You can make good money as a lawyer if you make the right contacts. Willis McCook was lawyer to the robber barons, and he lived among them in this splendid Gothic mansion on the Fifth Avenue millionaires’ row. The architects were the local firm of Carpenter & Crocker. It is now a hotel called the “Mansions on Fifth,” along with the house around the corner that McCook built for his daughter and son-in-law.
Pittsburghers are used to bricks and Belgian blocks, and most people who walk on Ellsworth Avenue past the entrance to this absurdly narrow little street probably never notice that these blocks are made of wood.
Wood-block pavements were very common in the 1800s. The “Nicolson pavement”—a pavement of wood blocks soaked in creosote—had some advantages over stone: cobblestones were horribly uneven, and Belgian block is expensive and hard on horses’ feet. Wooden pavement does not stand up well to heavy vehicular traffic, however, and almost all the Nicolson pavements are gone. There is one in Philadelphia, one in Cleveland, a badly decayed one in St. Louis, and three in Chicago, according to the Wikipedia article. But Roslyn Place is the only remaining street in America paved from beginning to end with wood blocks—although, to be fair, the beginning and the end are not very far apart. Here, in a quiet dead-end court, the traffic is light, and the blocks last for decades before they have to be replaced. Since the street is a historic district, we can be fairly confident that they will always be replaced with wooden blocks, as they have been in the past.
A very plain apartment block (as far as we can tell from the outside, the name of it is For Rent 2 & 3 Bedroom Apartments), but an attractive addition to the street nonetheless. The prominent bays, which would have been spurned by modernist architects, have two salutary effects. Aesthetically, they vary what would otherwise be a monotonous front. If you are the kind of modernist who despises aesthetic considerations, however, consider the practical purpose: bays like these flood the interior with light in a way that cannot be accomplished with any flat surface.
Addendum: According to our local John McSorley expert, this building was put up for developer John McSorley in 1903. The architect was J. A. Thain from Chicago.
A modest apartment building with a bit of Art Deco flair in the brickwork and the staggered vertical lines.
A notable example of Art Deco in Shadyside.
Otherwise not remarkable among the many classically inspired apartment houses in Shadyside, this one has an entrance that certainly stands out. It makes a spectacle of itself, in fact. The capitals on the massive square columns are more or less Corinthian, but Corinthian is usually the lightest and airiest-looking of the classical orders, whereas this construction gives the impression that it outweighs the whole building behind it.
This picture was taken with what might be called a toy camera. It was a no-name digital camera with stated 18-megapixel resolution, but clearly those 18 megapixels are achieved by multiplying some much smaller number of pixels. It may amuse you to enlarge the picture to full size and examine the results.
A large classical firehouse with its front on Filbert Street and a long, well-designed side on Elmer Street.
The Filbert Street front.
Arms of the city of Pittsburgh, on the left side of the front.
Arms of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, on the right side of the front.
The Elmer Street side looks like an Italian Renaissance palace.
Most pedestrians on Walnut Street pass this building without noticing it; at best they may glance at the rounded corners, but otherwise it strikes them as just another modernist building. It is in fact one of the very earliest outbreaks of modernism in Pittsburgh: it was designed by Frederick Scheibler and opened in 1908. It must have been startlingly modern indeed surrounded by Edwardian Shadyside.
This building began its life as the First Methodist Protestant Church; it later passed into the hands of the Seventh Day Adventists, and now belongs to a nondenominational Korean congregation. It is a work of Frederick Osterling in his typically florid Romanesque style. Obviously the spire has had a bit of bad luck, but the rest of the exterior is in pretty good shape.
This modest but tasteful house seems to be the parsonage for the church, and Father Pitt can easily imagine that it was designed by Osterling as well. He would be happy to have his speculation corrected or confirmed. Update: Father Pitt’s speculation was wrong. The architect of the parish house, built in 1914 or so, was H. E. Kennedy.1
