Biography | Harry Sternfeld — He Began This Courthouse the Year His War Monument Opened in Flanders

Harry Sternfeld won the Paris Prize in 1914, the year he took his master's in architecture at Pennsylvania. He could not collect it.

The war had closed Europe. He taught in Pittsburgh instead, and reached the École des Beaux-Arts only in 1919, in the Atelier Jaussely, then the American Academy in Rome the year after that.

Twenty-three years later two of his commissions came due in the same year, and both of them were about that war.

In 1937 the American Battle Monuments Commission inaugurated his monument at Audenarde, in Flanders: a limestone shaft to the American divisions that fought there in the final two weeks of the fighting.

Work began on this one at Ninth and Market the same year. The United States Court House and Post Office was finished in 1941.

The General Services Administration reads it as PWA Modern — Art Deco pared back to volume rather than surface ornament — and notes that central air conditioning is what allowed the courtrooms to sit in the middle of the block, where no window reaches.

The Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned the reliefs at street level.

Donald De Lue cut Justice and Law for the Market Street entrance. It was his first major public commission, nearly thirty years before The Rocket Thrower at the 1964 World's Fair.

Edmond Amateis carved Mail Delivery for the Ninth Street side.

Sternfeld went home to Philadelphia and stayed. He was Professor of Design at Pennsylvania until he retired in 1959, and he died in 1976.

The building outlasted its own name. Congress renamed it in 1985 for Robert N. C. Nix Sr., the first Black congressman elected from Pennsylvania, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

The reliefs are still at eye level on the Market Street front of a working federal building, where anyone walking in to buy stamps passes under them.

📸 Cover: the Market Street front, photograph by Beyond My Ken, 25 April 2013, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the same building from Chestnut Street, 19 April 2013, same photographer and licence.