A small and attractive apartment building in the part of Park Place that belongs to Wilkinsburg. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but these curved metal balconies that look as though they are serving the tenants up on platters were a favorite detail of Wilkinsburg’s own Milligan & Miller.
Before he fell under the spell of the European modernists, Frederick Scheibler had already developed his own distinct version of the classical style. Even if he had never progressed beyond the early style we see in this building from 1903, we would still think he was one of our more interesting minor architects.
The two-storey porch with a balcony dangling between the colossal columns is unusual—but not unprecedented. The Ruskin Villa apartment building in Wilkinsburg uses exactly the same idea, and in many other ways is similar to this building. In construction listings, L. A. Raisig was named as the architect of that building, which went up just a few months before Raisig took on young Frederick Scheibler as a partner. Father Pitt’s probably unprovable hypothesis is that Scheibler was already working for Raisig, and Raisig assigned the Ruskin Villa to him. This building in Park Place, then, would be a case of Scheibler adapting and refining ideas he had already worked out three years earlier.
An early building by Frederick Scheibler, built in 1904, when Scheibler had not yet fully embraced modernism, but was already well on his way. Even in his earliest buildings, Scheibler already had his own distinct quirks in the classical style he had adopted. He liked his classical details big, like the arches here.
And even in this early building, we already see Scheibler absorbing some of the Art Nouveau ideas that were wafting over from Austria and Germany. This entrance is like nothing else in Pittsburgh.
The building is a bit bedraggled now, but it does look as though what is necessary to keep it intact has been done.
Ellsworth Dean designed this school, built in 1903. The rich cinnamon brick—actually made of several related colors of brick—still looks dignified today. The school is now the primary school for the Environmental Charter School.
This year’s garden emphasizes native American crops, including corn and Echinacea purpurea.
We have more pictures of the Park Place School in the winter, including a complete front elevation.
Frederick Scheibler produced two variations on the same theme in 1906: this building and the Linwood a few blocks away. Each had half a dozen large and luxurious apartments. The general shape and layout was the same, and the windows were originally identical (the ones on the Linwood have been replaced). In both the balcony towers are the strongest visual features; here they terminate in large gables that give them even more emphasis. In both the eye is funneled down to the main entrance in the center by the placement of the windows on the third and second floors.
The entrance, with its receding concentric abstract-Gothic arches, is unique to the Whitehall.
Here is a row of houses obviously all put up at the same time and designed by the same hand. In typical Pittsburgh fashion, they are all made of brick, but no two are the same color.
This house, which looks as though it is about to get some restoration work, has lost half its porch, but otherwise preserves most of its features in original condition.
This is what we think of when we hear “Victorian house”: turrets and angles everywhere. The picturesque arrangement also creates interesting and versatile spaces inside.
This church was built in 1897 for a congregation known as the East End Presbyterian Church. The architect was E. B. Milligan of Wilkinsburg. The congregation later became known as the Waverly Presbyterian Church (because it was on Waverly Street), which in 1929 built a much larger church a few blocks away. The Refuge Church of God in Christ now lives in this building.
An illustration published when the church was dedicated in 1897 shows a cap on the tower that has since disappeared.
The stone porch is the most remarkable thing about this church; it seems to lift the whole building out of the residential streets around it and into a different world.
If old Pa Pitt had to pick one apartment building to preserve in Pittsburgh, it would be a hard choice. But this one, built in 1905, is probably the first one that would come to mind. It was the one that earned Frederick Scheibler a short-lived international reputation, and it is perhaps our best example of the kind of Viennese Art Nouveau that some of our architects drooled over in the European magazines that made their way over here.
The name “Old Heidelberg” tells us something about the charm of this style. It’s the predecessor and source of what Father Pitt likes to call the “fairy-tale style” of the 1920s and 1930s: it tries to create an impression of a delightful time long past, but it does it with modern materials, sometimes shockingly modern, and with a design vocabulary that adroitly mixes the historical with the up-to-date and even futuristic.
The Old Heidelberg got quite a bit of attention from the architectural press, and the photograph above even made it into the Viennese annual Der Architekt for 1908, thus bringing the chain of architectural influences around in a circle, since Scheibler is known to have taken many of his ideas from Viennese publications.
Note how the building is constantly varied, even where you might expect it to be symmetrical. The balconies on the right are handled differently from the balconies on the left.
In 1963, the Historic American Buildings Survey took pictures of the Old Heidelberg, including a couple of interior shots—regrettably fogged, but still recognizable. Above, a dining room; below, a fireplace. We can see that the odd but effective combination of nostalgia and modernism prevailed in the interior as much as on the outside.
Little decorative whimsies all over add to the fairy-tale atmosphere and the sense that some kind of adventure lurks around every corner.
Cottage wings were added after the main building was put up; they match well enough that one might not guess that they were later additions, but the style is simpler and even more modern-looking.
For some reason, Park Place is one of those neighborhoods that have no official existence on city planning maps. It is counted as part of Point Breeze South, but there is a considerable gap between the rest of Point Breeze South and Park Place, which slops over into Wilkinsburg, thus becoming one of the rare neighborhoods that ignore city boundaries. In fact the border goes through a number of buildings and houses.
Ellsworth Dean was the architect of this Renaissance palace of education, which was built in 1903. It is now an “Environmental Charter School.” We assume that means children can have the unique experience of learning in an environment. (Actually, old Pa Pitt just looked up the school’s Web site, and now he is wishing there had been such things as Environmental Charter Schools when he was a tot back in pre-Revolutionary days.)
