs House, Point State Park and Fort Ligonier.

In addition, Stotz continued to write. He produced lengthy articles on the restoration of Old Economy and Fort Ligonier, and a second book, "Outposts of the War for Empire," on early American military buildings. He died in 1985.

"It is a classic work that has never been equaled," says Catherine Marshall, the Press's editor-in-chief, about "The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania." "It comes from a particular historical period and represents a kind of scholarship and interest that is unique to that period. And it had been out of print for a long time and really deserved to be back in print in a very handsome edition."