Shadyside seems to have a larger concentration of modernistic mid-twentieth-century apartment buildings than any other Pittsburgh neighborhood. Without any other information, old Pa Pitt would guess this one dates from about 1940.
Glass block from Pittsburgh Corning became a badge of modernity. If that were not enough, the metal awning over the entrance should do it.
The Negley Station is an easy walk from both the Ellsworth Avenue and Walnut Street business districts in Shadyside, as well as businesses on Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard. Like most busway stations in Pittsburgh, it is a direct replacement for an old commuter-rail station: in this case, the Roup station that used to be at exactly the same place. (South Negley Avenue was part of Roup Street until the 1890s, and rail stations tend to keep their names even when the street for which they are named changes.)
Commuters gather on the inbound platform in late morning rush hour.
And here come the buses.
The outbound platform in evening sunlight.
The eastern part of Howe Street grew a fine collection of upper-middle-class houses around the turn of the twentieth century. Here are three in three different styles, beginning with a fine Dutch colonial. The entrance has been altered to make the house an apartment building, but otherwise the details are in good shape.
Here is a sturdy foursquare house with Queen Anne details.
Finally, a Tudor with an imaginative randomness made even more random by later alterations and additions.
This building immediately struck old Pa Pitt as a Geisler & Smithyman sort of building, and in this case his instinct was correct. It was built in 1929, and Geisler & Smithyman were indeed the architects. The Geisler of the firm was the venerable Charles R. Geisler, who lived in Beechview and scattered medium-sized apartment buildings all over the Pittsburgh area.
The thick and high evergreens leave just enough gap to make the entrance to an enchanted world. So it seems from the street, and the garden beyond the mystic gate does not disappoint us.
Dover Gables is still a bit of a mystery to old Pa Pitt; no one seems to have pinned down the architect. The combination of simple Tudor-style rows of houses with lush landscaping crams the greatest load of picturesqueness possible into a tiny patch of land.
We have more pictures of Dover Gables from three years ago.
The postwar boom was a very busy time for architects of apartment buildings, and Philip Friedman was probably the busiest of them all. Friedman seems to have owed his success to his willingness to make compromises when the client asked for them. Here we have Friedman at his most purely modernistic, borrowing the very practical cruciform plan from Le Corbusier—a plan that was getting a lot of publicity from its use in the Gateway Center development. But even here…
…the froufrou grapevine-pattern metalwork that holds up the porch roof, which seems quite out of character for the modern-to-the-max building, was probably the client’s idea.
The First German Evangelical Lutheran Church was founded in 1837, and it was downtown, or on the edge of downtown, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue, until the commercial development of downtown Pittsburgh had scattered the congregation and made the land too valuable to keep. We can see from this building that the congregation had money to spend when the church moved to the East End. The architects were the Cleveland firm of Corbusier, Lenski & Foster (not that Le Corbusier, we should point out), who were much in demand as church designers, though this is the only one of their designs old Pa Pitt has found in Pittsburgh so far. By the time this church opened in 1928, the congregation was bilingual, with services in German and in English; so the new church was called Trinity Church.
Not hidden under a bushel.
The parsonage was designed by the same architects and built at the same time as the church.
Neal & Rowland (Joseph Ladd Neal and George M. Rowland) designed this church in the Norman Gothic style, as they described it, and it succeeds in creating the impression of a medieval parish church that grew organically out of the soil.
A sketch of the design was published in the Pittsburgh Gazette for September 22, 1902, and the church as it stands today is just about the same, except for a few small details that seem to have changed before construction began.
As the Gazette article explains, the Gothic design was a change of heart on the part of the congregation—an about-face that must have caused the architects no little consternation, and one that makes their accomplishment all the more praiseworthy.
The congregation of the First Unitarian church, now worshiping in the frame chapel in Craig street, opposite the Duquesne garden, will soon lay the cornerstone of their new church at the southeast corner of Ellsworth and Morewood avenues. This site was bought for $35,000 shortly after the present church property was sold as an addition to the new Catholic cathedral site. The new site faces 170 feet in Morewood avenue and 181 feet in Ellsworth avenue. It is opposite the Shadyside academy and adjoins the costly residence properties of Attorney General P. C. Knox and of Col. J. M. Schoonmaker.
The original plan of the trustees was to build a church of white Georgia marble after the Greek Doric Temple style, a decided innovation in Pittsburgh architecture. Later this plan was abandoned and the architects, Neal & Rowland, were instructed to make the design after the Norman Gothic model. The walls of the church will be of stone. It will have four gables and the conventional Norman tower at the corner. The audience room will sent 400 and the Sunday school rooms, which are separated from it by folding doors, will accommodate 150 more. The interior of the church is to be handsomely finished in hard wood with stained and art glass windows. On the outside an elaborate scheme of landscape work will make the site very attractive. The church will be set back 44 feet from Ellsworth avenue and the carriage entrance will be from Morewood avenue.
The First Unitarian congregation was organized in 1889 by the Rev. J. G. Townsend and was under the charge of the Rev. Charles E. St. John from 1891 to 1900. The Rev. L. Walter Mason, the present pastor, came to the charge in November, 1900, since which time the number of communicants has increased to 460. The congregation will continue to hold services in the present building until June 1, when it is expected the new edifice will be completed, at a cost of about $35,000.
In spite of the overoptimistic estimate in the article that the building would be completed in June of 1903, there were some delays: the cornerstone was laid in 1904.
A few houses that show the wide variety of late-Victorian styles on this one street in central Shadyside.
Many of the houses in Shadyside were victims of the epidemic of porch amputations in the 1960s and 1970s. The one above, having lost its porch in the rage against porches of the late twentieth century, grew a new porch just a few years ago.
Peabody & Stearns were a Boston firm that kept a branch office in Pittsburgh to handle the many jobs they picked up in this city. They were responsible for rebuilding the Horne’s department store, and they designed the Liberty Market, later Motor Square Garden. But they also had a thriving business in Tudor mansions for the well-to-do in Pittsburgh’s East End. This one was built in 1902.
This picture from The Brickbuilder shows the house newly built. We can see that, except for filling in the side porch, very little has been done to change the house. Even the original diamond-paned upper sashes, or identical replacements, are still in the windows, and the windows in the sunroom that was made from the porch were matched to the rest of the windows in the house.
The gables were treated in a dark color scheme; the pastel blue of the current paint, along with the lacy wood trim, gives them a more feminine look than they would have had originally.
