“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.
More pictures of Third Presbyterian.
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.
—“Sunday Service to Mark Start on New Church,” Pittsburgh Press, November 17, 1928, p. 5.
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.
More pictures of the Minnetonka Building.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
