Father Pitt

Category: Allegheny West

  • Joseph & Elizabeth Horne House, Allegheny West

    Joseph O. Horne house

    An early work of Longfellow, Alden & Harlow in Pittsburgh, this house was given the Carol J. Peterson treatment, so that it has its own little book of its history. Old Pa Pitt will not repeat everything the late Ms. Peterson found out about it, but this is the outline: Joseph O. Horne, son of the department-store baron, married Elizabeth Jones, daughter of the steel baron B. F. Jones, and her father had Longfellow, Alden & Harlow design this cozy little Romanesque house for the young couple. It was one of the many houses restored in the late twentieth century by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson, and now it looks pretty much the way the architects drew it, minus some erosion and a century of soot.

    Dormer decoration

    The decoration on the dormer is a bit eroded, but that probably makes it more picturesque than it was when the house was new.

    Joseph O. Horne House

  • Graham–Teufel House, Allegheny West

    840 Lincoln Avenue

    This house has an unusual history, which we take from Carol Peterson’s detailed research at the Allegheny West site. It was built in the early 1860s as a typical modest Pittsburgh rowhouse. In 1918, new owners decided they wanted something less embarrassingly old-fashioned, so they hired the most modern and up-to-date architects—Kiehnel & Elliott—to remodel the house in the most modern and up-to-date style—Spanish Mission. The result is something that would have been right at home in Florida, where Kiehnel and Elliott were beginning a flourishing practice that would persuade them to move to Miami in 1922. It would also have matched the neighborhood aesthetic in many of the new Pittsburgh streetcar suburbs like Carrick or Beechview. It seems a little out of place on Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny West.

    Graham–Teufel House

  • Hoffstot House, Allegheny West

    Hoffstot House on Lincoln Avenue

    Like many of the houses in Allegheny West, this grand Second Empire house had a detailed history prepared by the late Carol Peterson, so old Pa Pitt will tell you only that it was built in 1880 for Gideon and Mary Hoffstot, and for the rest we can let Ms. Peterson take over.

  • Entrance to the Kinder Building, Allegheny West

    The Kinder Building is a little Beaux-Arts masterpiece at the corner of Western Avenue and Galveston Avenue. At night its carefully balanced classical entrance takes on a pleasing air of mystery.

  • Neon in Allegheny West

    Modern Cafe spelled out in neon

    The Modern Cafe is a little outcropping of late Art Deco in Allegheny West that looks as though it belongs in a hardboiled detective movie or an Edward Hopper painting.

  • Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church, Allegheny West

    Calvary Methodist Church

    Now Calvary United Methodist Church, this church is known for its stained glass by the Tiffany Studios. It was built in 1892–1895; the architects were Vrydaugh & Shepherd and T. B. Wolfe. The exterior is a feast of elaborate and often playful Gothic detail.

    Entrance
    Gargoyle
    Gargoyle
    Detail of a tower
    Mask
    Carved face
    Another face
    Face and foliage
    Turret
    Foliage
    Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church

  • Henry Chalfant House, Allegheny West

    Chalfant Hall

    Now Chalfant Hall of the Community College of Allegheny County, and currently getting a thorough renovation. The house was built in about 1900; no one seems to know who the architect was. Henry Chalfant was a successful lawyer whose father was a successful lawyer as well.

    Front
    Detail

  • Allegheny Preparatory School, Allegheny West

    Allegheny Preparatory School

    The children of Allegheny millionaires could walk around the corner to this school, where they would presumably be prepared to go on to college and become better educated than their merely rich parents, or perhaps just become wastrel thugs like Harry Thaw. It is now a training center for the city police, most of whom are not children of Allegheny millionaires.

    Lincoln Avenue front
    From Lincoln Avenue

    Old Pa Pitt does not know the original purpose of the low industrial-looking building to the left of the school in this picture. It seems to date from between 1910 and 1923, to judge by our old maps, and it belonged to the school. Can anyone enlighten us?

    Addendum: The architect was Thomas H. Scott, who would later design the Machesney Building (Benedum-Trees Building) and the Garden Theatre, among other works.

  • Thaw Mansion, Allegheny West

    Thaw mansion

    Architecturally this house is a bit of a mess, but a pleasing mess. It was built in three different stages, the first in 1870 and the last in 1900.

    Thaw mansion

    The Thaw family was a bit of a mess, too. William Thaw was a railroad baron who made all the money in the world and had ten surviving children by two wives. Of those children, the one everybody remembers was Harry Thaw, who murdered Stanford White in front of as many witnesses as could possibly be crammed into one nightclub. It was the climax of a career of difficult situations, and in every one of them Harry’s mother used the mighty power of money to extract him from his difficulties. (Harry used money to light cigars with.) You can read about his murder of White and the legal adventures that followed in Harry Thaw’s Wikipedia article; for our purposes it is sufficient to say that the family money saved his hide again, and Clarence Darrow provided him with a nifty new defense called “temporary insanity.” Many who knew Harry Thaw would question the temporariness of the insanity.

    Thaw mansion

    This was not the Thaws’ biggest house. Their favorite architect, Theophilus P. Chandler Jr., designed a house for them in Squirrel Hill named Lyndhurst; that one was demolished in the 1940s.

    From the side

  • Rhodes Mansion, Allegheny West

    Rhodes mansion

    Does anyone know the history of this house? A twenty-year-old Post-Gazette article describes the restoration challenges that would have awaited a new owner; Father Pitt does not know the history of the house since then, and he thinks the article may be incorrect about the history before that. The Post-Gazette article says it was built for steel magnate Joshua Rhodes; but the Joshua Rhodes who turns up in every other search lived on Western Avenue and certainly did not have a 32-year-old wife in the early 1900s, which the article says was Grace Rhodes’ age when she died of a brain tumor not long after the house was built. Joshua Rhodes might have built this house for one of his sons; that is old Pa Pitt’s best hypothesis. William B. Rhodes would have been 39 in 1903; Walter J. Rhodes would have been 31. Either one of them might plausibly have had a wife in her thirties in the early 1900s.

    Almost all the surviving great houses in Allegheny West have either been repurposed as institutional or office buildings or restored as grand mansions once again. This Tudor palace, however, seems to be in need of a bit of help. Clearly the exterior is in good shape, though the front lawn is not maintained much this year. A suburban doctor’s house would probably cost less than this 40-room mansion. Who’s ready for a do-it-yourself adventure?

    Front door
    Decoration

    The decorative shield over the front door looks from a distance as though it once bore an inscription, but as far as old Pa Pitt can tell it was always decorated with horizontal ridges alone.