Father Pitt

Author: Father Pitt

Tudor Duplexes in Shadyside and Beechview

This duplex in Beechview is one of a pair right beside the Westfield stop on the Red Line. It looked very familiar. Where had we seen it before?

This duplex is on Ellsworth Avenue in Shadyside, part of a group of duplexes on St. James Place and the adjacent side of Ellsworth Avenue. It is not identical to the one in Beechview, but so many of their parts are identical that the Beechview and Shadyside duplexes were obviously drawn by the same pen.

Above, a perspective view of one of the pair in Beechview, which is marked “Woodside Dwellings” on a 1923 map. It stands on Westfield Street, which was briefly called Woodside Avenue; the other of the pair was called “Suburban Dwellings” after the cross street, Suburban Avenue. Except for the loss of the Tudor half-timbering in the front gable, this one is very well preserved. (Suburban Dwellings has lost more details.)

Below, a perspective view of one of the duplexes in Shadyside.

One of the details they share is a “No Outlet” sign. But we can see that the Shadyside duplexes are narrower and deeper than the Beechview ones. The same architect adapted as much of the same design as possible to the different dimensions of different lots.

Four more of these duplexes stand on St. James Place, a little one-block side street running back to the cliff overlooking the railroad and busway.

This one has kept its original tile roof.

A detail preserved by the one in Beechview is the Art Nouveau art glass with Jugendstil tulips.

Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect of these Tudor duplexes. But if he had to make a wild guess, he would guess Charles Bier. The wide arches with strong verticals above, and the filtering of Tudor detailing through a German-art-magazine Art Nouveau sensibility, strongly remind us of Bier’s other works. There are other known works of Bier both in Shadyside and in the South Hills.

In Shadyside, these Tudor duplexes are interspersed with Spanish Mission duplexes, showing once again that Tudor and Spanish Mission belong together.

January 15, 2024
Commercial Building at Third & Third, Carnegie

Father Pitt took these pictures more than a year ago, but for some reason he never published them until now. This Rundbogenstil building at Third Street and Third Avenue takes full advantage of its corner site, and the details of the pediment and cornice have been lovingly picked out in tastefully balanced colors.

January 15, 2024
Joseph & Elizabeth Horne House, Allegheny West

An early work of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow in Pittsburgh, this house was given the Carol J. Peterson treatment, so that it has its own little book of its history. Old Pa Pitt will not repeat everything the late Ms. Peterson found out about it, but this is the outline: Joseph O. Horne, son of the department-store baron, married Elizabeth Jones, daughter of the steel baron B. F. Jones, and her father had Longfellow, Alden & Harlow design this cozy little Romanesque house for the young couple. It was one of the many houses restored in the late twentieth century by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson, and now it looks pretty much the way the architects drew it, minus some erosion and a century of soot.

The decoration on the dormer is a bit eroded, but that probably makes it more picturesque than it was when the house was new.

January 14, 2024
Fort Pitt Blockhouse, by Arsene Rousseau

From The Charette, December, 1928.

This sketch was a winner in the Pittsburgh Architectural Club’s Summer Prize Sketch Competition. The artist was Arsene Rousseau (misspelled in the caption), who later became a successful architect in Youngstown.

The sketch shows the situation of the Blockhouse as attractively as the artist can manage consistent with honesty. It had been restored to its past and present condition by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who maintained a little patch of green in the decaying warehouse and slum district of the Point. We see just a little of the Point Bridge in the background.

For comparison’s sake, here is how the Blockhouse looked in 1887, before the ladies of the DAR got their hands on it:

From Fisher & Stewart’s Guide and Handbook of Pittsburgh and Allegheny, 1887.

January 13, 2024
Cast-Iron Fronts on Wood Street

We have seen these beautiful storefronts before, but only obliquely. Here they are again, because we can never see them too often. This is one of the best Victorian cast-iron fronts in the city. Note that whoever designed the building has tried very hard to make you perceive it as symmetrical, though in fact the section on the right is significantly wider than the other two.

January 13, 2024
Art Deco Telephone Exchange in Carnegie

Press C. Dowler was almost certainly the architect of this classic Art Deco telephone exchange, since he designed most of the buildings for Bell Telephone in our area during the Art Deco era.

The blankness of the first floor is probably original. As much of the switching equipment as possible was on the ground floor, because copper was expensive, and anything that shortened the distance that had to be cabled saved a lot of money.

The polychrome frieze is an unexpected flash of color on what is otherwise a monochrome building that makes its decorative statements with cleverly patterned brick, a few stone accents, and small terra-cotta ornaments.

It used to be usual for corner buildings to carry the names of the streets in lieu of street signs. It was already old-fashioned when this building went up, but who could resist those elegant Art Deco letters?

January 12, 2024
Forsaith Block (and Neighbor), Sharpsburg

The ground floor of this building has been turned into a garage, but without losing too much of the character of the façade. The date stone tells us that the building was put up in 1889.

Probably a little later, but not too much later, a building went up to the left of this one, perhaps for the same owners.

This building appears on a 1906 map, which gives us a latest possible date. The style is somewhat different—we might call it Allegheny Valley Rundbogenstil—but the two buildings share some decorative details: the treatment of the cornice is the same, and the same flower-and-foliage ornaments (they look like a jonquil between acanthus leaves) are used on both buildings.

January 12, 2024
Sunset Through the Branches

January 11, 2024
907 Liberty Avenue

Penn and Liberty Avenues are living museums of Victorian downtown architecture: in very few other places can we get such a vivid impression of what a big city looked like in Victorian times before the age of skyscrapers began. From old maps, we can see that this splendid building appears to have been put up in the 1880s for one W. T. Shannon, who was still the owner in 1923. The upper floors are now loft apartments.

January 11, 2024
One Side of One Block of Espy Avenue, Dormont

Many well-known architects worked in Dormont, as old Pa Pitt knows from leafing through the construction trade journals of the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, those journals are usually maddeningly vague on locations, so it has been hard to identify which house was designed by which architect. But we can appreciate the art even without knowing the name of the artist.

Espy Avenue is a street of particularly fine houses, and the finest block is the one between Potomac Avenue and Lasalle Avenue. Here are a few houses from the northwest side of the street, because the sun happened to be shining on that side when Father Pitt was out walking in Dormont.

Father Pitt will have to come back to Dormont soon when the other side of the street is properly illuminated. But he could not resist taking pictures of this one double house, even with the sun behind it, because it is an exceptional design exceptionally well preserved:

A few bits of wood have been replaced with aluminum, and the brick walls in front of the porch may not be original, but otherwise this grand duplex is probably much as the architect imagined it.

All these pictures were taken to test a Sony camera Father Pitt found in a thrift store for about six dollars. It has a Zeiss lens that seems to live up to its reputation. The resolution is 4 megapixels, but our experiments here at Pa Pitt Labs show that a 4-megapixel picture doubled to 16 megapixels from a camera with a good lens looks better than a 16-megapixel picture from a camera with an indifferent lens.

January 10, 2024