This picture was taken on a dim winter day from a very long distance, and therefore is soupy with noise reduction if you look at it too closely. But it makes its point: the restoration and conversion of the old Beltzhoover Sub-District School is proceeding with decent respect for the design of the original architect, William J. Shaw. Note the brand-new windows in the correct size and shape.
Here is a remnant of the old middle-nineteenth-century commercial Pittsburgh, when a large part of the population lived downtown and shopkeepers often lived above their shops. In addition to being an unusual relic of the mostly obliterated past of downtown, this particular building is famous for its mural, “The Two Andys,” by Tom Mosser and Sarah Zeffiro.
Father Pitt was looking at Wikipedia’s list of flatiron buildings in the United States and thinking that he could multiply the number by ten or so just from buildings in Pittsburgh and the surrounding suburbs. So he has begun a collection of these flatiron buildings, meaning buildings that are triangular like a clothes iron. Here is one that he found especially attractive. The shape is dictated by the acute angle between California Avenue and Woodland Avenue, and of course it has the usual Pittsburgh problem of irregularity in three dimensions to deal with. The form of the building is typical of early-twentieth-century commercial architecture, but the Art Nouveau patterns picked out in light Kittanning brick set this building apart from others like it.
Edgemont Street is a one-block street in the southeastern extremity of Mount Washington, according to city planning maps, where Mount Washington, Allentown, and Beltzhoover all come together. It was part of the Grandview Plan of lots, built on the land that had belonged to various members of the Bailey family until the early 1900s. This was a particularly high-class street in the plan, and some of our prominent architects designed houses here, although we have so far positively identified only one. We begin with a close examination of a house that is typical of the first wave of houses on the street, which share certain distinctive features and were probably all designed with the same pencil.
The oval leaded glass in the reception hall would create an impression of prosperity and taste.
These dormers with arched window in the center recur on several of these houses; this one preserves its original shingles. Note also the curled finial at the peak of the roof behind the dormer.
Patterned brickwork marks where the chimney is inside the wall—a kind of decoration we might call a false chimney, or perhaps an expressed chimney.
This house has been divided into apartments and suffered multiple alterations, but the bay flanked by columns is unique and probably original.
One of our architects had fun with this flamboyantly Flemish roofline. The rest of the design is very good early-1900s arts-and-crafts, with most of the original details preserved for now, though they will not survive the next house-flipper.
A Craftsman bungalow, again with many original details preserved, though the original windows (probably 3-over-1) have been replaced.
Probably described by its builder as a Dutch colonial, with a gambrel roof that creates a spacious, almost full-sized third floor. The mismatched bays bother old Pa Pitt. They are not asymmetrical enough for the asymmetry to be a design feature; they look like a failed attempt at symmetry. But it’s still an attractive house and an efficient use of a small lot.
This triple house was designed by Henry Gilchrist, who was responsible for some famous mansions (Robin Hill is a notable example). It may originally have been built as a single residence.1
A later house than most of the others on the street, probably dating from the late 1920s or early 1930s. Siding has replaced what was probably half-timbered stucco, and windows have been replaced, but some of the original details, including an individual interpretation of the popular arch-with-rays, are well preserved, and the house is well taken care of.
The shingles in the gable of this house were replaced long ago with hexagonal asbestos-cement tiles. The word “asbestos” can cause panic, but the best advice from safety experts, even the ones who make their money in asbestos remediation, is to leave stable tiles like these in place, and they will harm no one.
Finally, at the other end of the street, another of those foursquare houses with an arched window in the dormer. This one preserves its original dormer window.
Sunset Hills is a middle-class plan, compared to the upper-crustier Mission Hills or Beverly Heights, but many of its more modest homes were designed by well-known architects, and they form a museum of middle-class styles of the 1920s and 1930s. Here are just a few houses across from Pine Cone Park, a little triangular parklet at the irregular intersection of Parkside Avenue and Sunset Drive.
Set back in the woods along Pioneer Avenue, this house obviously belongs to a different era. It looks like a typical Pennsylvania farmhouse, because—as far as we can tell from old maps—that is what it was: an I-house with a plantation-style colonnaded porch added in a moment of prosperity. The Knowlsons owned much of the land that became southwestern Brookline, and they gave the neighborhood its name. They certainly did prosper when they sold their land to developers, along with their relatives the Flemings.
A few details of the Union Trust Building, designed by Pierre A. Liesch when he was working for Frederick Osterling—at least according to Liesch; the building is usually just credited to Osterling.
For good reason old Pa Pitt didn’t publish these pictures when he took them eleven years ago. They were blurry and grainy and ugly, and if you enlarge them you can see that everything he did to rescue them was at most partly successful. But at the time he did not know that this old Russian church would be demolished about three years later. Since he ran across these pictures again today, he decided that, as poor as they are, they can stand here for a memorial to one of the dwindling number of mementos of the Hill’s days as a lively polyglot mishmash of every ethnic group.
O. M. Topp, the favorite architect of Lutherans in Pittsburgh for a generation, designed this magnificent Romanesque church, which was built in 1927–19281 and seems almost like a tribute to the late John T. Comès, who had died five years earlier. Topp almost always designed churches in the Gothic style, but here he takes up Romanesque and shows that he can be a master of it, right down to the polychrome stripes that Comès loved so well.
The entrance on the Stewart Avenue side is perhaps the stripiest ecclesiastical structure in the city of Pittsburgh.
The post office in Mount Oliver has been peripatetic if we take a long-term view. It began a few doors north of here on Brownsville Road in a little brick building later replaced by a furniture store. In about 1905, this substantial “flatiron” building went up at the complicated intersection of Brownsville Road, Amanda Street/Avenue (the border between Mount Oliver, which calls it an avenue, and Pittsburgh, which calls it a street), Bausman Street, Sherman Avenue, and Hays Avenue.
Now the post office is in a much larger modernist building two blocks up Brownsville Road. But this building still stands in reasonably good condition.
