Father Pitt

Category: Shadyside

  • Emerson Apartments, Shadyside

    The Emerson

    Update: See the comment from David Schwing below identifying this as a 1906 design by Chicago architect Samuel N. Crowen. Father Pitt looked at some of Mr. Crowen’s other buildings, and the ones from this period certainly seem to bear a stylistic resemblance, although in his later works the architect turned more conservatively classical. Compare this apartment building on Google Street View, with its similar corner balconies, square windows, exaggerated cornice, top floor set off by a masonry stripe, and entrance surrounded by Art Nouveau curves. Imagine how much more that building might resemble this one if this one had not been painted.

    Father Pitt keeps the original article, with all its speculations, below, so that his readers can see how his mind works.

    Today this strange building that makes faces at you as you go by has no name; on Google Maps, it is called “Apartment Building.” But on a 1923 map it is marked as “Emerson,” belonging to a B. F. Newman. It first appears on the 1910 layer of the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, where property owners are not marked. And with that, old Pa Pitt has exhausted all the information he has been able to gather about this building. Searching for information is made more difficult by the fact that there is a later apartment building in Shadyside also called “The Emerson,” a Frankenstein construction with a Fifth Avenue mansion at its core encrusted with modern growths of differing ages and styles.

    At first sight this has the outlines of an ordinary early-modern apartment building, but when you look up at the balconies you find the building looking back at you.

    Balcony
    Balcony
    Grotesque face

    We know that this building was put up before 1910. Father Pitt knows of only a few architects working in Pittsburgh at the time who were batty enough to do something like this.

    Father Pitt’s first guess is Titus de Bobula, whose churches are strongly marked with Budapest Art Nouveau. He also did commercial and apartment buildings, and his career is obscure enough that a number of commissions have probably gone unrecognized. He is known to have done the Everett Apartments (1907) on Ellsworth Avenue at Copeland Street; it has similarly inset balconies flanked by decorated square pilasters, and it uses exactly the same terra-cotta cornice moldings as the ones on this building.

    Frederick Scheibler, our most famous early modernist, is known to have designed about 150 buildings around here, of which Father Pitt has fewer than forty in his Great Big List as of this writing. His style varied over the years of his career, but the whimsically grotesque faces do not seem like his sort of thing.

    Kiehnel and Elliott were also working here at that time. They were influenced by German modernism, and when they later moved to Miami they became famous for extravagantly decorated Art Deco designs. They are a possibility.

    We might also mention Edward Keen, about whom Father Pitt knows nothing (even his name: in some sources it is Kern) except that he designed the D’Arlington in Oakland, a building teetering on the border of classicism and modernism whose lines strongly remind us of this building.

    So there you have it: an enigma, and Father Pitt would certainly be grateful for any scraps of information about this building.

    Entrance

    The curving lines of this entrance also strongly suggest Titus de Bobula.

    Balcony
    Balcony from the side
    Side of the grotesque head
    From the west
    The Emerson

  • Hunt Armory, Shadyside

    Hunt Armory

    This block-long palace is a startlingly imposing building to run across in the residential back streets of Shadyside. The dwellers in the houses surrounding it must feel a glow of confidence knowing they are well protected should the Prussians invade. The building was designed by the W. G. Wilkins Company, also responsible for the Maul Building and the Frick & Lindsay Company Building (now the Andy Warhol Museum). It opened in 1916.

    Main entrance
    Arms of Pennsylvania
    South entrance

  • Cathedral Mansions and Haddon Hall in 1929

    Thanks to a kind correspondent, old Pa Pitt has an opportunity to prove himself right about one thing and wrong about something else. Being wrong is almost as good as being right, because it means learning something new.

    Our correspondent sent two pictures that appeared in an advertisement that ran in the Post-Gazette in 1929. The ad was for Frigidaire refrigerating systems, as used in prominent buildings in the city.

    First, the Cathedral Mansions apartments on Ellsworth Avenue.

    Cathedral Mansions in 1929

    Here Father Pitt was right. A little while ago, we ran this picture of Cathedral Mansions as it looks today:

    Cathedral Mansions today

    At that time we mentioned that we suspected it had lost a cornice. Father Pitt was right about that, as you can see from the 1929 picture.

    Now, here’s the one we were wrong about:

    Haddon Hall in 1929

    This building is now an apartment building called Hampshire Hall. As “Haddon Hall” it was a hotel with apartments. Here is what it looks like today:

    Hampshire Hall (formerly Haddon Hall)

    The obvious change is that modernist growth on the front. When he published these pictures, Father Pitt wrote, “It appears to be a glass enclosure for what was once an elegant verandah.” That is wrong. It seems to have been a replacement for the original dining room or lounge of the hotel. It was probably put there in about 1961: a newspaper ad from December 22, 1961, promotes the Walt Harper Quintet’s appearance at the “newly remodeled Haddon Hall Lounge.”

    Many thanks to our correspondent for the pictures, which give us new information about these two notable buildings. If anyone knows the architect of either one, but especially Haddon Hall/Hampshire Hall (which is in a distinctive modernist-Renaissance style), Father Pitt would be grateful for the information.

  • Berry Hall, Chatham University

    Built in 1895, this is one of several magnificent private houses that have come into the possession of Chatham University without drastic architectural modification. The exterior is in an exceptionally accurate Georgian style that would be right at home in Annapolis or Williamsburg.

  • Cathedral Mansions, Shadyside

    Cathedral Mansions

    A modernized form of classicism, or a classicized modernism, makes an attractive apartment block on Ellsworth Avenue at the western edge of Shadyside. It is mostly a group of rectangular boxes, but a few classical details—like the Vitruvian-scroll molding above the third floor—give it some character. Father Pitt suspects that it has lost a cornice; it might have been late enough to do without a cornice, but that Vitruvian scroll looks as though it ought to be echoing something at the top of the building, and slight signs of damage up there suggest that something was peeled off at some point.

    Addendum: Thanks to the research of a kind correspondent, we now have a picture of Cathedral Mansions in 1929, and it does indeed have a proper cornice.

    Another addendum: Another correspondent provides the information that the architect was John M. Donn, the Washington (D. C.) architect who also designed the Investment Building downtown. The information comes from an Iron City Sand and Gravel advertisement in the Pittsburg Press, Monday, November 22, 1926 (page 30).

  • Lindsay House, Chatham University

    One of several mansions that have become part of Chatham University, this tasteful Tudor house is comparatively modest against its neighbors the Mellons and the Reas.

    Addendum: We find from the June 1911 issue of The Builder that this was built as the President’s Home for the Pennsylvania College for Women. The architect was Thomas Hannah. Here are two pictures from the magazine:

  • Alumnae Memorial Window, Chatham University

    A window by Louis Comfort Tiffany, donated to the Pennsylvania Female College (now Chatham) in 1888. The figure is taken from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling: the Erythraean Sibyl, “here transformed into a symbol for women’s education,” as a plaque nearby says. This was an early work of Tiffany’s, believed to be his earliest in the Pittsburgh area. It was put away in about 1930 and sat in storage for seventy years, because who needed a window by Tiffany? In 2000 it was finally brought out of storage—old Pa Pitt imagines a janitor starting the ball rolling by saying, “Hey, can we get this thing out of the way?”—and restored for a place in the science building.

    Note that Shakespeare’s name appears twice in the pantheon of great figures every young lady should know. No one else gets that honor, and—though Shakespeare certainly is worth twice as much as any of the others to an English-speaking college student—one wonders who specified the duplication, or even whether it was intentional.

  • Redbuds at Chatham University

  • Rea House, Chatham University

    Rea house

    Another of the millionaires’ mansions that have become part of Chatham University. Built in 1911 or 1912 for steel executive James C. Rea, the Julia and James Rea House is now a student dormitory. Students tell us the rooms are “quirky” in a good way, with high ceilings and odd protrusions, because the house was divided with minimal disruption to the original architecture.

    Rea House

    A very short video on the Chatham Undergraduate Housing page shows us some of the interior.

    With a tree in front
    Up a long hill

    Addendum: The architects were MacClure & Spahr.

  • Clyde House, Shadyside

    This Renaissance house in Shadyside is now a residence for first-year students at Carnegie Mellon. The round dormer is unusual, but there was a brief fad for them around the turn of the twentieth century: see also the J. J. Matthews House.

    Addendum: The architect was Frederick Osterling. This is the sole survivor of a row of three houses Osterling designed; this one was for James H. Hammond. See Works of F. J. Osterling by J. Franklin Nelson, 1904.