Father Pitt

Category: Architecture

  • The Pittsburgh Foursquare

    Houses on Aylesboro Avenue
    Aylesboro Avenue, Squirrel Hill.

    You see them everywhere in Pittsburgh neighborhoods: those big cube-shaped houses with a pyramid roof, a house-wide porch, and a big dormer facing the front.

    Foursquare in Beechview
    House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.

    This is the Pittsburgh Foursquare, the local variety of the American Foursquare. It was a style especially popular, with variations, in the years from about 1890 to about 1930.

    Perspective view of the same house
    House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.

    These houses are called “foursquare” because they look square, and the ground floor usually has four rooms, counting the reception hall with the grand staircase, which in those civilized days was often the largest room in the house. The stairway usually had a landing with a big art-glass window to impress visitors.

    Stairway with stained glass
    Staircase with stained glass in a Beechview house.

    These windows often go missing—sometimes because they are stolen if the house is vacant for a while, and sometimes because, in the middle twentieth century, it was so embarrassingly old-fashioned to have stained glass in one’s house that people either covered the windows with heavy curtains or replaced them with something more in line with modern taste, like glass block. Nevertheless, there are thousands of them still in place in Pittsburgh houses.

    On the second floor were three or four bedrooms and a bathroom (and usually a linen closet the size of a small room). The third floor generally had two more full-sized rooms, which might be used as servants’ quarters.

    The most distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh version is usually a steeper pitch of the roof, allowing more space in the two rooms on the third floor and giving the houses a taller and beefier appearance than the Midwestern varieties of the species. It is also true that the Pittsburgh version is designed to make the best use of narrow city lots, giving the homeowner as much “detached” house as can be squashed into a lot typically thirty feet wide. For that reason, Pittsburgh Foursquares are usually considerably deeper than they are wide. The design is exceptionally efficient in cramming square footage into a city lot, even allowing for the reception hall, which later generations would consider wasted space.

    Side of a house in Mount Oliver
    House on Koehler Street in Mount Oliver.

    Whole blocks in streetcar neighborhoods of the early 1900s are lined with these houses.

    Alton Street in Beechview
    Alton Street, Beechview.
    Fallowfield Avenue in Beechview
    Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
    Fallowfield Avenue again
    Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
    Two houses in Mount Oliver
    Penn Avenue, Mount Oliver.

    Though the basic shape varied little, decorative details like the dormer could make the house distinctive.

    House on Koehler Street in Mount Oliver
    House on Koehler Street, Mount Oliver.

    Pittsburgh Foursquares are built in all materials—frame, brick, stone, and occasionally concrete block.

    Concrete-block house in Mount Oliver
    House on Penn Avenue, Mount Oliver.

    Cameras: Squirrel Hill, Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Beechview, Canon PowerShot A530; Mount Oliver, Kodak EasyShare Z981.

  • The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

    Aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Perma-Stone: old Pa Pitt calls them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are the four most common artificial sidings applied to Pittsburgh houses, especially frame houses. (But not exclusively frame houses: siding salesmen were aggressive enough to go for brick houses if they sensed weakness in the buyer.) They are responsible for more uglification in the city than any other single force. That is not to say that it is impossible to use them well, only that they are almost never used well. We can find perfect illustrations within a block of each other on the South Side.

    Aluminum siding

    Aluminum is usually easy to recognize by the rust stains, which probably come from the fasteners rather than the aluminum itself.

    Vinyl siding

    Vinyl siding is the closest in appearance to wood siding, and if applied well can be hard to distinguish from a distance. But instead of removing the wood siding and replacing it with vinyl, the contractors usually stick the vinyl over the wood siding. That means two bad things: first, that there is an invisible layer of decaying wood; second, that all the trim on the house is swallowed up, leaving the house a cartoon shell. In the picture above, the whole process has been taken to its logical conclusion in the right-hand house. A good deal of money was spent on new windows in the wrongest possible shapes, vinyl trim, and paste-on fake shutters that could not possibly cover the windows, leaving the house an expensive architectural wreck.

    Insulbrick

    Insulbrick is a trademark name (though there were disputes over the trademark) for siding made up of asphalt sheets stamped with a brick pattern. When the siding is new, it looks as if a child drew bricks on the house with crayons. When it is older, it looks like the picture above. In spite of the name, it is very bad at insulating.

    Perma-Stone

    Perma-Stone is another trademark name: it is siding that imitates stonework, once again in a cartoonish fashion.

    Sometimes more than one of these sidings can grow on a house, either because the owner loved variety, or because different generations attacked different maintenance problems in different halfhearted ways.

    Insulbrick and Vinyl

    Insulbrick and vinyl.

    Aluminum and Perma-Stone

    Aluminum and Perma-Stone.

    If you are the owner of a frame house that still has wooden siding, congratulations! You are a member of a small elite minority in Pittsburgh. Keep a good coat of paint on that siding, and attack problems while they are still young, and you will keep your house beautiful for generations to come.

    If the time comes to replace that siding, though, consider the long term. Contractors will tell you that their artificial sidings will last forever. Look around you. You can see that they are misinformed. Consider replacing wood with wood, or—if wood is not in your budget—consider replacing it with vinyl rather than covering it over with vinyl.

  • United Steelworkers Building from the Boulevard of the Allies

    Architects Curtis and Davis enlivened what would have been a simple square box with a distinctive diamond-grid facing that continues down into the pillars at ground level.

  • Reflections in PPG Place

    Artsy if not artistic pictures of PPG Place reflecting PPG Place and nearby buildings.

  • Croatian Fraternal Union Building

    Croatian Fraternal Union Building

    UPDATED UPDATE: The building is now demolished, but the terra-cotta façade will supposedly be re-erected on the new building.

    This sadly abandoned building, which has its own Wikipedia article, has been sitting empty in what has become a valuable part of Oakland for at least three years. It has come into the hands of the University of Pittsburgh, as everything in Oakland does sooner or later, and Pitt wants to demolish it. Preservationists want to keep it, because it is an important part of Croatian-American history. Pitt usually wins.

    The architect was Pierre A. Liesch, a disciple of the great Frederick Osterling. Liesch is credited with some of the detail on the Union Trust Building downtown: “Liesch was a native of Luxembourg and later used a similar Flemish Gothic style for his design of the Croatian Fraternal Union Building,” says Wikipedia. “Similar” is generous. The Union Trust Building is, in Old Pa Pitt’s opinion, a work of colossal genius. This building is interesting and, again in Father Pitt’s opinion, not in the best taste. (His opinion might be different if the building still had the “highly ornate overhanging cornice and a pointed-arch apex topped with a sculptural element” mentioned in the Wikipedia article.) Of course it may well be that the Croatian clients had no budget for colossal genius, and Mr. Liesch gave them what they could afford.

  • Herron Hill Pumping Station

    Herron Hill Pumping Station

    Why shouldn’t a water-pumping station look like a Roman basilica? It’s what the Romans would have done. This substantial building was designed by William Smith Fraser, and it has its own appropriately substantial Wikipedia article. Unfortunately the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority has thought it necessary to brick up the windows, so that what used to be an airy temple of technology must be like a tomb inside now.

  • Gailliot Center for Newman Studies

    Gailliot Center for Newman Studies

    There is still at least one architect in Pittsburgh who can work in the Gothic idiom with modern materials. His name is David J. Vater, and he designed this building on Dithridge Street (which opened in 2007) and the Ryan Catholic Newman Center around the corner on Bayard Avenue. His listing on Porch.com has this to say about his firm: “Based in Pittsburgh, David J Vater Ra is an architectural firm that provides bathroom design, site planning, and master planning as well as other services.” The fact that bathroom design is mentioned first suggests that the demand for grand Gothic institutional buildings is low.

  • Schenley High School

    Schenley High School

    This is the most magnificent work of an architect who specialized in magnificent schools: Edward Stotz, whose son was the noted preservationist Charles Stotz. The building occupies a triangular sloping plot, which certainly challenged the architect. Mr. Stotz responded with a triangular building that looks inevitable on its site.

    When it opened in 1916, Schenley High was a shrine of culture and art, an idealized version of what high-school education could be in an enlightened city. It closed as a school in 2008, and it has now, like every other substantial building in a desirable neighborhood, been refurbished as luxury apartments.

    Curiously, Edward Stotz was also responsible for another famously triangular building: the Monongahela Bank Building, which is now the Wood Street subway station and the Wood Street Galleries.

  • Cathedral of Learning in the Rain

    Cathedral of Learning from Schenley Farms

    It started to rain while Father Pitt was out for a walk today, which gave us this atmospheric picture of the Cathedral of Learning looming through the mist like a heavenly palace behind the pleasant houses of Schenley Farms. This is why old Pa Pitt’s cameras live in a waterproof bag. Father Pitt himself is not waterproof, but he does dry fairly quickly.

    If you like black and white and all the greys in between, you might enjoy Father Pitt’s Monochrome World, a very simple site that collects his favorite black-and-white pictures from Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

  • Webster Hall

    Webster Hall

    A full view of the Fifth Avenue façade of Webster Hall. The design is by Henry Hornbostel, who successfully created a conservative Art Deco classicism that harmonizes with the other grand monuments on Fifth Avenue.

    The building was apparently put up as fancy bachelor apartments, but soon became a grand hotel (it is now apartments again). It was famous for the Webster Hall Cake, whose secret recipe is still treasured by little old ladies all over Pittsburgh. But old Pa Pitt is delighted to discover that the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle has a whole article on Webster Hall Cake, including two recipes that claim to be close approximations. Father Pitt suspects that there are still little old ladies out there who claim to have the real thing, but these recipes are a good start.