Perhaps the best way to describe the architect Frederick Sauer is to say that he was a high-functioning mad genius. He produced some very respectable church designs—St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, St. Stanislaus Kostka, and St. Mary of the Mount, to name three. Meanwhile, he went home every evening and started pulling rocks out of his back woods and piling them up into whimsical buildings with his own hands.
When he designed a private residence, Sauer sometimes pushed the limits of current styles. Here is a big stony house built from his design in 1893. It hits some of the fashionable Romanesque notes, but that immense crowstepped Flemish gable makes a big impression on the neighbors. (The high-pitched roof and big gables also give the house a roomy third floor.)
When we last saw this triple building, it was getting a fresh coat of paint. The new color scheme looks much better, and old Pa Pitt offers his congratulations to the people with taste at Mozart Management.
The three connected buildings were put up in 1901 as the Howard, the Delaware, and the Norfolk, and we can just barely make out the ghosts of the inscriptions above the entrances. The architect was William E. Snaman.1 The Norfolk, above, preserves the original appearance. In the other two, the balconies have been filled in to make closets, and they looked forbiddingly blank with the old paint scheme; the more artistic new scheme at least emphasizes the surviving trim.
Source: Pittsburg Post, September 25, 1900. “It developed yesterday that ex-Mayor Bernard McKenna and a syndicate of local capitalists will be the owners of the three apartment houses now in course of erection in the Highland avenue residence district, particulars of which were announced in this column last week. They were designed by Architect William E. Snaman, and the contract for their erection has been let to L. E. Umstead, of Allegheny. Each will stand on a lot 40×100 feet each at Highland avenue and Bryant street, and will be of brick and stone, and three stories high. When completed and ready for occupancy the houses will represent an investment of over $100,000.” Thanks to David Schwing for finding the clipping. ↩︎
Designed by Tasso Katselas, this 22-storey apartment tower opened in 1962. It has reverted to its original name, Highland House, after some years as “the Park Lane.”
Many projects for skyscraper apartments or hotels were proposed for Highland Park, but this is the only one that ever succeeded. “A dramatic use of the Miesian glass cage formula applied to a 22 story apartment house” was how James D. Van Trump described it in “The Stones of Pittsburgh.” “Located on the edge of Highland Park it seems to float above a nearby reservoir.”
Miesian is a good term for it: the building adopts the colonnade of stilts that became the signature of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Many imitators of Mies seem to lose courage and make the peripteral colonnade a narrow and useless space; see, for example, the Westinghouse Building. Katselas, on the other hand, if anything exaggerated the width of the porch, so that the ground floor is reduced to a little entrance cage, leaving a big broad outdoor space under the shelter of twenty-one floors of steel and glass.
This is a big apartment complex, but it is not nearly as big as it was meant to be.
In the beginning of 1939, an apartment complex was proposed for this land. it would require zoning changes in an area that was mostly single-family houses and mansions, and when residents saw the designs by architect Clifford Lake, there was much loud protest.
“Mercer Plans Big Apartment,” Pittsburgh Press, January 12, 1939, p. 5.
It would be a huge complex of interlinked towers, nine storeys high, that would completely change the character of Negley Avenue. “It will be necessary for City Council to change the district from a Class A to a Class C zone before work can be started,” the Press reported.
It was obvious from the reaction that the plans had been far too ambitious. By May, the plans had shrunk. “Original plans for the structure have been scaled down from a nine-story 623-family apartment to the present six-story building, Mr. Lake said.”
But many of the residents nearby were still not satisfied. Give them an inch, they thought, and who knows how many ells they might take?
“You well understand,” said an attorney for the opposing property owners, “that it is impossible under the law to negotiate what kind of structure will be built after the zoning ordinance is passed.
“They propose to change the law so that hotels, educational and charitable institutions, jails and commercial businesses can be placed in a district where these people have built homes.”
It was not until a year later, in 1940, that a building permit was applied for. But the fight wasn’t over. When the zoning law was changed, residents went to court, and they won. Then came the Second World War, which was an even bigger fight than the zoning battle.
Finally, in 1946, the zoning law was changed to permit three-storey apartments in the area, and construction of the reduced complex begin in 1947, finishing in 1948.
Perhaps because of the long fight, the complex makes a surprisingly modest impression from the street. The landscaping is lush and park-like: this complex, like Gateway Center, makes good on the promise of “towers in a park,” although “towers” is a bit generous for buildings with three floors and a high basement.
The buildings themselves are fairly ordinary, not the dream towers Mr. Lake envisioned in 1939. The entrances, however, are decorated in late-Art-Deco fashion to maintain the impression that you are approaching something special.
The sides of the buildings facing the garden court have been given ridiculously narrow cartoon paste-on shutters, which do them no favors. The sides facing the side streets have no shutters and look the way Mr. Lake meant them to look.
Source: Pittsburg Press, December 18, 1905, p. 20. “Architects Alden & Harlow have plans for a $20,000 residence to be erected at Negley and Elgin avenues for A. E. Nieman.” In Margaret Henderson Floyd’s book Architecture After Richardson, the name is spelled “Niemann,” but the name is Nieman on plat maps and in city directories, and, yes, old Pa Pitt was squirrely and obsessive enough to look it up in Polk’s. ↩︎
We have seen pictures of the outside of this church before—here, for example, is a picture from May of 2021:
The other day the current inhabitants, the Union Project, were kind enough to turn old Pa Pitt loose in the sanctuary to take as many pictures as he wanted.
The architect was John L. Beatty, who designed the building in about 1900. A newspaper picture from 1905 (taken from microfilm, so the quality is poor) shows the exterior looking more or less the way it does now.
Pittsburg Press, April 29, 1905.
After a disastrous fire, much was rebuilt in 1915, again under Beatty’s supervision.1 Another fire in 1933 would necessitate rebuilding part of the tower.
The church was built for the Second United Presbyterian congregation, which had moved out to the eastern suburbs from its former location downtown at Sixth Avenue and Cherry Way (now William Penn Place)—exactly one block from the First United Presbyterian Church, which moved to Oakland at about the same time. Later it became the East End Baptist Church, and then was renamed the Union Baptist Church. When that congregation folded, the church was bought by a Mennonite group that founded the Union Project. It is now a community center for pottery, because “everyone should have access to clay.” The sanctuary—which has been preserved mostly unaltered, except for the removal of pews and other furnishings—is available for large events.
The sanctuary is roughly square, which is typical of many non-liturgical Protestant churches in Pittsburgh at the turn of the twentieth century. Above, looking up at the center of the ceiling.
The stained glass was restored as part of a remarkable community effort in which people in the neighborhood learned the art of stained-glass restoration themselves. It would have cost more than a million dollars to have the work done professionally, but volunteers learned priceless skills, and the glass is beautiful.
The vestibule includes some of the original furniture from the church, and some smaller stained-glass windows.
Source: The Construction Record, January 16, 1915: “The Second United Presbyterian Congregation has selected Architect J. L. Beatty, 146 Sixth street, to prepare plans for repairing the church on Stanton and Negley avenues.” ↩︎
Built in 1905–1909, St. Andrew’s was designed by Carpenter & Crocker, who seem to have been favorites among the Episcopalians of Pittsburgh: they also designed the parish house for the cathedral downtown and St. James’ in Homewood, now the Church of the Holy Cross. This building is dominated by its outsized tower.
Very grouchy gargoyles guard the tower.
An ornamental pinnacle on one corner of the tower.
After years of neglect and decay, this apartment building in the otherwise prosperous neighborhood of Highland Park is finally condemned.
And it will be a tragedy to lose it, because it is an extraordinary work by an extraordinary architect.
Frederick Scheibler is possibly the most-talked-about architect Pittsburgh ever produced, and this building—put up in 1906 for Mary M. Coleman—marks a turning point in Scheibler’s style, according to his biographer Martin Aurand. “The facade departs from precedent, however, in the sheer strength of its massing, and in its near total lack of common domestic imagery—even a cornice.… There is virtually no exterior ornament at all. The Coleman facade continues a process of abstraction begun at the Linwood [in North Point Breeze], but the leap forward in Scheibler’s developing style is sudden.”1
Considering the value of real estate in Highland Park right now, restoring this building should be not only public-spirited but also profitable. Is any ambitious developer willing to take it on? That blue sticker isn’t necessarily a death sentence: it will be removed if the dangerous conditions are remediated. To make it easier for you, Scheibler’s original drawings for this building are preserved in the Architecture Archive at Carnegie Mellon, so there need be no guesswork in the restoration.
The Highland Park Residential Historic District, which is coextensive with the neighborhood as defined by the city, preserves more good examples of Queen Anne houses than perhaps any other neighborhood, although Shadyside would come in a close second. Here is an especially splendid Queen Anne mansion on Stanton Avenue. (Addendum: This was the home of architect William Smith Fraser, which he designed and built for himself in 1891.1)
This house gives us two common Queen Anne elements that were missing from the mansion above: a turret and curved surfaces in the gable.
Here is a whole row of Queen Anne houses bulging with stubby turrets. They lean toward the Rundbogenstil end of the spectrum, which Father Pitt mentions because he misses no chance to say the word “Rundbogenstil.”
This mansion on Stanton Avenue has been converted to apartments, but its basic outlines remain.
This last one might be better classified as “Stick style,” a closely related style that preceded but overlapped the Queen Anne style. Stick-style houses have more of an emphasis on woodwork, especially boards overlaid on the siding for contrasting trim, as we see here, and less of an emphasis on curves and complexities of form.
Three identical houses with all the signature quirks of the Queen Anne style: turrets, odd angles, curved surfaces, oriels, shingles, and every other effect that can be applied to a city house to make it more picturesque.
