This would be an ordinary brick box, except that the main entrance has been grandified with two floors’ worth of Doric columns and an elaborate classical entrance, making the building look like a modernist apartment block that collided with a plantation house.
It seems that every few years old Pa Pitt points his camera at this building again (more pictures here and here). Its gaudy modernism appeals to him the way a colorful toy appeals to a five-year-old.
John A. Butz, the brother of the more productive Edward M. Butz, designed this apartment building, which was put up in 1912.1 Here we see it in the last rays of evening sun.
Addendum: Our correspondent David Schwing sends us this photograph of the Ellsworth that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post for September 28, 1915, before the building was obscured by trees and later buildings.
The little rowhouses on Pierce Street were built as rental properties for Andrew W. Mellon, who was not too rich to squeeze a few pennies out of working-class tenants. The houses had a fine location right next to the Roup station on the main commuter-rail line to the east, and they are still right next to its successor, the Negley station on the East Busway. Old Pa Pitt visited them on an August evening, and the fact that these pictures are appearing only now shows how backed up we sometimes get around here. We have some history of the Pierce Street rowhouses in an earlier article.
Pierce Street is unusual in Pittsburgh; it looks more like a street in Baltimore, with an entire block of identical houses all built more or less as one building, their fronts right against the sidewalk.
A few of the houses on one side of the street have disappeared, replaced by parking lot; but the streetscape is still intact enough to show us what it originally looked like.
It appears that most of the houses are in the hands of the same owner and kept up beautifully with identical stoop plantings.
Not all of them, however; a couple are still obviously in private hands and were not repointed when the rest of the houses were restored.
This corner house was left isolated when a few houses to the left were demolished.
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.
