The little village of Rennerdale sits halfway between Carnegie and Oakdale on the Noblestown Road. This corner-tower frame church, with its Colonial-style details, reminds us of the Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church designed by James Allison; and since we know that Allison designed other buildings in the area, it would not surprise us to find that he was responsible for this one. It has been swathed in artificial siding, as our few surviving frame churches usually are; but the siding men did an unusually good job of making sure that the windows and doors were properly framed. The church still belongs to its original congregation.
Old maps show that this apartment house was built after 1910 and before 1923, and that the owner was C. P. Hitchens. C. P. Hitchens was a Pittsburgh architect, so it’s probable that he designed the building. It’s an attractive design with elements of everything from Romanesque (the recessed arched entrance) to Prairie Style, all harmonized so that nothing seems out of place.
We’ll have to wait till the leaves are off the trees to get anything like a complete picture of the front of Highland Towers, one of Frederick Scheibler’s most famous buildings. But this collection of details should be enough to demonstrate why architectural historians drool over it. The building brings a fresh breath of Art Nouveau to Highland Avenue.
As built in 1914, the apartments were luxurious residences. Each had a living room, dining room, solarium, kitchen, library or guest room, two bedrooms, bathroom, and servant’s chamber. There were garages in back with gardens on the roofs.
Scheibler took the idea for these mosaic patterns from the German graphic designer, architect, industrial designer, type designer, and artist Peter Behrens.
This is a strangely elaborate gateway for a postwar modernist apartment building. But anyone who knows the history of Fifth Avenue can guess that the gateway indicates where a grand mansion once stood on the Shadyside Millionaires’ Row. (Although city planning maps make Fifth Avenue the boundary between Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, traditionally both sides of the street were counted as “Shadyside.”)
Atherstone was the mansion, or “castle” as locals would have said, of hardware and steel magnate John Bindley.
It was built in 1890, greatly expanded during the First World War (when these pillars were built), abandoned in 1929, and torn down in 1938.
When the demolition began, the Bulletin Index, Pittsburgh’s high-toned society magazine, ran an article about the house that we reproduce below. The magazine had been infected by Timestyle with its horror of conjunctions and its quirky capitalization, but we trust our readers to interpret it without too much difficulty. The article gives us a picture of Depression-era Fifth Avenue at its lowest point, before the postwar housing boom filled many of the vacant estates with modern apartment buildings.
Atherstone
Forty years ago young Theodore Dreiser used to spend his evenings reading Balzac in the Allegheny Public Library, his Sunday afternoons walking out Fifth Avenue and back again. It was then one of the wealthiest, swankiest, most famous streets in the world. Dreiser gaped at the great mansions, marvelled years later in his autobiography that “even the lamp posts were better than in other parts of the city.” One of the most magnificent of the castles he gaped at was “Atherstone” (see cut).
Atherstone was a work of art, a baronial symbol of the great-spending paleo-industrial age of which William Randolph Hearst is the sole remaining big figure. Pittsburgher John Bindley, having grown rich with his Grant Street hardware store, richer as co-founder of the Pittsburgh Steel Co., built his four-story gargoyled castle (in 1890) in the grand manner, with crenellated turrets and 80 windows with leaded panes, named it after his ancestral home place in England. A widower with only two of his six children living, he travelled through Europe every year with his niece Elmina, brought back paintings, furniture, hand-carved panelling, marble mantel-pieces in the fashion of one who feels it a class privilege and duty to patronize the arts. Fixtures he had made to order in Manhattan to match the furniture he bought, for the Chippendale dining room, the Japanese room that was his favorite. During the prosperous war years Steelman Bindley spent $200,000 to remodel, add a wing to his castle. In an enlarged residence of 24 rooms, six baths, he installed an electric elevator, new copper drains, plumbing and kitchen equipment, added cupboard space that virtually equalled the room volume of an ordinary house, put two carved stone pillars at the driveway entrance, two huge solid oak doors at the entrance of the hand-carved oak panelled hall.
Four years later, at the age of 75, Steelman Bindley died. Atherstone and contents were left to Son Edward Houston Bindley, who died in 1929, to Daughter Adelaide Bindley Davidson, who closed up the castle, put most of the furniture (including the Japanese room) into one end of the Hoeveler warehouse, moved to California. Installed above the spacious six-room coachhouse in the rear was Niece Elmina McMillin, her four servants.
Many a great mansion Theodore Dreiser looked upon forty years ago now stands boarded up and weed-choked, many another has been torn down to leave great toothless gaps in swank Fifth Avenue. Fortnight ago came word that John Bindley’s Atherstone, scene of many and lavish entertainments, was to be given into the hands of home-wrecking Austin Givens, Inc. (who eleven years ago tore down John Bindley’s hardware store to make way for the Gulf Building). Last week the curious and buying public poked and peered through the cold bare rooms of Atherstone, being auctioned bit by bit. This week Wrecker Givens began to tear down, cart away.
“Mrs. Thaw’s chocolate church” was what the neighbors called it, since the brownstone church was largely built with Thaw money. The architect was Theophilus P. Chandler, Jr., a name that sounds as though its bearer was summoned into being to have his suspenders cut by the Marx Brothers.
A magnificent building that takes full advantage of a magnificent site, right at the busy corner of Forbes and Braddock Avenues. It was dedicated in 1930; the architects were Ingham & Boyd, who abstracted the Gothic style into a cool and elegant modernism that does not look dated at all almost a century later.
When the cornerstone was laid on November 17, 1928, the Press described the planned facilities:
The new church will be of early English gothic style of architecture. The contract for the erection of the church has been awarded to Edward A. Wehr, noted builder of a number of famous churches in Pittsburgh and other cities. The seating capacity of the new edifice will be slightly in excess of 600. The exterior walls will be of Indiana limestone. The roof will be an “open timber” roof, with wood trusses exposed. In the vestibule, oak paneling will be used to the top of the doors, with plaster above and an oak beam ceiling. The floor of the vestibule will be tile. Paneled and carved woodwork will be used at the front of the auditorium, the pulpit, reading desk, choir gallery and organ screen being designed as a unit to create a focal point in the design at this location. Temporary windows will be of leaded glass of good quality, in the hope that from time to time these temporary windows may be replaced with memorial windows of stained glass, of high quality in design and workmanship.
That the assembly room on the ground floor may be used as a social room as well as for Sunday school purposes, a temporary kitchen has been arranged for, adjoining. At the opposite end of the assembly room, shower baths and locker rooms have been provided in accordance with the original intention of using this room for recreational purposes also.
Ahavath Achim (“Brotherly Love”) is an independent Jewish congregation that describes itself as “traditional, but egalitarian,” meaning that women and men participate equally in traditional Hebrew services. The synagogue was founded in 1903, and the modest and tidy little building blends two styles so successfully that drivers on busy Chestnut Street probably don’t notice the blending. When you stop and look, though, you can see that the foyer is a modernist addition on an early-twentieth-century synagogue (built in 1937, according to a correspondent). The bricks are matched, however, and the sharply drawn lines of the addition seem to fit well with the early-modern rectangularity of the main building.
Oakdale was a prosperous little town, as we can see by these houses in a variety of styles, all on the same street. It is still a fairly prosperous town today, and most of these houses have been kept up and altered in various ways that suited their inhabitants over the years. We present them without further comment, except to say that, if you come away with the impression that the back streets of Oakdale are very pleasant, your impression is correct.
Built in 1908, the Minnetonka Building was designed by Frederick Scheibler, and it would be hard to imagine the impression it would have made in Edwardian Shadyside. It looks like a building thirty or forty years ahead of its time, with its simple forms and streamlined curves that look forward to the Moderne architecture of the 1930s and 1940s. But it also has details that remind us of the most up-to-the-minute ideas from those Viennese and German art magazines that we know Scheibler got his hands on.
This doorway with its Art Nouveau window and Egyptian-style tapering would have been right at home in a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.
No longer a firehouse, but the building has been adapted to other uses with care to preserve as much of its original stocky Romanesque look as possible.
