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.
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Engine House No. 16, North Point Breeze
Sony Alpha 3000.
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Two Old Houses in Noblestown
This old house was probably built in the middle 1800s, but the simple vernacular style of it makes it hard to date with any precision. It was obviously put up at a time when the main street of Noblestown was more a path than a road; now anyone stepping out the front door has to be careful of traffic. (The church in the background is the Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church.)
Olympus E-20N. This somewhat larger house is almost identical in layout; it probably just has larger rooms in the main part of the house. The porch is a later addition—probably from the first quarter of the twentieth century, to judge by the Craftsman-style tapered pillars and rusticated concrete blocks.
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Nora McMullen Mellon House, Shadyside
Something interesting must lurk behind this wall along Howe Street.
As we step closer we notice the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque, and we begin to get a view of the cottage beyond the wall.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. The sheltering wall seems to be there less to conceal the house than to delight us with the revelation. This is the Nora McMullen Mellon house, built in 1911 from a design by Thomas Scott. The unusual (for Pittsburgh) choice of stucco with brick trim makes this English cottage stand out on the street, and the current owners keep it as pretty as an architect’s rendering.
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Pittsburgh New Church, Point Breeze
This picturesque church, built for the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1930, still serves its original congregation, now under the name “The New Church.” The architect was Harold Thorpe Carswell, who had been an apprentice of Ralph Adams Cram; to judge by the few references to him on line, this is one of his best-known works. Few Pittsburghers ever see it, however, because it sits at the end of a one-block dead-end residential street in Point Breeze.
The inscription, in florid medievalistic lettering, reads, “Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei”—an abridged quotation from Swedenborg, which we may translate as “Now we are permitted to enter into the hidden things of the faith.”
The attached school is in a complementary Tudor style.
Olympus E-20N.
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Beaux-Arts at the Waterworks
This small but grand pumping station, or some sort of utility building, sits by the reservoirs behind the Waterworks shopping center. Thomas Scott was the architect of most buildings for the Pittsburgh water system in the era when this one was built, and this is certainly in his style, so we attribute it to him with some confidence. The windows that would have flooded the building with light have been blocked in, possibly for security reasons, but more likely because no one could see the point of maintaining glass windows when plywood covers the holes just as well.
On city planning maps, the waterworks, the Waterworks shopping center, and St. Margaret’s Hospital are in the Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar neighborhood, which is otherwise on the other side of the Allegheny—one of those neighborhood-boundary absurdities that no real Pittsburgher would recognize. Pittsburghers would say they are at Aspinwall, although they belong to the city and not the borough of Aspinwall.
Behind the encroaching jungle of vines and utility cables we can just make out a pair of classical dolphins—always the emblem of a water-related building—and a cartouche with the city arms.
Olympus E-20N.
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Moderne Apartment Building in Shadyside
Composite of two photographs from a Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Probably built in about 1940, this was the science-fiction apartment building of the future. Except for newer windows, it has not changed much.
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Oakdale
Oakdale is a pleasant little borough in the western suburbs. The town was devastated by floods from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and some of it never recovered; but the back streets are full of pleasant houses, and the business district has business in it, and the population is growing.
The tiny urban core of Oakdale is a row of shops on Noblestown Road.
This building, 120 years old this year, has kept its corner entrance. Addendum: This was the First National Bank of Oakdale; the architect was Max Brenning.1
The odd polygonal end of this building probably had large showroom windows at one time.
Finally, an old service station. Few old-fashioned service stations have survived without massive alterations, but this one still keeps its attractive little red-roofed hut with—once again—a corner entrance.
Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Three Houses with Turrets in Shadyside
Here’s a house in an eclectic style made up of bits of other eclectic styles, but they all fit together well. The heavy arches picked out in darker brick remind us of the Rundbogenstil, a word we like to say as often as possible; but the irregular picturesque arrangement of parts takes inspiration from the style that, in defiance of history, was called Queen Anne.
The turret has a well-preserved witch’s cap and a rim of foliage scrollwork.
The oriel and the porch pediment are both decorated with grotesque foliage ornaments.
The house next door is a duplicate, but reversed.
Finally, a house that shares the same general shape, but is distinguished by its shingly top with curved surfaces and ornamental swags and foliage picked out in contrasting paint.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Like many Shadyside houses, this one has automobiles burrowing under the porch.
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Parkstone Dwellings, North Point Breeze
Built in 1922, the Parkstone Dwellings are the most astonishing double duplex in Pittsburgh. The architect was Frederick Scheibler, who had come through a period of prophetic modernism into a period of romantic fantasy.
The tenants upstairs are airing out their rugs. No, wait—
—that’s a mosaic!
Sony Alpha 3000; Nikon COOLPIX P100. The Scheibler Treasure Hunt blogger had the good luck to stumble on an estate sale here back in 2013, so you can run to that site for interior shots of one of the Parkstone Dwellings.
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Spanish Mission Style on Brookline Boulevard
Yesterday we looked at the Spanish Mission style in Dormont. One of the adjacent city neighborhoods, Brookline, is also stuffed with Spanish Mission commercial buildings along Brookline Boulevard. Again, we look for tiled overhangs (although often the tiles have been replaced with asphalt shingles) held up by exaggerated brackets.
This building was the Brookline Theatre, a silent-era neighborhood movie house.
The building above and the one below both bear dates of 1926, and they share some similar design ideas—though the one above has slated instead of tiled overhangs.
Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100. An abstract and geometric form of the style, but the overhang was probably tiled originally, and it probably had brackets before it was rebuilt.
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