This apartment building with Renaissance details was built in about 1905. The architect was A. E. Linkenheimer,1 about whom old Pa Pitt knows very little so far.
The name of the building is interesting, because it is the name of a project that was planned at about the same time nearby at the intersection of Penn and East End Avenues, where Titus de Bobula was to supervise an immense $600,000 Alpha Apartment Hotel. That project fell through; at the moment Father Pitt does not know that the name was anything more than coincidence.
This building is under sentence of condemnation, but it does not appear to be in such bad shape that it could not be rescued. Homewood is not rich, but there has been some renovation going on in nearby streets.
The Braddock Avenue side has its own neatly symmetrical façade.
- Source: Pittsburg Press, October 29, 1904, p. 19: “Architect A. E. Linkenheimer has awarded the contract to William Kerr & Sons for the erection of a three-story brick apartment house for J. N. Straub at Frankstown and Braddock avenues, Twenty-first ward, at a cost of $40,000.” ↩︎
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