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.
Willis McCook was a lawyer to the robber barons, which earned him a baronial mansion among them on the Fifth Avenue millionaires’ row.
For his daughter and her husband, he hired the same architects, Carpenter & Crocker, to design this neat little Tudor cottage around the corner on the Amberson Avenue side of his property. We can see how the architects cleverly linked the two houses by making the central peak of the smaller house echo the prickly gables of the larger one.
The Shadyside half of Bayard Street is lined with fine houses in a variety of styles. We ambled down one block on a sunny November day, taking pictures of the patterns of light and shadow on the sunny side of the street.
A reader named Tom Slack writes to ask about Pierce Street. “There is a street in Shadyside I’ve always been fascinated with—the block of row houses on Pierce Street—I wondered if you knew anything about the history.”
Old Pa Pitt is always happy to hear from readers, and he was ready to send this one to his article about Pierce Street, with apologies for not knowing any more than is in the article. But he could not find his article on Pierce Street. He distinctly remembered having been to Pierce Street just to photograph those houses, and the pictures turned up when he searched the vast Father Pitt archive. But here it is more than two years after those pictures were taken, and still no article!
Well, we can take care of that right now. Father Pitt regrets to say that he does not know much about these houses, but here is what he does know.
Pierce Street—formerly Parker Street—is a tiny street, two blocks long, that branches off the end of College Street. The rowhouses in the 5800 block are on listed by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation as a historic landmark, and the PHLF tells us that they were built in 1891–1892. Old maps tell us they were owned by A. W. Mellon. This teaches us the valuable lesson that every little investment helps if you want to become the richest family in the world.
From the Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, March 18, 1891: “At Baum Grove, near Roup station, Allegheny Co, about fifty dwellings will be erected by A. W. Mellon, of Pittsburg.” Roup Station was just at the west end of Parker Street. A few of the houses on the southeast side of the street have disappeared, replaced by a parking lot. But the block-long row on the northwest side is still intact.
The houses look tiny from the front, and by any standard they are small houses. Like many of these Pittsburgh terraces, though, they are deeper than you might think. Moreover, they make clever use of the space they do have, as we see in this view of the alley behind one of the rows, where projecting oriels add a few more square feet to the upper floors while still leaving room for rear exits and trash cans.
There is a little mystery about the street name. The street was called Parker Street before the houses were built, and after as well, until the great street-name rationalization after Pittsburgh absorbed the city of Allegheny, when duplicate street names were eliminated. (Renamed streets were usually given a name that began with the same letter, as happened here.) But when the houses were built, a street sign was built into the corner house identifying the street as “College Place.” Father Pitt does not know whether the street was ever renamed, or whether Mr. Mellon expected to be able to wangle a renaming for his new little development and was disappointed. The commercial building at the corner of Ellsworth Avenue and College Street was built at the same time, also on A. W. Mellon property, and it bears an identical stone block identifying College Street as “College Ave.”
Here is another architectural mystery solved by recognizing a Second Empire mansion under a radical exterior alteration. We saw such a house made into an apartment building in Highland Park; here, the transformation has been managed with much more elegance. “Pittsburgh House Histories” on Facebook explains that this was originally the home of James Rees, a builder of riverboats and steam-powered industrial engines, built in the fashionable Second Empire style with a central tower much like the one at Baywood. In 1919, the house was bought by John H. Hillman, Jr., and by that time the Second Empire style was already a mortal embarrassment. Mr. Hillman hired the architect Edward P. Mellon, who prospered through his connections to rich Mellon relatives, to remodel the house. Mellon’s taste was staidly classical, but within that taste he could manage some very attractive effects. He amputated the top of the tower and refaced the house with stone, adding Renaissance trimmings. The result was a house that looked almost new and quite up to date for 1919.
If you wanted your house to convey the message “I’m rich ppttttttthhht,” then Paul Irwin was the architect to hire. This Renaissance palace uses every trick in the architect’s vocabulary to tell the world that a millionaire lives here, and he is richer than you are. It was built in 1914 on the Fifth Avenue Millionaires’ Row, where, although it is not the biggest of the surviving mansions, it somehow manages to look like the most expensive.
