More details of Heinz Chapel, including the arms of various American colleges and universities. We have another collection of details of Heinz Chapel here, or you can see our whole collection of Heinz Chapel pictures spanning nearly nineteen years.
A parade of the largest, though not the tallest, monolithic columns in the world.
An industrial streetscape in Chateau, which is still a busy industrial and warehouse district. A railroad spur formerly ran along the street and under the projecting roof of the Heyl & Patterson building in the foreground.
Inglenook Place is something unique: a whole street where all the houses were designed by our noted early modernist Frederick Scheibler. There are two qualifications to be made here: first, one house on the corner of Oakmont Street, addressed to Inglenook Place, is not a Scheibler house; and second, there are two more blocks of Inglenook Place on the map, but they are a stairway with no houses addressed to it.
Here we see, at the end of the row, the one oddball house on the street.
These houses are two of Scheibler’s simplest designs, obviously meant to be built as cheaply as possible; but his modernist instinct is on full display in them. The larger group was built in 1907, all in this straightforward design; a second, smaller group was built in 1909 in a different though also simple design.
This is slightly less straightforward in that Scheibler has played with the rhythm of four houses in a row by putting the upstairs windows in three groups of 1, 4, 1.
Unfortunately, the neighborhood fell on hard times, and about a third of the houses are abandoned and will probably vanish eventually. When that happens, we’ll lose one more unique streetscape, in spite of the valiant efforts of neighborhood advocates.
This sign is so ancient that it dates from a time when it was normal to do lettering by hand on public signs. A designer of today would be baffled if you said you didn’t want every occurrence of the letter E to look the same: how would you even do that?
Carson Street on the South Side has our best collection of Victorian commercial buildings. For the second place, several neighborhood spine streets are in the running. Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield is one; Butler Street in Lawrenceville is another. But for variety and quality of Victorian architecture, old Pa Pitt might award the second place to East Ohio Street in Dutchtown.
This little house with storefront is probably one of the earliest buildings on the street. Italianate details like the brackets place it in the middle nineteenth century, but otherwise it is not much different from the houses that grew up in Pittsburgh and Allegheny from the moment we had access to bricks.
The contrast with the high-Victorian building next door is striking. This building must have looked frightfully modern in 1888. The next generation of architects would find it old-fashioned, because they had gone back to a more pedantically correct classicism.
The Fort Pitt Bedding Company sold all manner of bedding, and it had the Sealy franchise for the Pittsburgh area. But the company’s specialty seems to have been institutional bunks: it held patents on clever designs that allowed bunks to be stored absolutely flat and set up without tools.
The complex was built in stages, of which the section with arched windows seems to be the oldest.
Today the buildings are handsomely restored and filled with various businesses.
Wilkinsburg’s own A. (for Adelbert) Dudgeon & Son, architects and builders, designed this striking apartment building in the Wilkinsburg quarter of Regent Square. Part of the front has been filled in, the fourth-floor balconies have been removed, and a Richard Nixon nose has been added, but on the whole the building is in very good shape, as we can see from this newspaper picture of the building when it was new in 1907.
Henrietta Street is now Whitney Avenue in Wilkinsburg, though the same street is still Henrietta once it crosses into Pittsburgh. Later maps show the building as the Ward Apartments, so Mr. Zimmerman must have sold it.
The conservatory at Clayton is a sort of miniature of Phipps Conservatory in Schenley Park. It was designed for Henry Frick by Alden & Harlow.
Damp weather has made them pop up everywhere. Father Pitt thinks these are probably False Parasols (Chlorophyllum molybdites), also known as “the Vomiter,” and that latter name should probably be all the advice you need about trying to collect them.
This row of houses on Middle Street has a complicated history, and old Pa Pitt is not sure of all the details. A row of four brick houses stood here at least as early as the 1880s. At some point in the 1930s or thereabouts, they appear to have been refaced with yellow and white face brick, and given metal-framed casement windows typical of modernist buildings of the era. It is possible that they were rebuilt, but Father Pitt leans toward saying they were the same houses with new faces, because he recalls noticing what appeared to be older chimneys in plain red brick.
In 2019, the houses were thoroughly renovated again, with the main parts of the houses restored to the way they would have looked in the 1800s, but a new postpostmodern third floor that gives each house a delightful balcony and a bright upper room.
