A little apartment building—with four apartments, judging by the number of buzzers—in what old Pa Pitt calls the fairy-tale style, the mark of which is exaggeratedly picturesque features that look like illustrations from a children’s book.
The entrance is so similar to the entrance to the Sholten Arms in Carrick that we have to suspect the same hand drew both. Father Pitt’s guess is that the decorative gable was originally carried all the way to its logical peak, but was truncated when the overhang was rebuilt.
Set back in the woods along Pioneer Avenue, this house obviously belongs to a different era. It looks like a typical Pennsylvania farmhouse, because—as far as we can tell from old maps—that is what it was: an I-house with a plantation-style colonnaded porch added in a moment of prosperity. The Knowlsons owned much of the land that became southwestern Brookline, and they gave the neighborhood its name. They certainly did prosper when they sold their land to developers, along with their relatives the Flemings.
Walter R. Fleming, a real-estate developer, built himself one of the finest houses in Brookline in 1913. It still stands today, and it’s still a handsome house in spite of multiple alterations, which form a sort of manual of things that can happen to a Pittsburgh house over the course of a century: porches can be filled in, windows can be replaced with different sizes; half-timbered stucco can be covered with aluminum or vinyl; chimneys can be shortened.
Knowlson Avenue is a two-block-long, brick-paved street lined with Craftsman Style houses. Their design and integrity make Knowlson Avenue an excellent representative concentration of the Craftsman Style residential character integral to Brookline. While the types of houses are similar to those found in the rest of the neighborhood, the level of integrity, and therefore the articulation of the houses’ original materials and design, is greater here than in any other contiguous area in Brookline.… Beyond its buildings, Knowlson Avenue’s brick-paved street and mature street trees contribute to its strong evocation of Brookline as it appeared ca. 1930.
That made it seem worth a visit, so last week, when old Pa Pitt happened to be in Brookline for other reasons, he made a pilgrimage to this street. It really is an unusually fine collection of houses, and the brick pavement does add to the laid-back atmosphere. (Among other things, bricks encourage drivers to slow down.)
The sun was shining from directly behind the houses on the southwest side of the street, so those will have to wait for another day. But Father Pitt has photographed every single house on the northeast side of the two blocks the architectural inventory mentioned, and here they are.
This picturesque corner cottage in a style the architect probably called “French” actually faces Dorchester Avenue, but it is addressed to Knowlson Avenue, so it counts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The architect’s drawing shows us that nothing on the outside has changed except for the encrustation of newer building to the left.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This building was the Brookline Theatre, a silent-era neighborhood movie house.
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.
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.
