Father Pitt

Category: Brookline

  • Janssen & Abbott in Brookline

    1402 Creedmoor Avenue

    Benno Janssen was one of the titans of Pittsburgh architecture, but even titans take on small projects once in a while. This is a fairly ordinary house on an ordinary street in Brookline, but it was designed by the firm of Janssen & Abbott.1 In spite of revisions that have changed some of the original character, it seems to retain some of the elegant simplicity of Janssen, who never wasted a line.

    Front door

    The front door is set back on the side of the house, which allows a broad front living room opening out on the porch, without dropping visitors right into the living room when they arrive—a clever way of making a narrow lot seem less restrictive.

    Showalter house
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.
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  • St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Brookline

    St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

    In honor of Reformation Day, here is a Lutheran church. O. M. Topp, for a generation the favorite choice of Lutherans, designed this neat Gothic church, which was built in 1929, as we see from the cornerstone.1 But, oddly, the cornerstone says that the church is the Sunday school.

    Cornerstone with date of 1929

    That’s because things didn’t go exactly as planned. This was meant to become the Sunday-school wing, temporarily serving as the sanctuary until the much larger church was built. But then the Depression came, and then the war, and the big church was never built. Instead, when the congregation was finally ready to expand in 1960, it was decided to keep this building as the sanctuary, and a large modern Sunday-school wing was built beside it.

    St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

    The architect’s drawing shows us that nothing on the outside has changed except for the encrustation of newer building to the left.

    “New Church Planned in Brookline,” Pittsburgh Press, April 6, 1929, p. 28.
    St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
    Entrance
    Ornament
    Cross
    Lantern
    Sunday-school wing and main sanctuary

    The Sunday-school wing is in a very different style, but tall Gothic arches are meant to tie it to the earlier building.

    Sunday-school wing
    St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990; Fujifilm FinePix HS20 EXR.
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  • Paul Presbyterian Church, Brookline

    Paul Presbyterian Church

    Paul Presbyterian Church, built in 1923, was named not for the Apostle Paul, as you might suppose, but for Elizabeth Paul, who donated the land on which the church was built along with $1,000 toward the cost of the building. After the congregation dissolved in 2001, the building passed to the Providence Reformed Presbyterian congregation. Now it belongs to Freedom Fellowship Church of Pittsburgh.

    Cornerstone of Paul Presbyterian Church

    The amazingly thorough Brookline Connection site has a long history of Paul Presbyterian Church, all written in bold Comic Sans, like the rest of the site.

    Paul Presbyterian Church

    Stained glass with a depiction of Christ as Good Shepherd was in the front windows until the Reformed Presbyterians took over. The windows needed expensive repair, and, according to the Brookline Connection article, “with this being a rather conservative Presbyterian denomination, displaying the image of Jesus above God ran contrary to the First Commandment, and replacing them was more in line with their beliefs”—a weirdly Arian argument that we hope was garbled in transmission.

    Paul Presbyterian Church
    Paul Presbyterian Church
    Rear of Paul Presbyterian Church
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • Brookline War Memorial

    Brookline War Memorial

    The Brookline war memorial sits in a little triangular park formed by the curve of Brookline Boulevard meeting Chelton Avenue and Queensboro Avenue. The cannon is placed in position to repel invaders from Dormont and Beechview.

    Brookline Honor Roll
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • Spanish Mission Style on Brookline Boulevard

    802 Brookline Boulevard

    Yesterday we looked at the Spanish Mission style in Dormont. One of the adjacent city neighborhoods, Brookline, is also stuffed with Spanish Mission commercial buildings along Brookline Boulevard. Again, we look for tiled overhangs (although often the tiles have been replaced with asphalt shingles) held up by exaggerated brackets.

    Brookline Theatre

    This building was the Brookline Theatre, a silent-era neighborhood movie house.

    Brookline Theatre
    758–800 Brookline Boulevard
    Windows and tiled overhang
    758–800
    936–932
    Slated overhangs

    The building above and the one below both bear dates of 1926, and they share some similar design ideas—though the one above has slated instead of tiled overhangs.

    Tiled overhangs
    972 Brookline Boulevard
    944
    944
    824
    Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    An abstract and geometric form of the style, but the overhang was probably tiled originally, and it probably had brackets before it was rebuilt.

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  • Frank H. Mazza Pavilion, Brookline

    Frank H. Mazza Pavilion

    The challenge: take a 1970s Brutalist retirement home that seemed to interrupt the neighborhood streetscape of Brookline Boulevard and re-imagine it as something bright and welcoming that would fit with the little one-off shops that make up the rest of the Boulevard. Rothschild Doyno Collaborative responded in 2011 with this design, whose muted but varied colors, large windows, and human-scaled ground floor seem at home on the street, whereas the previous incarnation of the building seemed to loom menacingly.

    Mazza Pavilion
    Perspective view
    Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • A Marble House in Brookline? Well, Almost…

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh

    The white facing blocks of this house set it apart from its neighbors, and from most other houses in Pittsburgh. Are they stone? Are they concrete? Well, mostly concrete, but a bit of both.

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh

    When the house was going up, it attracted some attention for its novel material. From the Gazette Times, December 20, 1914:

    MARBLE DUST WITH CEMENT.

    New Brookline House Discloses Novelty in Material Used.

    A house nearing completion in Brookline, attracting much attention, is the home being erected by Mrs. Mary M. Otterman, on Berkshire avenue, near Castlegate avenue. Its construction is hollow tile, veneered on the outside with white “marble” blocks. These blocks are made on the premises by the use of a molding machine, the material used being white cement and marble dust. While this method of construction is not expensive, it has a very beautiful effect. The white “marble” walls, with rich brown trim and colored roof, make it one of the most attractive homes in the South Hills. The property is being visited dally by architects, contractors and prospective builders and no doubt many “marble” veneer houses will be built around Pittsburgh in the early spring.

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh

    Well, it’s surprising how few of these “marble” houses we do see around Pittsburgh. It may be that architects and contractors missed out on a good idea. Here it is, 111 years later, and the “marble” blocks are still in perfect shape.

    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh
    Mrs. Mary M. Otterman house, Brookline, Pittsburgh
    616 Berkshire Avenue
    Olympus E-20N.
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  • Modernistic Double House in Brookline

    5230 and 2528 Wedgemere Street

    “God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, and the details that would have refined the style of this double house have been lost: windows have been replaced, a hipped roof (invisible from this angle) replaced the original flat roof about six years ago, and we suspect that the porch railings and aluminum canopies are not original. Even so, we can see enough to see that this was an interestingly modern construction when it went up, probably in the late 1930s or the 1940s. The corner windows were a badge of modernity.

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  • Mr. Cooley Builds His Dream House

    C. D. Cooley house

    C. D. Cooley, an architect who was associated with the Bartberger brothers for a while in the firm of Bartberger, Cooley & Bartberger, built this home for himself in the newly accessible suburb of Brookline, which had suddenly become an easy commute from downtown Pittsburgh when the Transit Tunnel opened. It is a beautiful house even now, little altered from Mr. Cooley’s vision, and it stands out from its more pedestrian neighbors as a work of unusual taste.

    513 Bellaire Avenue

    But tragedy struck the Cooley family. In 1915, Mrs. Cooley died. She was only thirty years old.1 About half a year later, Mr. Cooley put the house up for sale.

    Advertisement for “Beautiful Residence in Brookline”
    Pittsburg Press, March 23, 1916.

    “Built by Pittsburg architect for home at cost of $9,000, but, owing to death in family will sacrifice to quick buyer.”

    We might add that the building cost of $9,000 might have been twice the cost of neighboring houses in Brookline. The house was not huge, but by Brookline standards it was luxurious, with expensive materials—stone instead of brick, and oak where neighboring houses would have had cheap yellow pine.

    Cooley house
    Porch
    Chimney Pots

    Father Pitt loves chimney pots, and these simple rectangular ones are perfectly matched to the style of the house.

    C. D. Cooley house
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • Ritz Apartments, Brookline

    Ritz Building

    Perhaps not quite as ritzy as they would be in another neighborhood, but for prosperous working-class Brookline this is a fine building. The stone-fronted ground floor is topped by two floors of stone-colored white Kittanning brick, making a rich impression; and clever little decorations made from what look like terra-cotta remnants brighten what might otherwise be a monotonous façade.

    Cornice
    Terra-cotta diamonds
    Nikon COOLPIX P100
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