A little modernistic apartment building whose details have been marred somewhat—the stock “picture windows” do it no favors. But enough remains that we can imagine the clean late-moderne look the architect was going for.
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Nellie Mae Apartments, Homewood
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Belmar Christian Church (Baptist Temple Church), Homewood
Edwin V. Denick was the architect of this neat little corner-tower church, which was built in 1905.1 The current congregation, the Baptist Temple Church, keeps it scrupulously tidy. “We do what we can,” one member modestly told old Pa Pitt—modestly because the man had just spent hours cleaning inside.
Old maps show that the attached parsonage was built later than the church, but it was matched very well to the style and material of the main building.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Old Service Station, Brushton
For some reason prewar service stations fascinate old Pa Pitt, so he will continue to collect them even if no one else is interested. This one was probably built in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It is a sturdy little building with well-preserved details, and you could buy it right now.
We file this under “Homewood” because city planning maps do not recognize Brushton as a separate neighborhood.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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Pittsburgh Railways Car Barn in Homewood
As you walk or drive down Frankstown Avenue, you might wonder what this oddly imposing building that walls in one side of the street was in its prime. The answer is that it was part of an enormous Pittsburgh Railways car barn, where streetcars went home to rest after a hard day at work. In the heyday of streetcars there were four long blocks of car barn and yard here, but this is what’s left. Since the streetcars left, it has been many things, including a bowling alley, and the otherwise forbidding wall has been festooned with colorful murals by local artists.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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A Few Buildings on Frankstown Avenue, Homewood
Homewood is showing considerable signs of revitalization, but there are still long stretches of what used to be the commercial district that are nearly deserted. Here is a block of Frankstown Avenue that seems typical of the area: about a third of the buildings demolished, a third abandoned, and a third still inhabited and straggling along. We begin with an apartment building with two storefronts that has been kept standing by low-budget renovations.
The private club “WEMCO” seems to be thriving, and the small apartment building that goes with it is not only well maintained but also kept scrupulously tidy.
Two abandoned buildings that will probably be taken down sooner or later. Because they have been abandoned, they preserve details that might otherwise have been replaced by cheap renovations.
Here is an interesting answer to the question of how to make attractive dwellings over a storefront. The grand arched entrance to the apartments sets them apart from the business downstairs and makes them feel like a real home, not a temporary way station.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. This duplex with inset balconies looked a lot better before the lower balcony or porch was filled in, but we can see what it was aiming for.
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Homewood Presbyterian Church (Bethesda Presbyterian Church), Homewood
Thomas Hannah designed this unusual church, which was built in about 1917.1 We find many churches in Pittsburgh where the sanctuary is upstairs, with Sunday-school rooms and social halls on the ground floor; this appears to be one of the very few where there are rooms above the sanctuary. It is still Presbyterian, but in 1961 came into the hands of the Bethesda United Presbyterian congregation.
When you look at this church, it looks back.
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Rowhouses by Frederick Scheibler, Homewood
These houses were built in 1910, and nothing like their brisk modernity had been seen in Pittsburgh. Frederick Scheibler was our most adventurous modernist in those days, and these would have been approved by the Bauhaus ten or twenty years later.
The two houses on the upper end of the upper row have been kept in near-original condition, though they are in less than perfect shape.
In the rest of the row, different ownerships have sent the houses careening off in various directions.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. Like many architects of terraces like these, Scheibler repeated this design in multiple locations. Apparently both Scheibler and his clients considered the design a success. We’ll be seeing more of these little houses.
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Alpha Apartments, Homewood
This apartment building with Renaissance details was built in about 1905. The architect was A. E. Linkenheimer,1 about whom old Pa Pitt knows very little so far.
The name of the building is interesting, because it is the name of a project that was planned at about the same time nearby at the intersection of Penn and East End Avenues, where Titus de Bobula was to supervise an immense $600,000 Alpha Apartment Hotel. That project fell through; at the moment Father Pitt does not know that the name was anything more than coincidence.
This building is under sentence of condemnation, but it does not appear to be in such bad shape that it could not be rescued. Homewood is not rich, but there has been some renovation going on in nearby streets.
The Braddock Avenue side has its own neatly symmetrical façade.
Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
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St. Stephen Evangelical Lutheran Church, Homewood
Now the Homewood Church of Christ, a congregation that keeps the building in beautiful shape. Old Pa Pitt was out walking in Homewood a while ago when he spotted this church two blocks away. He immediately thought, “That looks like a Lutheran church designed by O. M. Topp.”
And so it was.1 The cornerstone, as we see, was laid in 1916, at a time when O. M. Topp was the favorite architect of Lutherans in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. Lutheran churches from before the Second World War have a characteristic traditional church shape, like Catholic and Episcopalian churches but unlike the majority of Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches in our area. O. M. Topp’s designs for medium-sized churches like this one have a straightforward Gothic simplicity that marks them as his work.
Note the rectangular windows where most Gothic architects would place Gothic arches.
- Source: Pittsburg Press, April 23, 1916, p. 20 “O. M. Topp has been selected to prepare plans for the rebuilding of a $40,000 church at Hamilton and Brushton aves., for the St. Stephens’ Evangelical Lutheran congregation.” ↩︎
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Corner Store in Homewood
Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR. A typical Pittsburgh corner building—typical especially in that the corner is not a right angle. Some of the details are well preserved, including the elaborate decorative brickwork in the cornice and the signboard above the storefront, ready for some local artist to inscribe the next tenant’s name in paint.
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