Category: Point Breeze

  • A Bunch of Houses on Thomas Boulevard, North Point Breeze

    Shingle-style house at 6843 Thomas Boulevard

    A while ago, Father Pitt took a walk on Thomas Boulevard in the light rain, so don’t be surprised to see raindrops in some of these pictures. Thomas Boulevard, like McPherson Boulevard, has an eclectic mixture of housing from duplexes through Shingle-style mansions to medium-sized apartment buildings. Today we’re concentrating on the houses, some of which are magnificent. Above, a Shingle-style house with all its shingles in place.

    6734 Thomas Boulevard

    If you ever asked yourself how much difference materials really make in the appearance of a house, compare this Shingle-style house, where the shingles have been replaced with fake siding and paste-on shutters, to the one above.

    6730

    A typical Pittsburgh Renaissance palace that has turned into an apartment building.

    6735

    A house with Queen Anne outlines that has been modernized with reasonably good taste.

    6735
    6745

    This frame house was in deplorable condition before it was updated and made to look like a product of the twenty-first century. You can look on Google Street View to see the specific meaning old Pa Pitt assigns to “deplorable.” With an unlimited budget, Father Pitt would prefer to restore a house like this to its original design. With a limited budget, this was a good result.

    6746

    This turret with house attached needs some rescuing. It has what the real-estate people call good bones, and that turret ought to be attractive to a well-off eccentric now that the neighborhood is on the upswing.

    6746
    6806

    A big center-hall house that is now solar-powered.

    6807

    A stony foursquare with Queen Anne details. It has lost its porch, but the third floor retains fine original woodwork and windows.

    6811

    A center-hall colonial from early in the Colonial Revival, when Georgian was filtered through a late-Victorian lens.

    6811
    6815

    This is a variation on the same plan as the previous house, which is right next to it; they were probably built at the same time and designed by the same hand. The porch has been replaced with a modern construction that does not quite fit, but the house looks much better with this porch than it would look with no porch at all.

    6818

    This towering center-hall manse makes spectacular use of Kittanning brick in Frederick Sauer’s favorite color. The beefiness of it, along with the well-balanced selection of picturesque details, makes us think that Sauer is a good suspect for the architect.

    6818
    6839

    This house grew a large balcony when it was turned into a duplex.

    6841

    A big square house with typical Queen Anne details, especially the little balcony and the curved surfaces covered with shingles.

    6842
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    This is a typical Pittsburgh Foursquare, but with an oversized dormer that gives it a good bit of extra space on the third floor.


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  • Corner Building in Point Breeze

    6741 Reynolds Street

    Acute-angled intersections are common in Pittsburgh, and in business districts they produce some odd-shaped buildings. This one in Point Breeze has been tastefully modernized with an eye for what is most distinctive about it. The oriel over the entrance on the corner is especially appealing.

    Corner building
    Oriel and corner entrance
    Oriel
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
  • Stone House in Point Breeze

    House on Reynolds Street

    This stone house makes a fine impression as you walk by on Reynolds Street. If you just glanced at it, you might miss a very unusual feature: the corner windows in the front bedrooms on the second floor. Corner windows were very popular for a while in the middle twentieth century in modernist residences: they had the very practical purpose of leaving large expanses of wall blank for furniture or decorations. But it is not common to see them on a house that probably dates from about 1900.

    Oblique view
    Front door
  • Gothic I-House in Point Breeze

    This house probably dates from the 1870s, making it much earlier than the city neighborhood that filled in around it. Because Point Breeze is such a desirable neighborhood (this house is just around the corner from the Frick Art Museum), it has been worth the expense to restore this house to something like its original appearance.

  • Frick Park Gatehouse

    Frick Park gatehouse

    This looks exactly like the gateway to a world of sylvan rest and rustic pleasure that it was meant to be. In passing we note that the gatehouse is actually a building, with a room on either side of the gate: we used to have staff to sit here and tend to park visitors’ needs.

    Front of the gatehouse

    The architect was a big deal for such a small structure: John Russell Pope. He had some famous commissions in Washington (that’s Big Worshington to residents of the South Hills): the Jefferson Memorial, the National Gallery of Art, Constitution Hall, and the National Archives, among other buildings. In Pittsburgh he is best known for the colossal Winter mausoleum at Allegheny Cemetery.

    Map showing the location of this gatehouse.

  • The Little Phipps Conservatory at Clayton

    Conservatory at Clayton

    Henry Clay Frick really liked the Phipps Conservatory in Schenley Park when it went up in 1892. He liked it so well that he said, “I want one of those in my back yard,” and hired Alden & Harlow to design it. (You can do that when you’re a robber baron.) They gave him a miniature of Phipps Conservatory, with a central greenhouse large enough for substantial citrus trees.

    These pictures were taken in March of 2000 with a Kodak Pony 135.

    Conservatory
  • The Walled Garden in Mellon Park


    A panoramic view of the Walled Garden. Mellon Park was originally the Mellons’ back yard; the Walled Garden was designed by the landscape architects Vitale and Geiffert.

  • Frick Art Museum

    Until April 4, the Frick is hosting an exhibit called “Impressionist to Modernist: Masterworks of Early Photography.” The “early” part is debatable—the exhibit begins in the 1880s and concludes in the 1930s, by which time photography was already a century old. Father Pitt would call these works “middle” photography. There is no room for debate on the quality of the exhibit itself: all the artistic possibilities of photography as a medium are on display. It was enough to inspire old Pa Pitt to try some work in black and white, so here are some ducks:

    Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

    Well, it’s not Steichen, but Father Pitt liked the ripply reflections of cattail stalks.

  • Frick Park Gatehouse

    OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

    The gatehouse to Frick Park, across from the Frick Art Museum, at Reynolds Street and Homewood Avenue.

  • Frick Art Museum

    2013-08-24-Frick-Art-Museum-01

    Helen Clay Frick built this charming Renaissance palace in her back yard to give the people of Pittsburgh a chance to admire her art collection. It’s a small collection—a Reynolds here, a Boucher there—but an extraordinarily rich one for its size. And in a city where the collective museum culture has decided that expensive admission fees are the rule, the Frick is always free.