Father Pitt

Author: Father Pitt

  • German Victorian on the South Side Slopes

    2500 South 18th Street

    This has the look of a “hotel” in the Pittsburgh sense: a bar with rooms upstairs, thus qualifying for the much more readily available hotel liquor license. It still has a bar on the ground floor. The style is what old Pa Pitt calls “South Hills German Victorian,” and indeed a glance at the plat maps shows that this part of the Slopes was thoroughly German when this building went up shortly before 1910. The whole triangle bounded by South 18th Street, Monastery Place, and Monastery Street (now Monastery Avenue) was owned by Elizabeth Lenert.

    Entrance

    When your building has an acute angle, but not sharply acute, one way of dealing with it is to put the entrance there and make the corner into a feature rather than something that looks like an unfortunate necessity. The rocket-shaped turret on this building acts like a hinge to make it feel as though the building was meant to fold into this shape.

    Turret
    Cornice

    Otherwise, this is not an elaborate building, but the clever arrangement of bricks at the top of the 18th Street side makes an attractive cornice that doesn’t fall down.

    Chimney pots

    We must pause to admire two different chimney pots, both of them fine examples of their types.

    Corner Café
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The building would have had a much more dignified and balanced appearance before the ground-floor storefront was filled in; but since a corner bar is close in spirit to a men’s club, patrons should be grateful that it has windows at all.

  • Falcon

    Peregrine falcon
    Peregrine falcon
    Peregrine falcon
    Peregrine falcon
    Peregrine falcon
    Peregrine falcon
    Peregrine falcon
    Peregrine falcon

    Father Pitt believes this is one of our Peregrine Falcons, but he is always willing to be corrected. It posed on this chimney for quite a while, running through its repertoire of avian expressions.

    Camera: Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • A Mining Village in Bethel Park

    1st Street, Mollenauer

    Whenever you see rows of identical double houses like these in a suburban area or out in the country, you have run across an old mining town. The houses were usually built all at once to provide housing for the workers, who would live on the property of the mining company and be paid in scrip accepted at the company store, and thus have strong incentive to remain loyal employees rather than homeless paupers. These little houses were built very cheap, but often under the supervision of a skillful architect who knew how to make cheap permanent.

    1st Street

    Mollenauer, now part of the municipality of Bethel Park, was built in 1902 by the Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Company for workers in its Mine No. 3. After the mine passed into private ownership, the houses were sold off individually. Originally the houses on a street all looked the same—though the steep hill forced some adaptations, as we see on 1st Street above, where houses on one side have basements with ground-level street entrances, and houses on the other side have their front porches down several steps from the street.

    1st Street, with houses on the lower side
    Pair of houses
    Double house with different renovations
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    With separate owners, the houses in a pair often end up going their separate ways as if they hardly knew each other. The one on the left side of this pair looks as though it has fallen into the hands of house-flippers.

    A 1934 plat map shows us how the village was laid out.

    Mollenauer is a short stroll from the Washington Junction station.

  • Sunset

    Sunset behind a maple

    Sunset behind a flourishing maple and through the branches of a dead tree. The dead tree is itself an interesting phenomenon: it was a Tree of Heaven, or Pittsburgh Palm, or Tree from Hell (Ailanthus altissima), apparently destroyed by an infestation of spotted lanternflies—one plague destroyed by another.

    Sunset through a dead tree
    Sunset through bare branches
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Cornell Gardens, Mount Lebanon

    Cornell Gardens

    Charles Geisler designed numerous apartment buildings in Mount Lebanon, Dormont, and Squirrel Hill, among other places. This one he also owned, at least when it first went up.

    The Cornell, or Cornell Gardens

    A picture of the building when it was new in 1929 (taken from a blurry microfilm copy of the Pittsburgh Press) shows us what has changed: the roof overhangs, some of which have been removed, were originally tile; the roof was flat (replaced now with a hipped roof, doubtless to solve persistent leaking problems); and the apartment windows matched the ones in the central stairwell.

    Perspective view
    Front of the building

    The entrance and stairwell are the least-changed parts of the building, and we can see how Geisler used tastefully simple arrangements of brick and tile to create apparent ornamental richness.

    Ornamental brickwork
    Entrance porch
    Porch pillar

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

  • Butterfly on Black-Eyed Susan

    Pearl Crescent on Black-Eyed Susan

    Father Pitt believes this little butterfly is a Pearl Crescent (Phycioides tharos), but he is not an entomologist, and corrections are always received with gratitude. Its slightly damaged wing was not preventing it from enjoying a patch of Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) in Bird Park, Mount Lebanon.

    Pearl Crescent on Black-Eyed Susan
    Pearl Crescent on Black-Eyed Susan
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

  • Two Rows on Galveston Avenue, Allegheny West

    1011–1021 Galveston Avenue

    Two rows of houses, both in the Italianate style, but at different scales.

    1009 and 1011 Galveston Avenue

    These more modest houses are, in form, the typical Pittsburgh city house of the nineteenth century. They are raised above the common herd by Italianate detailing, such as the cornice brackets and elaborate entrances.

    1105–1011 Galveston Avenue
    1011 Galveston Avenue
    1013–1021 Galveston Avenue

    These taller and grander houses share many of the same stylistic traits as their smaller neighbors, but they have full third floors, and everything is of a slightly higher grade, including the arched windows and transom over the front door.

    1021 Galveston Avenue
    Front door
    Sony Alpha 3000

  • The Royalton, Mount Lebanon

    Royalton
    Royalton plaque

    Le Corbusier introduced the world to the idea of the cruciform apartment building. He regarded the form as so perfect, in fact, that he proposed demolishing Paris and replacing it with a sea of cross-shaped towers.

    In Pittsburgh, cruciform buildings were a bit of a fad in the late 1940s and early 1950s, probably encouraged by the national attention lavished on Gateway Center. They do have certain advantages. A cross-shaped building can give every apartment cross-ventilation and a view of open spaces, while still putting quite a bit of building on a small lot.

    Tennyson and Van Wart were among the architects who picked up on the idea. Alfred Tennyson was a Mount Lebanon architect who would continue with a very prosperous career in the second half of the twentieth century. John Van Wart, as half of the partnership of Van Wart & Wein, had been responsible for some big projects in New York in the 1920s and early 1930s; in the middle 1930s, he moved to Pittsburgh to work for Westinghouse, and then formed a promising partnership with Tennyson. His unexpected death in 1950, probably while this building was under construction, put an end to the partnership, and Tennyson went on alone.

    Royalton apartments

    The style is typical postwar modernism, but not pure modernism. A few little decorative details, like the subtle quoins, give the modernism a slight Georgian flavor.

    Entrance
    Entrance
    200

    The scalloped woodwork, if it is not a later addition, must have been one of those details added to persuade prospective tenants that this building was, after all, respectably Colonial enough not to embarrass them.

    Royalton apartments
    Entrance
    From the garage end

    As with many Pittsburgh buildings, the question of how many floors this one has is a complicated one. The answer varies between three and six, depending on how you look at it.

    From the lower end

    Cameras: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6; Canon PowerShot SX150.

  • Zinnias

    Back in the dark ages of “bedding plants,” which is to say the 1970s and 1980s, zinnias were almost forgotten, grown only by those eccentric gardeners who grew their annuals from seed and liked bright Victorian colors. Now zinnias have regained their honored place as staples of the annual garden, and the world is a brighter place.

  • Where the Ohio Begins

    Ohio River with boats and barge train
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

    Looking under the Fort Duquesne Bridge at river traffic at the head of the Ohio, with recreational boats and a barge train.