Peabody & Stearns were a Boston firm that kept a branch office in Pittsburgh to handle the many jobs they picked up in this city. They were responsible for rebuilding the Horne’s department store, and they designed the Liberty Market, later Motor Square Garden. But they also had a thriving business in Tudor mansions for the well-to-do in Pittsburgh’s East End. This one was built in 1902.
This picture from The Brickbuilder shows the house newly built. We can see that, except for filling in the side porch, very little has been done to change the house. Even the original diamond-paned upper sashes, or identical replacements, are still in the windows, and the windows in the sunroom that was made from the porch were matched to the rest of the windows in the house.
The gables were treated in a dark color scheme; the pastel blue of the current paint, along with the lacy wood trim, gives them a more feminine look than they would have had originally.
These double duplexes represent a common phenomenon in the streetcar neighborhoods that developed around the turn of the twentieth century. They were built for C. M. Neeld in 1916 on land that his family had owned for generations. When the streetcar line was pushed through from downtown in 1905, the Neelds found that their old family homes were right on the car line, and thus right in the path of speedy development. They profited by developing some of their land, but they kept a whole city block for themselves until after the Second World War. These apartments—twelve of them in three buildings—would have turned some of the vacant land into a good steady income that couldn’t be matched by the small farming the Neelds had probably done before the streetcars came.
Father Pitt guesses that the architect was William Arthur Thomas, who favored this white face brick and designed other similar duplexes in Beechview.1
The lowest of the three preserves its original details best. The one at the top of the slope has been altered the most, with mid-twentieth-century “picture” windows replacing the original much larger windows.
The one in the middle preserves these original small windows in the stairwells.
On 57th Street in Lawrenceville was a tight little community of Slovenians, known to their neighbors as Kreiners (from the German name of the Austrian province that is now Slovenia), who built a church, a school, and this Baroque clubhouse. Both this building and the parish school (now gone) were put up in 1911. We have not found an architect for this club yet, but the school was designed by Frederick Sauer; and, in a close ethnic community like this one, it is quite likely that the same people would hire the same architect—a guess made even more plausible by the buff Kittanning brick, Sauer’s favorite color.
The building suffered the usual fate of men’s clubs in Pittsburgh: all the windows were filled in with glass block. But in about 2017, after a period of abandonment, the building was renovated, and the windows were opened up again.
A photograph of the building just before its dedication appeared in the Press for May 28, 1911.
The dedication was a big deal, with a parade, speeches, and music by the city’s only Slovenian singing society. Here is how it was reported in the Kreiners section of the Pittsburg Press:
Tomorrow, May 29, will take place the dedication and opening of the Kreiner Slovenian Home erected at Butler and Fifty-seventh street, Pittsburg.
The home has been built at an expense of $30,000. The dedication of the Slovenic home will be attended by all the local Slovenic societies of Pittsburg and neighboring towns. A parade will start at 9:30 a. m. from the Slovenic hall on Fifty-seventh street, then go down Butler street to Fiftieth street, to Hatfield street then to Fortieth street as far as Arsenal park, whence the parade will return up Butler street to the Kreiner-Slovenic home on Fifty-seventh street.
The formal opening of the home then will take place. The first speaker will be Ferdinand Volk, the president of the Kreiner Slovenic Home, and several prominent Slovenians will follow him. The Slovenic singing society “Precern” will sing several Slovenic songs. The Fifty-seventh street, Pittsburg. The religious part of the dedication will be looked after by the Rev. J. C. Mertl, of the Slovenic Catholic Church of St. Mary, near Butler. The Kreiner-Slovenic Home is the largest Slovenic hall yet built in the United States. More than 1,000 visitors are expected to come to Pittsburg for the dedication of this building, which will be the meeting place of the Slovenians (Kreiners) in Pittsburg and neighboring towns.
Two cichlids from the pond in the Tropical Forest at Phipps Conservatory. Above, a “super red Texas cichlid,” which is a common aquarium hybrid; below, a pair of black belt cichlids (Vieja maculicauda).
Wallingford Street is only two blocks long, but its rich assortment of houses in various styles makes it worth a visit for anyone who enjoys admiring old houses. The street is especially rich in examples of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Georgian revival. Without any more introduction, here are some of the houses on the north side of the street.
Addendum: According to a correspondent, the house above was built as his own home by the architect Stanley Pyzdrowski, best known for many Catholic churches in the Pittsburgh area.
This historically Black congregation has been in Swissvale just about since there was a Swissvale. According to our correspondent “Calvin,” this building was originally the First Presbyterian Church of Swissvale. When that church built its new stone church in 1909, this building was sold and moved. (Moving buildings was surprisingly common, and there were firms that specialized in nothing else.)
This historically Black congregation has met in this building for more than 120 years. Some of the stained glass is being restored, so old Pa Pitt will have to return for more pictures when the work is done. The architect was Frederick Sauer,1 who specified his favorite buff Kittanning brick for the job. These streets in the central part of the North Side are tiny, and Sauer’s challenge was to cram as much church as he could into a minuscule lot. He employed the usual Pittsburgh expedient of putting the sanctuary upstairs, with Sunday-school rooms and offices on the ground floor. It seems, by the way, that old Pa Pitt succeeded in finding the architect where other local historians failed (or didn’t try), but the citation is no surprise. This buff Kittanning brick was almost Sauer’s signature, and the building looks like what would happen if you squished St. Mary of the Mount into an impossibly tiny lot.
We are not sure who designed this church, and perhaps a parishioner can enlighten us. Our problem is too many architects: James D. Van Trump attributed it to R. N. Verbrowski, but in the Charette for December, 1949, we read: “ ‘You never know what the Russians are doing,’ is Thomas Pringle’s report on his St. Gregory Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church for Homestead. Of brick with stone trim and one-story, the church will include a chapel, will cost approximately $75,000 and, with the help of God in donations, may be undertaken next Spring.” The mystery would evaporate if we assumed that the design was Verbrowski’s, and Pringle was the local architect of record responsible for supervising the building. At any rate, whoever was responsible for the design went deep into Russian tradition to pick out the elements, but arranged them in a very modern fashion.
The cornerstone preserves the memory of a traumatic event in Homestead’s history: perhaps as traumatic as the 1892 labor war that temporarily turned Homestead into an independent republic, and even as traumatic as the closing of the mills in the 1980s. In 1941, with the Second World War raging in Europe and the American government wisely preparing for the possibility of being sucked into the conflict, the Homestead mill was enormously expanded. Blocks and blocks of densely inhabited streets were bulldozed; splendid churches were razed; ethnic communities were scattered. Everything between Sixth Avenue and the river was just gone. Most of the churches rebuilt somewhere in upper Homestead; but several of them, like this one, could not build until after the war was over and the surviving male halves of their congregations returned.
