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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Moderne Apartment Building in Shadyside
Composite of two photographs from a Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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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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Spanish Mission Style in Dormont
A tiled overhang and exaggerated brackets to hold it up: these are two markers of the Spanish Mission style that was fantastically popular in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Dormont in particular filled up with apartment and commercial buildings in that style, like this one at Potomac and Glenmore Avenues, which was built in 1923. Here’s a small collection of commercial buildings in the Mission style on Potomac Avenue and West Liberty Avenue, the two main commercial streets of the borough.
Nikon COOLPIX P100; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Church of the Atonement, Carnegie
Utility cables were removed from this picture, because Father Pitt could not remove them from the street. With almost complete confidence, old Pa Pitt attributes this Episcopal church to Ingham & Boyd. It speaks the same dialect of Gothic as some of their other churches, and they are known to have designed the parish house that was built just before the church. However, Father Pitt has not yet found the documentary evidence that would remove the “almost” from his statement.
The cornerstone was laid on October 5, 1930. At the same time, one stone taken from the foundation of Old St. Luke’s in nearby Woodville was also laid in the foundation of this church, to tie it to the pre-Revolutionary tradition of Episcopalianism in Allegheny County.1
Olympus E-20N. This parish house is known from several listings to have been the work of Ingham & Boyd,2 and it was built just a little before the church itself. The architects looked to vernacular Western Pennsylvania farmhouses for their inspiration. We do not know what inspired the designer of the modern vestibule.
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Old Post Office, Carnegie
Olympus E-20N. Oscar Wenderoth was director of the Office of the Supervising Architect, which was responsible for designing federal buildings all over the country. Even though he was in office for only about three years, from 1912 to 1915, those were very productive years, and the nation is littered with post offices that bear his name. This one is typical of the buildings put up under his supervision—respectably classical, with big arched windows to let light pour into the main lobby. The post office has moved into a much duller building down the street, but as the Carnegie Coffee Company this building is beautifully kept and a lively gathering place for the town.
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Pumpkin Blossoms
You have to get up early in the morning to catch pumpkin blossoms at their peak. They’re spectacularly huge, but they start to wither as soon as the sun comes out. Here are two from a city garden that by this time of the year is mostly pumpkin vines.
Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church
Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Yesterday we looked at the Oakdale Public School, one of the earliest commissions for James E. Allison. Here, just a short distance to the west in the old village of Noblestown, is another Allison building1 from a little over a year later—a small frame church that, although it has been coated with artificial siding, still retains some of its distinctive character. The form is the irregular square popular in small Romanesque churches of Victorian times, but the details are Georgian, including the big window. The half-round protrusion in front indicates a Sunday-school room built on the popular Akron Plan. The congregation dissolved a few years ago, but the building is in use by a veterans’ organization called Heroes Supporting Heroes.
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