Some sights on one side of one block of Western Avenue, the business spine of Allegheny West. Though it has become a trendy and prosperous business district, Western Avenue still keeps its quirky combination of commercial buildings, private houses, and houses turned into commercial buildings.
This is a designated historic district, so that is a historic utility cable.
This is the only house on the street that has not been expensively restored. Much original Italianate detail is left for the next ambitious owner to savor.
Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect of this house on Western Avenue, which looks as though it dates from somewhere around 1890. The carving in the stone trim might have been done by Achille Giammartini, who is known to have decorated many of the houses in Allegheny West.
There is only one National Historic Landmark on the North Side, and this is it. Modest as it is, it would appear on many historians’ lists of the greatest American buildings of the nineteenth century. It is the other great work of Henry Hobson Richardson in Pittsburgh, after the Allegheny County Courthouse. One is sometimes tempted to say that it was ahead of its time (it was finished in 1886, when high Victorian style usually demanded a thick crust of ornamentation), but it would probably be better to say that it stands out of time. It is never stale, and yet it was never outrageously modern. It stands as an inspiration and a reproach to every other building.
It earns all those accolades from architects in spite of one serious engineering mistake. Those walls were not meant to lean outward the way they do. The weight of the huge roof pushed them out within a few years after the church was finished. The congregation called in Richardson’s old associates Longfellow, Alden & Harlow to see whether anything could be done, and their conclusion was that the structure was stable the way it was and should be left alone. A century and a third have proved them right.
These simple triangular dormers are the single feature of this church most often directly imitated; compare, for example, the ones on St. Paul’s Episcopal on the Hill (designed by Elise Mercur), or the ones on the First United Presbyterian Church of Etna (Father Pitt hasn’t figured out the architect of that one yet), or the ones on the Watson Memorial Presbyterian Church on Observatory Hill (designed by Allison & Allison)—all direct quotations from Richardson’s dormers here.
This front elevation is a 36-megapixel composite, so you can enlarge it and enjoy the details of the wonderfully varied brickwork that nevertheless seems natural and organic and avoids all suggestion of ostentation.
Allegheny West never quite became a slum, but it was down on its luck for a while. Over the past few decades it has very gradually turned into an expensive and trendy neighborhood, and the Western Avenue business district is lively and full of interesting one-off restaurants and shops. In a short stroll, we see some of the variety of commercial and domestic buildings that line one side of the street.
This church was finished in 1893; the architects were the Kansas City firm of Vrydagh & Shepard. Thomas B. Wolfe, a native of Sewickley Heights, was working in Kansas City for Vrydagh & Shepard, so it was natural that he should be the one sent to Pittsburgh to supervise the church. While it was under construction or shortly afterward, Martin Vrydagh decided to move to Pittsburgh and join Wolfe, founding the prolific partnership of Vrydaugh (in about 1899 he changed the spelling of his name) & Wolfe.
It took old Pa Pitt a while to figure all that out, because every Pittsburgh reference—including Father Pitt’s own sites and the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque on the church—gave the name of the firm as Vrydaugh & Shepherd. Father Pitt began to get suspicious when he found that Web searches for “Vrydaugh & Shepherd” turned up this church and nothing else, so it was time to explore alternate spellings.
This building went up between 1910 and 1923, and it seems to have been owned by the same Joseph Kinder who earlier put up the Kinder Building next to it facing Western Avenue. That is as much as old Pa Pitt knows, but his attention was attracted by the unusual brick patterns that ornament the front of the building.
The last time we saw the Chalfant House, it was getting some restoration work. Here we see the result: the house, now Chalfant Hall of the Community College of Allegheny County, looks almost new again.
These two houses facing West Park on what used to be Irwin Avenue both have interestingly complex histories. The one above has a detailed history by the late Carol Peterson, so here we will only mention the things that led to its appearance today and encourage you to see the Peterson history for more details. It was built in about 1870 as an Italianate house. In 1890 Augusta and Jacob Kaufmann of the Kaufmann Brothers department store bought the house. It was given a third floor, and the whole house was made over in the Romanesque style with Queen Anne overtones.
The house next door was probably built at about the same time as its neighbor. Without the help of Carol Peterson, we can only report what we observe. It was also built in the Italianate style, and it looks as though the third floor is an addition here as well. But the addition may have been made earlier than the alterations to its neighbor, since the tall windows were done in the same Italianate style as the ones below the third floor. The round bay in front was finished off with a mansard roof, showing the influence of the Second Empire style that was popular here before Romanesque became the big fad.
This interesting modernist church was built in 1963, as we find from the attractive plaque by the entrance:
The balance of modern design and hand-crafted artisanship in the lettering is very appealing.
The architects of the church were Williams & Trebilcock.1 The church was dedicated on April 5, 1964; it replaced a building that had been next to the old Presbyterian Hospital. This building now belongs to Living Word Ministry.
