Built in 1908, the Minnetonka Building was designed by Frederick Scheibler, and it would be hard to imagine the impression it would have made in Edwardian Shadyside. It looks like a building thirty or forty years ahead of its time, with its simple forms and streamlined curves that look forward to the Moderne architecture of the 1930s and 1940s. But it also has details that remind us of the most up-to-the-minute ideas from those Viennese and German art magazines that we know Scheibler got his hands on.
This doorway with its Art Nouveau window and Egyptian-style tapering would have been right at home in a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.
The sheltering wall seems to be there less to conceal the house than to delight us with the revelation. This is the Nora McMullen Mellon house, built in 1911 from a design by Thomas Scott. The unusual (for Pittsburgh) choice of stucco with brick trim makes this English cottage stand out on the street, and the current owners keep it as pretty as an architect’s rendering.
Here’s a house in an eclectic style made up of bits of other eclectic styles, but they all fit together well. The heavy arches picked out in darker brick remind us of the Rundbogenstil, a word we like to say as often as possible; but the irregular picturesque arrangement of parts takes inspiration from the style that, in defiance of history, was called Queen Anne.
The turret has a well-preserved witch’s cap and a rim of foliage scrollwork.
The oriel and the porch pediment are both decorated with grotesque foliage ornaments.
The house next door is a duplicate, but reversed.
Finally, a house that shares the same general shape, but is distinguished by its shingly top with curved surfaces and ornamental swags and foliage picked out in contrasting paint.
Parking garages sometimes give us good views of the surrounding buildings, and no one questions your right to be there as long as you look respectable enough. (The powdered wig helps.) Here are three interesting houses on Aiken Avenue seen from the Shadyside Hospital garage. First, an unusually well-preserved Shingle-style house with a lush crop of shingles.
This Queen Anne house has been turned into seven apartments, to judge by counting mailboxes and doorbells.
Finally, this mansion in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Colonial style has grown an apartment building in its back yard, a disease to which some old houses are subject in urban neighborhoods. It appears on Google Maps as a “community correction center,” so if you make a mistake in typing you can probably come here to have it corrected professionally. Old Pa Pitt prefers to make his own corrections, but he is glad there is a service for people who need it.
Exactly two years ago today, Father Pitt paid a visit to this unique church, one of the most imaginative works of architect Thomas Cox McKee. At the time, he had no idea the church would be demolished a few months later, or he would have documented it more carefully. Looking back on the pictures he published then, old Pa Pitt decided they were lousy, not to mince words. As a memorial to the vanished building, he decided to go back to the original images and see if he could make better pictures out of them. Two years from now, Father Pitt will look back at these pictures and think they were lousy and he could do better, but the delight of a life of constant learning is seeing incremental improvement.
To put the pictures in context, we reprint the text of the article we published two years ago:
Now known as Shady Avenue Christian Assembly, after having spent many years as Shady Avenue Presbyterian Church (without the “Cumberland”).
Just down the street from the huge and spectacular Calvary Episcopal and Sacred Heart Catholic churches, each the size of many a cathedral, this 1889 church is likely to pass unnoticed. Once you do notice it, though, you will not stop noticing it. It is a bravura performance in a sort of Queen Anne Romanesque style by a Victorian architect who was about 22 years old at the time, and who was not afraid to pull out all the stops and stomp on the pedals for all he was worth. An entire issue of the East Ender, the East End Historical Society’s newsletter, was devoted to the architect, T. C. McKee (PDF), and we take all our information from Justin P. Greenawalt with profound gratitude for his research.
Thomas Cox McKee (usually known as T. C. McKee) was apprenticed to architect James W. Drum. But in 1886, when young McKee was still only 20, his master was run over by a freight train. Instead of looking for another apprentice position, McKee went out on his own and seems to have been successful right away. He later built a comfortable practice designing homes for the wealthy and small to medium-sized commercial buildings, along with at least one prominent school (the Belmar School in Homewood, still standing). Then, in 1910, he threw it all away and went to Cleveland, where he took odd jobs until he settled down as a designer of soda fountains. No one seems to know what happened, although Mr. Greenawalt’s article hints that it might have had something to do with McKee’s constitutional extravagance.
That extravagance comes through in every detail of this building. In the age of modernism, this sort of thing was dismissed as a bunch of Victorian noise, but the masses are balanced to form interesting compositions from every angle.
The much more conventional 1911 addition (although even it is a little bit fantastical) was designed by Rodgers & Minnis. Below we see it across the pile of dirt that used to be Shady Hill Center until the property became too valuable to host a suburban-style strip mall.
This picture from The Builder, April, 1919, p. 28, shows the Painter Dunn Company building—identified as an Overland service station (it later moved up to Pierce-Arrow)—as it was built. The architects were the Hunting Davis Company, architects and engineers who specialized in industrial buildings. Later a third floor was added—probably supervised by the same architects, since it is as well integrated as it could be with the design of the original building, and Hunting Davis remained, through various exchanges of partners, one of Pittsburgh’s leading industrial architectural firms for decades.
The building is on Centre Avenue opposite Millvale Avenue, and after years of neglect it was beautifully refurbished for another century of use.
In 1891 the Architectural Record ran a long illustrated feature on “The Romanesque Revival in America.” Naturally it dwelt on the accomplishments of H. H. Richardson, and in particular on Trinity Church in Boston and the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh, his two most famous buildings. But what about the work done in the “Richardsonian Romanesque” style since Richardson’s death? Few churches could stand up to Trinity, but…
A Presbyterian church at Pittsburg by Mr. Richardson’s successors, Messrs. Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, is an unmistakable and a very successful piece of Richardsonian Romanesque, which owes much of its success to the skill with which the central tower, a lower and much simpler crowning feature than that of [Trinity Church in] Boston, is developed into the church to which the other features of a short nave and shallow transepts are brought into harmonious subordination.
The church has not changed much since the picture above was published in 1891. It has expanded, but the expansions have been carefully matched to the original. And since the soot has been cleaned off, it looks almost as just-built today as it did when it was new—and almost as timelessly ancient, which is the paradoxical trick that the best Richardsonian Romanesque buildings can pull.
There are some secondary sources that say this was one of the projects Richardson had sketched before his death and left his successors to finish, but the earlier sources seem to attribute it entirely to Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge.
Old Pa Pitt had meant to publish these pictures a little before Christmas, but he lost track of them. And since he doesn’t want to wait till next year, here they are now. This is the Negley-Gwinner-Harter House in Shadyside, with a crew installing its Christmas ribbon. This was the house that sat derelict for years after a disastrous fire, so it is always a cheerful sight when Father Pitt walks past and sees it in fine shape like this. But it is even more cheerful all tied up in a Christmas bow.
Some Tudor houses (or “English,” as they were usually called) stick just enough timbers in the stucco to get the message across that this is supposed to be Merrie England. This one is a bravura performance in woodwork. The 1910 layer at Pittsburgh Historic Maps shows it as owned by A. R. D. Gillespie, who was probably the original owner.
