One of Downtown’s last surviving 19th-century commercial warehouses
The Maginn Building at 915 Liberty Avenue, best known as the home of Specialty Luggage until its recent closure, now has seven floors of condos and a first-floor retail space meticulously designed by its owner, Day3Design. The group is composed of Matt Barnett and Richard Hetland and his daughter Paige Mitzen.
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Today it remains one of the last surviving downtown period commercial warehouses.
Adding to its charm and peculiarity is its unique 19th century structural style. Built as a high-rise and constructed of timber framed floors with traverse box girder riveted beams- it is truly a Pittsburgh structure to be proud of.
Day3Design purchased the building from Jeff Izenson, owner of Specialty Luggage, who closed the store’s location after a liquidation sale. Built in 1891, the high-rise has housed a number of businesses, starting with MaGinn’s Wholesale Confectioner and Fruit Warehouse.
“The building’s in great shape,” says Barnett, who was impressed by its foundation of cut-limestone blocks during their due-diligence tour. “It was designed by Charles Bickel, a turn-of-the-century architect who focused heavily on Romanesque architecture. He did a number of buildings in the city and that was certainly something that caught our eye early on.”
The facade will be repainted dark green and yellow, a Victorian color scheme. Accent lighting will be added “so that at night it really pops,” Croyle says. Because the building was a factory, it remains “a pretty robust structure,” he says, but will need new stairs, and elevator and sprinkler systems.
“Day3Design’s not a new-build designer,” he says. “Adaptive reuse is what we want to do — we get to resurrect this beautiful, turn-of-the-century building that others might think is too hard to do.”
“I think people applaud us for attempting adaptive reuse for a building that’s not known to be economically viable,” Barnett says. “As a community, how do we assign use to buildings for the next century of service? Because the alternative is blight. We want to create habitable space, and we should preserve our architectural heritage because it speaks to the past.”