A few Victorian houses on the edge of Manchester.
The one at right was originally a double house, now apartments.
These two are also divided into apartments, though we wouldn’t know it from the front.
We’ve seen the E. M. Butz house before; now here it is again captured on film in glorious black and white.
Edward M. Butz was a prominent and successful architect of the late 1800s whose reach extended far beyond Pittsburgh. (One notable still-standing public building designed by Butz is the Wicomico County Courthouse in Salisbury, Maryland.) Many years later, in 1936, Maurice Trimble remembered that “Mr. Butz was a veritable human dynamo; he designed among other buildings, the Western Penitentiary, the Uniontown Court House and Jail and many of those snappy Victorian Gothic houses, some of which were cleverly done.”
One of those snappy Victorian houses was this one. Mr. Butz designed it and lived in it with his family in the late 1870s. The house had an unfortunate renovation in the middle 1900s, with small horizontal windows installed on the second floor in place of the original tall windows; but the current owners have used paint to mask the mismatched brickwork and integrate the original features of the house as much as possible.
Today the ground floor is home to a fancy cocktail bar called “The Lion.”
Father Pitt would not hesitate to affirm that this is one of the finest blocks of Second Empire houses in North America. Manchester has had its difficulties, but it has some outstanding streetscapes to show us.
The newer Saint Joseph School was built just after the Second World War; this one, however, predates St. Joseph’s Church. Old maps show a frame building here in 1882, and a brick one of the same dimensions in 1890; either this building replaced an older one at some point in the 1880s, or the frame building was shrouded in brick. The restrained classicism is unusual for the era; old Pa Pitt does not know how much the building has changed from its original state.
Edward J. Hergenroeder, who prospered in the years after the Second World War as a designer of Catholic schools and churches, was the architect of this handsome little modernist school for the German parish of St. Joseph.1 It is in use as coworking space now, so it will remain when St. Joseph’s Church is demolished.
The long side of the building faced North Franklin Street, which has since been pedestrianized.
Five houses on North Franklin Street epitomize the paradox of Manchester: three are gorgeously restored, and two are condemned. This one, one of the condemned, had a little corner store on the ground floor.
We’ll find these incised decorations on all but one the houses. They were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s.
This house and the one next to it are nearly identical, except for differences in decoration. They were probably put up at the same time.
This house has a plaque dating it to 1881.
This house is probably the most recent of the lot; from the style, we would date it to the 1890s.
This house has been up for sale for a couple of years now, so the owner is probably motivated to sell. A quarter-million dollars should be enough to get that blue sticker off the front.
This building has been slowly crumbling for many years now, and it has finally reached a stage where reasonable people agree nothing can be done to save it. According to neighborhood gossip, it was estimated that five million dollars would be needed just to stabilize the structure, and no one has five million to spend on a big church in Manchester.
It is part of the curious paradox of Manchester that this church stands on Liverpool Street right next to perhaps the finest and best-restored block of Victorian rowhouses in Pittsburgh. “A building like this anchors the community,” one neighbor told old Pa Pitt—“even in this condition.”
St. Joseph’s was built in 1897 for a German parish. The architect, as we might guess from the picturesque style and the buff brick, was Frederick Sauer.1
When the parish closed, the building was sold to a nondenominational congregation, but the same neighborhood gossip tells us that the congregation struggled even to pay utility bills. After it folded, the building stood vacant, and suffered the usual piecemeal destruction of a large vacant building.
A few days ago, Father Pitt passed by on Liverpool Street and saw the big red sticker on the door. It was pouring down rain at the time, but he went back the next morning to document the church before it disappears, which is why we have more than fifty pictures to show you.
Many more pictures…
A pair of rowhouses whose elaborate Italianate details have been meticulously restored. And since, as longtime readers know, old Pa Pitt collects breezeways…
We’ve seen this house in the spring; now here it is in the fall, when we can see more of it because there are fewer leaves.
A pair of houses probably built in the 1860s or 1870s, according to old maps, with an addition in the rear in the 1880s.
