A good example of how an old building can be updated on a limited budget without too much damage to its appearance. Front porches are gone, and vinyl siding and new windows lost some of the Victorian detail. But the windows are framed appropriately if simply, and distinctive woodwork on the third floor has been preserved and restored. Now five apartments, the double house is still an attractive building; and if old Pa Pitt would prefer to have seen it restored to its original Victorian appearance, he nevertheless recognizes and applauds a tasteful effort to balance restoration with profitability.
This row of houses on Alder Street in Shadyside has been attributed to Frederick Scheibler, Pittsburgh’s most famous home-grown modernist, by the guesswork of certain architectural historians. But Martin Aurand, Scheibler’s biographer, could find no evidence that Scheibler designed them. Then who was responsible for this strikingly modern early-twentieth-century terrace?
Old Pa Pitt is confident that he has the answer. The architect was T. Ed. Cornelius, who lived all his life in Coraopolis but was busy throughout the Pittsburgh area. We can be almost certain of that attribution because the houses in the middle of the row are identical to the ones in the Kleber row in Brighton Heights:
And the Brighton Heights houses were the subject of a photo feature in the Daily Post of March 5, 1916, in which T. Ed. Cornelius is named as the architect.
The Alder Street houses are bookended by larger double houses, one of which—this being Pittsburgh, of course—is an odd shape to fit the odd lot.
So remember the name of T. Ed. (which stands for Thomas Edward) Cornelius when you think of distinctive Pittsburgh architecture. It is quite a compliment to have your work mistaken for Frederick Scheibler’s.
It is the northeastern corner of Shadyside now, but this house was built in the neighborhood that developed around the East Liberty station, which was not far from where the East Liberty station is today—now a busway station, but on the same route. This house was built in the 1880s for a family named McCully, to judge by old maps. It has been divided into three apartments, but it has kept many of its 1880s details.
This entrance is probably a replacement for a front porch that ran the width of the building.
The original carved wooden brackets include the abstract cutout botanical decorations that were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s
Once again our frequent correspondent David Schwing has spotted something important and delightful: a previously unidentified work by Elise Mercur, Pittsburgh’s first female architect. It’s been sitting right there in the open, but nothing on the Internet has pointed out its significance.
Mercur was a fascinating character. At a time when women as architects were almost unheard of, she was getting big commissions and supervising crews of men who knew they had better not cross her. (See the picture above: would you want to get that look from your boss?)
She first came to national attention when she beat twelve other competitors with her design for the Woman’s Building at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895. The decision of the committee was unanimous: she blew the other competitors away.
These renderings were printed in a big architectural magazine, which picked them up from another big architectural magazine. They were also front-page news in Atlanta, and of course in Pittsburgh. The Inland Architect and News Record accompanied them with this brief introduction to the architect:
Miss Elise Mercur, architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Of thirteen designs submitted, hers was considered of the highest merit and was accepted. As a preparation for her professional life Miss Mercur studied four years at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and subsequently continued her artistic studies in Germany. The lady has been a resident of Pittsburgh for four years and has been engaged upon practical architectural work in the office of Architect Thomas Boyd, whose foreman she now is. Miss Mercur assisted in the preparation of the plans for the new city Poor Buildings at Marshalsea and superintended their erection.
Thomas Boyd was a very prosperous architect in those days, and we must give him credit for recognizing ability when he saw it. It took courage to make a woman his construction foreman, but Mercur was up to the task.
Soon she had a prospering practice of her own, and she insisted on being in every way equal to a male architect.
For doing men’s work I always insist upon getting men’s prices. I never accept an assignment for less than 5 per cent. I never have any trouble. Contractors who have worked under me know that I won’t stand any ‘monkeying’ and do not try to fool me with poor material, careless work, &c. While I am willing to do what is right, I generally make them live up to the specifications, and any work done improperly has to be gone over again. (Mercur quoted in “Pittsburg’s Woman Architect,” New York World, January 9, 1898.)
Much of her work was academic—dormitories and classroom buildings for colleges. And that explains why most of it is gone. College presidents hate old buildings, because they stand in the way of big donors’ vanity projects, and college presidents are generally hired for their ability to round up big donors, not for their sensitivity to the architectural heritage of the campus. As far as we know, all of Mercur’s academic buildings have been demolished, some fairly recently. In fact, until a little while ago the only remaining building by Mercur known to exist was St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the Hill District. But now we have a fine house whose identification rests on solid ground.
Dr. William H. Mercur has purchased a choice plot on Fifth avenue, opposite Lilac street, as a site for a new home. The lot measures 50×200 feet, and it belonged to Charles D. Callery. The price paid was $10,000 cash, or $200 a foot. Mrs. Elsie Mercur-Wagner is making plans for a $15,000 brick dwelling which is to be erected on the property within the next few months. (“Real Estate Transactions,” Pittsburg Press, April 27, 1900, p. 14.)
By this time Mercur was married and using the name Wagner along with her own. We may point out in passing that the name “Elise” was unusual enough that almost half the construction listings misspell it as “Elsie.” Dr. William H. Mercur was her brother, and we imagine he was quite pleased with the house his sister built for him.
“Lilac Street” in the listing is now St. James, and the location “opposite Lilac street” makes the house easy to find. Plat maps shortly after the house was built show it as belonging to M. S. Mercur (probably William’s wife; property was often put in the name of the wife). In 1923, it still belonged to M. S. Mercur. It is on the side of Fifth Avenue that is counted as Squirrel Hill by city planning maps, but traditionally both sides of the street were “Shadyside,” and the Mercurs were rubbing elbows with some very rich people in the Shadyside millionaires’ row.
By comparing this lot with the one next to it, we can see that the lot level was originally above the garage doors. The front yard has been dug away to make space for driveway and garages. Much of the distinctive detail of the house has been preserved, however, and we hope the owners realize that they possess a rare treasure.
A house in a dignified version of the Queen Anne style, but still with plenty of picturesque details, which take on added picturesqueness in sunset light.
The elaborate woodwork and shingles in the gables have been preserved.
A pattern of stock terra-cotta tiles set in the wall may have taken the place of a filled-in window.
Fifth Avenue in Shadyside was the most famous of the millionaires’ rows in Pittsburgh. But there were some more modest houses as well—“modest” being a comparative term here. Some predated the arrival of the millionaires, and some were beyond the main stretch of mansions. Many have been replaced by postwar apartment buildings, but a number of these houses survive. A while ago, Father Pitt took an evening stroll on Fifth Avenue to have a look at some of them. Above, a wood-frame Queen Anne mansion with picturesque protrusions in all directions.
A center-hall house in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Georgian style.
Another center-hall house of the sort old Pa Pitt would call a center-hall foursquare. Walking around to the side reveals a fat turret that must add to the interest of the interior.
Another Georgian house, though the Georgian era was lamentably ignorant of buff Kittanning brick.
Sony Alpha 3000.
From the old days, before the millionaires, here is a wide I-house whose main part seems to have been built before 1872.
The dense Highland Avenue business district in Shadyside spilled across the tracks from East Liberty in the 1920s. Before that, the area was a residential section that began to build up in the 1870s. And if you peer behind the storefronts, you can see that much of that residential section is still there behind a crust of commercial development. For example, the building above looks like a typical 1920s store-and-apartments building from the front, but from this angle we can see that it’s an addition to a large double house built in the Second Empire style in the 1870s.
This house had its ground floor turned into a store without extreme alterations to the rest of the building.
This Second Empire house, built in the 1880s, has a magnetic attraction for architectural debris.
The busways in Pittsburgh are built mostly along old railroad right-of-way, and most of the stations are placed very near where the old commuter-rail stations stood. The Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway is unique in that the railroad still runs next to it; space for the busway came from the abandonment of extra parallel tracks on the busy Pennsylvania Railroad main line. Above, an outbound bus stops at the East Liberty station.
These views were taken from the Highland Avenue bridge across the railroad and busway. The bridge bears the Pennsylvania Railroad emblem in concrete.
The use of the old railroad right-of-way, which runs in a series of hollows below the main street level of the neighborhoods it goes through, makes the East Busway a true rapid-transit line, as much grade-separated as a subway.
