The Church of the Ascension, an obviously prosperous Anglican congregation in Shadyside, has just finished a new narthex and several other improvements. The architects were Rothschild Doyno Collaborative.
No lights are hid under bushels here.
The new entrance was meant to be “welcoming and transparent.” It does not attempt to imitate the style of William Halsey Wood’s original design for the church, but it does use similar stone, so that it seems to belong to the church.
The cornerstone is the only direct imitation: it is patterned after the original cornerstone of the church.
In the terminology of Pittsburgh Regional Transit, Stevenson is a “stop” rather than a “station,” meaning that you board from the low-level door—the one old Pa Pitt calls the “Pittsburgh door”—and walk up three steps, whereas at a “station” you enter by one of the platform-level doors.
Founded as Montour City, Imperial was renamed for the mining company that founded it, the Imperial Coal Company. It is picturesque in its decay, and yet not decayed enough that it is not a pleasant town to live in. The buildings along the old Montour Railroad below, for example, are still in use by a construction contractor. The other two views are parts of the business district on Main Street, which has little business these days.
How old is your sidewalk? Quite possibly more than a century old. The spelling “Pittsburg” was federally official between 1891 and 1911, and though some institutions continued to use the shorter form after the spelling officially reverted to “Pittsburgh,” the lettering on this bronze plaque is very much a nineteenth-century style. The Pittsburgh Orbit site featured this plaque a few years ago in its roundup of sidewalk plaques; the editor there is of the opinion that the sidewalk could not be more than a century old, but old Pa Pitt is of the opinion that well-laid concrete is forever. Especially if you repair the segments that crumble too much.
Outsiders visiting Pittsburgh are often surprised to find that, when buildings are in the way, we just drive right through them. This is Henry Street, which goes through the Software Engineering Institute.
Chartiers Avenue is the main business street of downtown McKees Rocks; and although it has lost some important buildings, enough remains to form the basis of a revival that seems to be in its early stages already. Above, a typically Pittsburgh commercial interpretation of the Italian Renaissance.
This little building has an interesting combination of details. The upper windows have round arches, but the lintels above them are fattened into incipient Gothic arches. The multiple decorative patterns in the brick add a rug-like texture to the front.
This building is marked “HALL” on old maps, suggesting that it belonged to a lodge of some sort. It has been altered so much that it is hard to see what it originally looked like. Nevertheless, it presents a neat front, if not a well-proportioned one. The vast expanse of side wall, exposed when a more interesting neighboring building was demolished about ten years ago, cries out for a huge mural of Cubist guitars.
“Cute” is a word old Pa Pitt seldom employs, but it is hard to think of a better term for the Gothic front on this little building. It appears to be a later addition to an older building. The Gothic peak is a thin false front with nothing behind it, and it was made a little too insubstantial: it is leaning backward slightly and will probably have to be stabilized by the next owner.
The ground floor has been altered, but the original character of this corner building is otherwise well preserved. Until very recently, its neighbor was one of the finest buildings in McKees Rocks, the McKees Rocks Trust Company, a sumptuously Ionic bank that loomed paternally over the whole block. As you can see, Father Pitt was just a little too late.
Finally, this union hall is a fascinating example of contemporary architecture. The building was an undistinguished little storefront from the 1950s or so, altered so much that it was impossible to guess its original character. In 2016, however, this impressive classical front was put on, which changed the look not only of the building but even of the whole street around it. Father Pitt has seen many examples of “New Classical” architecture that make him want to hide under an Edwardian sofa, but this one does exactly what it set out to do. It has classical dignity and a little ostentatiousness without lapsing into parody. The exposed girder above the column is a wry wink at modernist architecture, but the metal canopy makes the girder seem appropriate.
Tasso Katselas designed this apartment building, which opened in 1959. James D. Van Trump described it a few years later: “Glass, brick and concrete cage raised into space on arched stilts in the manner of Le Corbusier and at the time it was built the most ‘advanced’ apartment house in Pittsburgh.”
The drama of the building is in those arched stilts. They make approaching the building from the street an event. In typical Katselas fashion, they also solve a practical problem: they make room for a useful porte cochere while allowing the rest of the building to take up as much of its lot as possible.
