A modern office building that makes a good symbol of what the North Shore has become: it has gone from flophouse slum to high-class corporate address in one generation.
There are so many spindly pieces of metal and steel cables on this building that we expect it to make noises like an out-of-tune guitar when the wind blows.
Plat maps seem to show that this carriage house was built, not for the house it sits directly behind, but for the house of C. F. Arrott on the corner of Negley and Ellsworth. The house is now gone, replaced by Rutledge Hall, but the carriage house, which is big enough for a generous private home, is kept in beautiful shape.
When demand exceeds supply in the housing market, as it did for quite a while after the Second World War, apartment buildings can be plain brick boxes. It is enough to say, “Here is a place to live, and if you pinch your pennies you can probably afford it.” But in the 1930s, it was necessary to give people a good reason to pick your building over any of the other places people could live. Thus apartment buildings tended to sell a fantasy: live here and you will be the kind of aristocrat you always knew you deserved to be.
Bellevue Gables peddles that fantasy and does a good job of it. Especially on the Sprague Avenue side, the stone terraces and lush landscaping make the approach to the entrances feel like walking into one of the Stately Homes of England.
Rudolph Berg, Jr., was the owner, the builder, and the architect. He had suffered much in the Depression: when old Pa Pitt went looking for his name in the papers in the 1930s, he had to plow through pages and pages of sheriff’s sales before he came across any construction listings. But by 1939, when Bellevue Gables opened, he seems to have recovered and was ready to get back into the apartment-development business on a grand scale.
The complex is two buildings, one along Sprague Avenue and one along Hawley Avenue.
An Art Deco school with no sharp corners. Everything is rounded, and stop for a moment to think what talented bricklayers we had in those days. The school was built beginning in 1938 and opened at the end of 1939. Marion Steen was the supervising architect for the Board of Public Education, so the design was probably his, although Steen hired Edward Weber to design some of the schools built in the same period. The bidding was handled through the Board, so the architect is not mentioned in the usual advertisements.
The school is still in use by the city school system, now as the Spring Garden Early Childhood Center.
The original iron fence still surrounds the property.
The shallow metal awning over the auditorium is decorated with a very Deco wave pattern. It gives the auditorium the proper theatrical atmosphere.
Matching brick gateposts are topped with stone caps that bear the same Deco wave ornament.
This would be an ordinary brick box, except that the main entrance has been grandified with two floors’ worth of Doric columns and an elaborate classical entrance, making the building look like a modernist apartment block that collided with a plantation house.
A well-kept little frame church covered in fake stone. It began as a mission church, according to old maps, and then became a full parish as Grace Evangelical Lutheran.
Although old Pa Pitt is not very fond of the fake stone blocks, they have preserved the little church and given it a tidy exterior that is better than the aluminum siding they probably replaced.
The parish house predates the church; there was a frame house here in 1872, which is the earliest plat map we could find. The church itself was probably built around 1900.
We give the Odd Fellows credit for their early recognition that women could be odd, too: they were the first fraternal order in the country to have a women’s degree. The Rebekahs have moved out of this little temple, though, and it is about to turn into a beer garden. Bellevue was a dry town until 2015, but since then it has adopted craft beer in a big way.
The inscription includes the three-link Odd Fellows emblem.
There are some odd anomalies about this building, and old Pa Pitt can only point them out without explaining them all.
The main house seems to have been built as early as the 1860s; it appears on an 1872 plat map.
The current owners have added a nice bronze plaque saying that it was built in 1902 as the Jordan Hotel, but old maps make it clear that the 1902 portion is a small section in the rear that was probably added when D. C. Jordan bought it.
However, the bricks—now painted white—were grey Kittanning brick, which was not used in the 1860s. The Italianate details of the roofline would lead us to expect Italianate trim around the windows, but it’s not there.
It looks as though the brick shell of the house was rebuilt when Mr. Jordan bought it, without, however, changing the woodwork along the roof.
But it is also possible that the old house was completely replaced with a house that looks uncannily like a house from the 1860s updated for 1902.
That is as much as old Pa Pitt can say about the building, except that he is delighted to see it restored and refurbished for a new life as the Jane Street Café.
Joseph Stillburg, toward the end of an illustrious career, designed this very firehousey-looking firehouse for the city of Allegheny. It later became Truck Company No. 39 in Pittsburgh before being diverted to other uses.
Obviously the top of the tower has gone missing; Mr. Stillburg would not have put in Corinthian pilasters to hold up a strip of aluminum. Somebody ought to take those utility cables out of the picture.
And here are some more historic utility cables.
