Father Pitt

Category: Allegheny West

  • Letitia Holmes House, Allegheny West

    Letitia Holmes House

    The Letitia Holmes house, with Harry Darlington’s one-room-wide mansion clinging to the right of it. Mrs. Holmes’ splendidly dignified Italianate house was built in about 1870, and instead of repeating its history here old Pa Pitt will simply refer you to a well-researched page on the Holmes house in the Allegheny West neighborhood site. Letitia Holmes was a widow when she built this house, but she built it for elegant entertainments: the room with the tall windows to the right of the front door is a ballroom that spans the entire depth of the house.

  • Harry Darlington House, Allegheny West

    Harry Darlington House

    Half a block deep, four storeys tall, and one room wide—that is the adaptation railroad magnate Harry Darlington made to build a big mansion on a tiny lot. This narrow but substantial Romanesque pile was built in about 1890.

    To the left of it is the Holmes house, about which more soon.

  • Byers-Lyons House

    Byers-Lyons House

    If you were a millionaire in Pittsburgh in the late 1800s, of course you expected to have a mansion by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow. They were Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architects, after all. This Renaissance palace on Ridge Avenue is particularly splendid. Although it now belongs to the Community College of Allegheny County, its grand interior spaces have not been altered very much.

    Arcade

    The cloister-like arcade in front is one of the most striking features of the house.

    Gate

    This gate, which is either original or at least quite old, is kept in beautiful shape.

  • Sidewalks of Beech Avenue

    Allegheny West is one of Pittsburgh’s most pleasant neighborhoods, and Beech Avenue may be the most delightful residential street in the whole city. The street is only two blocks long, but you would be hard pressed to find a better collection of domestic architecture on any street in the city. Add shady trees, a magnificent Gothic church at one end, and literary associations (Gertrude Stein was born here, and Mary Roberts Rinehart lived here when she wrote her most famous novel), and you can see why old Pa Pitt loves this street.

  • Hipwell Mfg Co. (the Flashlight Factory)

    Hipwell Mfg. Co.

    This building is remarkably well preserved mostly because it belonged to a company that stayed in the same business until 2005 without ever outgrowing its limited premises. The Hipwell Maufacturing Company’s most famous products were metal HIPCO flashlights, the kind that used to be ubiquitous before plastics took over. But the company (according to this page) was an important innovator in the electrical business, inventing the single-cell batteries that power our flashlights and digital cameras and toys and a thousand other things we never think of until we have to buy batteries again. It was also involved in the early stages of telephones and electric toy trains.

    Today the building is lovingly preserved as—what else?—loft apartments, as well as a banquet hall called HIP at the Flashlight Factory.

    Hipco Dry Cell Batteries
    Hipco Flashlights for Safety
    Hipco Industrial, Commercial, Residential

  • Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Allegheny West

    This remarkable little church is actually the only National Historic Landmark on the North Side, and it well deserves the honor. H. H. Richardson put a lot of imagination into making a small church something unique. Note especially the decorative brickwork.

    The immense roof proved heavier than even the great Richardson had calculated. The walls of the church bowed outward under the weight very early. Engineers called in to inspect the damage found that the walls had reached a stable position: they would stay that way forever if the congregation didn’t mind. And so they have stayed for more than a century.

  • A Doorknob in Allegheny West

    2013-08-13-Allegtheny-West-Doorknob-01A special treat for hardware fans.

     

  • Mary Roberts Rinehart Lived Here

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    The Circular Staircase was one of the greatest bestsellers of all time, and Mary Roberts Rinehart lived here when she wrote it—just half a block up Beech Avenue from the house where Gertrude Stein, a writer with a somewhat different style, was born. The success of The Circular Staircase made Mary Roberts Rinehart one of the most powerful literary figures in America, and her good business sense consolidated that power into a publishing empire for her family.

  • Romanesque Details in Allegheny West

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    Architectural historians tend to call everything Romanesque revival “Richardsonian Romanesque,” and with especially good reason in Pittsburgh: Richardson’s Allegheny County Courthouse created a mania for everything Romanesque in Pittsburgh, and many private houses were built in that style for the wealthy merchant classes—especially in Allegheny West, which in the late nineteenth century may have been the richest neighborhood per capita in the country.

    UPDATE: Note the very interesting comment from “Mark”: “Much of the local stone carving as well as work across the North Side, downtown, Carnegie Mellon University, etc was done by Achille Giammartini who built the house at 1410 Page St, near Page St & Manhattan St, in Manchester (beside Allegheny West). Although this was his personal residence he used the exterior as a ‘billboard’ for his considerable skills.” See our article on the Achille Gammartini House.

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  • Rebel Flag in Allegheny West

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    An Allegheny City flag flies on Beech Avenue in Allegheny West. Pittsburgh conquered Allegheny, its smaller neighbor, in 1907, in spite of the vigorous objections of the citizens of Allegheny. Today Allegheny is the North Side of Pittsburgh, but there are some residents who openly speak of secession.