Father Pitt

Category: Beechview

  • Double Duplexes on Neeld Avenue, Beechview

    Double duplex on Neeld Avenue

    These double duplexes represent a common phenomenon in the streetcar neighborhoods that developed around the turn of the twentieth century. They were built for C. M. Neeld in 1916 on land that his family had owned for generations. When the streetcar line was pushed through from downtown in 1905, the Neelds found that their old family homes were right on the car line, and thus right in the path of speedy development. They profited by developing some of their land, but they kept a whole city block for themselves until after the Second World War. These apartments—twelve of them in three buildings—would have turned some of the vacant land into a good steady income that couldn’t be matched by the small farming the Neelds had probably done before the streetcars came.

    Front elevation
    Three double duplexes

    Father Pitt guesses that the architect was William Arthur Thomas, who favored this white face brick and designed other similar duplexes in Beechview.1

    Double duplex

    The lowest of the three preserves its original details best. The one at the top of the slope has been altered the most, with mid-twentieth-century “picture” windows replacing the original much larger windows.

    Upper double duplex
    Original windows

    The one in the middle preserves these original small windows in the stairwells.

    Dormer
    Segmental pediment
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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  • The New Casa San José, Beechview

    1600 Broadway

    We’ve been following the restoration of this building, and the new building rising beside it, for some time now. (We have pictures of the steel frame of the new building and an earlier stage of the restoration of the corner building.) When it is finished, it will be a new community center for Casa San José, an organization founded by Sister Janice Vanderneck that provides services for the Latino community in Pittsburgh. Beechview has become our most Latino neighborhood (though the Latino population is still only a fraction of the neighborhood at large), and Sister Janice and her organization stand in the great Pittsburgh tradition of religious people coming through with help for new immigrants, who quickly pay back the help they received by making their neighborhoods flourish. (Try out a few of the restaurants—Peruvian, Mexican, Salvadoran, and so on—that have moved into Beechview in recent years, and you will have a lot to be thankful for.)

    Addition to 1600

    The most impressive thing about the new building is how much it already looks like a native. It is built from the blond pressed brick that is the most common material in the Beechview business district, and if we look at the mortar—an odd detail to scrutinize, but old Pa Pitt never claimed not to be odd—we see that it is soot-colored, like century-old mortar everywhere in Beechview, because someone decided that this building ought to fit with its neighborhood.

    Brickwork
    Ornament

    There are even little floral ornaments set in the bricks, just as an architect like Beechview’s own Charles Geisler might have done a century ago.

    1600

    And of course there is the big advantage of a Beechview location, especially for poor immigrants: the Red Line runs right down the main street and stops right in front of the new Casa San José.

    Addition
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.
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  • Three Houses in Beechview, 1916 and Today

    The image above comes to us courtesy of the amazingly thorough Brookline Connection site. It shows Princess Avenue in Beechview at the intersection with Westfield Street, and the houses in the picture all still stand today. We’ll look at three of them (we’ve already seen the duplex at far right), beginning with the biggest and most elaborate.

    1627 Princess Avenue

    Here is a center-hall house that must have been well above the usual budget for Beechview houses. We notice the diamond panes in the upper sashes of the upstairs windows—a style we noticed elsewhere in Beechview and had reason to think might be associated with the architect W. Ward Williams. The house is now divided into apartments, but retains many of its characteristic details.

    Oval window
    Oriel with art glass
    1627 Princess Avenue
    1621

    This gambrel-roofed cottage has had its porch filled in to make a sunroom, which the photograph shows us had already happened by 1916. A photo of the house still under construction represented Beechwood, the original name of Beechview, in an ad for the plan in the Gazette for May 7, 1905.

    By the way, do you notice how the advertisement dwells on the paved streets? Take a look at the 1916 photograph again.

    The Brookline Connection site once again comes through with a better version of the same picture:

    Street names in Beechview have changed, in many cases more than once: Grove Street was the original name of this part of Princess Avenue.
    1645 Princess Avenue

    A gable-fronted foursquare house. Except for the replacement of its original porch rail with a more durable brick one, it has hardly changed at all.

    1645 Princess Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Lee School, Beechview

    Lee School
    Taken with the ultra-wide auxiliary camera on old Pa Pitt’s phone, so the picture is a mess if you enlarge it. But the ultra-wide lens is convenient in Pittsburgh’s narrow streets.

    Bartberger, Cooley & Bartberger were the architects of this dignified little school, built in 1911. The Bartbergers were Charles M. Bartberger and his brother Edward, and Cooley was C. D. Cooley, who would later establish his home nearby in Brookline. The school has been converted to apartments under the name Gualtieri Manor.

    Entrance to the Lee School
    Terra-cotta ornaments
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  • Fairy-Tale Cottages in Beechview

    1323 Westfield Street

    Even the tiniest houses could be romanticized in the age of what Father Pitt calls the Fairy-Tale Style of domestic architecture. The little bungalow above and the mirror-image cottages below probably date from the 1930s. A coating of snow helps the fairy-tale atmosphere.

    1315 Westfield Street
    1317 Westfield Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • House by William Wolfshafer in Beechview

    1614 Westfield Street

    A typical Pittsburgh Foursquare, just like hundreds of others in Beechview and thousands upon thousands in the city and inner suburbs, except that by random chance we happen to know the architect of this one: William Wolfshafer (or Wolfschaffer; like many German architects in Pittsburgh, he had a German and an Anglicized spelling of his name). He was a fairly successful architect, to judge by the occasional substantial apartment buildings we find with his name attached, and he was obviously capable of delivering just the kind of conservative but up-to-date house merchant-class Pittsburghers craved. Note the well-preserved classical details in the dormer.

    Dormer
    1614 Westfield Street
    Porch
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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  • Art Deco Urn at the Beechwood School, Beechview

    Urn with yellow chrysanthemum
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    Press C. Dowler was the architect of the school, and may have designed the urns as well.

  • Duplex in Beechview by W. A. Thomas

    1401–1403 Beechview Avenue

    William Arthur Thomas designed this First-World-War-era duplex,1 which is typical of the better class of Pittsburgh duplexes: it offers two spacious apartments (plus attic and basement), each with more square footage than many city houses. Thomas was very fond of white Kittanning brick, to judge by the number of his buildings that made use of it.

    Duplex in Beechview
    Duplex
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Olympus E-20N.
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  • Construction in Beechview

    Addition to 1600 Broadway under construction

    A while ago we mentioned that this building on Broadway in Beechview was undergoing a long-delayed restoration. Now, as the few Red Line riders who look up from their phone screens may have noticed, an addition is going up next to it, bringing an honest-to-goodness construction crane into Beechview for the first time in decades.

    Addition to 1600 Broadway under construction
    Addition to 1600 Broadway under construction
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.
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  • A Few Houses on Gladys Avenue, Beechview

    1114 Gladys Avenue

    Gladys Avenue was one of the richest streets in the middle-class neighborhood of Beechview. We’ve already seen a bungalow designed by the notable Pittsburgh architect W. Ward Williams. Here are a few more houses nearby, beginning with another designed by Williams, this one a generously sized Tudor—or English-style, as it would have been called in 1914, when it was built.

    1114 Gladys Avenue
    1132 Gladys Avenue

    They’re nearly obscured by shrubbery, but note the very interesting sloped porch supports of this house that echo the curving slope of the roof.

    1108 Gladys Avenue

    A generously extra-large foursquare. Have you noticed that these first three houses all have unusual diamond panes in the upper sashes of some of their windows? Those were also a feature of the bungalow designed by W. Ward Williams on the same street, making us wonder whether Williams was responsible for all these houses.

    1108
    1108
    1106

    Father Pitt had a nice conversation with the owner of this house, who tells us that it was built in about 1919. If you peer into the shadows behind the flag in the picture above, you may notice an exceptionally fine art-glass window in the parlor.

    1106
    1106
    Sony Alpha 3000.
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