Before he fell under the spell of the European modernists, Frederick Scheibler had already developed his own distinct version of the classical style. Even if he had never progressed beyond the early style we see in this building from 1903, we would still think he was one of our more interesting minor architects.
The two-storey porch with a balcony dangling between the colossal columns is unusual—but not unprecedented. The Ruskin Villa apartment building in Wilkinsburg uses exactly the same idea, and in many other ways is similar to this building. In construction listings, L. A. Raisig was named as the architect of that building, which went up just a few months before Raisig took on young Frederick Scheibler as a partner. Father Pitt’s probably unprovable hypothesis is that Scheibler was already working for Raisig, and Raisig assigned the Ruskin Villa to him. This building in Park Place, then, would be a case of Scheibler adapting and refining ideas he had already worked out three years earlier.
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