Steel baron B. F. Jones’ front doorway is a feast of elaborate terra cotta. This is a very large picture: enlarge it to appreciate the details of the terra cotta and ironwork.
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Front Door of the B. F. Jones House, Allegheny West
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St. Francis de Sales School, McKees Rocks
This composite picture is big; enlarge it to appreciate the variety of classical ornament. Unlike the adjacent church, St. Francis de Sales School found a new use when it closed, and it is still maintained. The alterations were heavy and unsympathetic, but we can still see enough of the original design to imagine the rest. The original part of the school was built in 1909; it appears to have been expanded later. This is the Margaret Street end, with the original inscription.
This end of the school appears to be a later expansion.
The open belfry in this entrance tower, and the entrance below it, suggest some Art Nouveau influence.
Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS. Click or tap the article title for comments.
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St. Francis de Sales Church, McKees Rocks
The dome is the star of this extraordinary building, which was put up in 1904 and is now slowly crumbling. The school behind it, heavily altered, is in use as a personal-care home; the church would be hard to find a use for even in a prosperous neighborhood. It ought to be preserved, but its most likely fate is to continue to crumble until it finally becomes too dangerous to leave standing.
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Porches of PPG Place
Adopting and heavily modifying an idea from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson surrounded the buildings of PPG Place with glass colonnades that create an inviting transition between inside and outside.
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A Flemish Row in Shadyside
This row of houses on Howe Street has a distinctly Dutch or Flemish look. The Flemish style is not unknown in Pittsburgh, but it is rare to see a row of five houses in that style at once. (For another example of multiple Flemish houses, see the Osterling row in Brighton Heights.)
This house, like many in Shadyside, has had part of its basement turned into a garage, with a steep driveway dug out of the front yard.
It is delightful to see that the intricate woodwork on the front porch has been preserved.
The angles and curves that make the gable look so Antverpian are made of iron or steel, as we can tell by one rusted section:
This makes us suspect that perhaps three of the other houses in the row might have had similar decorations, removed when they rusted too much to repair.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. This house, however, was clearly meant to show off its stones without additional adornment, except for the usual decorative utility-cable swags.
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Neville Island Presbyterian Church
About this church old Pa Pitt knows only what you see in these pictures. The sign has not changed since 2021, but the grounds are still mowed and the building is in good shape. Its most prominent feature is its tower with eye-catchingly prickly battlements.
Kodak EasyShare Z1285. One response
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An Odd Corner in East Liberty
Highland Avenue crosses Centre Avenue in East Liberty at an odd angle, creating an opportunity for two typically Pittsburghish odd-shaped buildings. First, the Wallace Building, shoved into a sharp corner and coming to a point at the intersection.
Old Pa Pitt hopes his readers will forgive a slightly imperfect composite of three photographs.
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. On the opposite side of Centre Avenue, the Stevenson Building fills in an oblique angle. Its prominent corner entrance makes the most of its location.
There is some uncertainty about the design of this building. It is listed by the city as a building designed by William Ross Proctor and built in 1896. However, Father Pitt finds a 1927 listing in the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, that matches this building perfectly and assigns it to O. M. Topp: “313. Architect: O. M. Topp, Jenkins Arcade, Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner: James B. Stevenson. Title: Store and Office Building. Location: Highland and Center Avenues. Approximate size: 25×100 ft.; three stories and basement. Cubage: 100,000 cu. ft. First story: Amherst buff sandstone; second and third stories: Roman brick and terra cotta.” Nevertheless, a building of exactly these dimensions stood here long before 1927, and we have not been able to find any newspaper stories about its destruction or replacement. It is possible that Topp only supervised renovations, and the editor of the Charette misunderstood the information he was given. As of now, therefore, Father Pitt assigns the building to O. M. Topp, but with the understanding that Proctor might have been the original architect.
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Zinnias
There is always room for more zinnias, which give us some of the most outrageously bright colors in the annual garden.
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A Charming Cottage in West Park
Old Pa Pitt was on his way out of West Park and already late for an appointment, but when he passed this house on the McKees Rocks side of the neighborhood, he had to stop and take pictures. It is not quite like any other house he has ever seen, and the original trim is well preserved.
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Norwood
Norwood is a traditionally Italian neighborhood in Stowe Township, originally a suburban development of modest detached houses connected to McKees Rocks and the Pittsburgh transit system by its own incline. The Norwood Incline closed in 1923, though a little shelter at the bottom station remains (old Pa Pitt keeps promising himself he will get pictures of it soon). By that time, it was easy to get to the neighborhood by automobile or trolley.
The Norwood Honor Roll, above, no longer has its honor roll. Many neighborhoods had painted honor rolls, and it is possible that this one was painted. Or it is possible that a bronze plaque was stolen and sold to a scrap dealer, who, faithfully believing that people are fundamentally honest, never even suspected that the hunk of bronze with names all over it was stolen. Perhaps someone from the neighborhood can tell us the story. The painted dedication is an act of love from someone in the neighborhood.
Many of the buildings in what was the business district of Norwood are faced with Kittanning brick, but clad the rest of the way around with cheap ordinary brick.
Layers of history and cycles of prosperity and decline can be read in these two buildings. It looks as though a small business, owned by the residents of the house to the right, grew and prospered and faded and was finally replaced with apartments. The renovations to the building on the left suggest that there was probably plenty of money in the 1970s.
This tall and narrow building looks like a hotel in the Pittsburgh sense—a bar with a few rooms upstairs.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. Note the patterned bricks, which remind us of similar decorations in West Park.
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