Georgian details applied to a pair of mirror-image apartment buildings on Elmer Street. The huge sunny bays might be described as exceptionally tall oriels, since they do not reach the ground, but instead terminate in surprisingly folksy carved wooden brackets.
Update: Thanks to our correspondent David Schwing, we have more information on this building, which is a kind of split-level apartment house with three floors if we count a high basement, the entrance being between two levels. We had originally called it a duplex, but it seems to be a triplex. The architect was C. P. Hitchens, a developer-architect who designed his own buildings; he bought the lot in 1911.
The arts-and-crafts style of the building, with a tinge of Spanish mission, is expressed in patterned brickwork and big carved wooden brackets. The windows have been replaced, but the tiles and brackets at least have been preserved.
We’ll have to wait till the leaves are off the trees to get anything like a complete picture of the front of Highland Towers, one of Frederick Scheibler’s most famous buildings. But this collection of details should be enough to demonstrate why architectural historians drool over it. The building brings a fresh breath of Art Nouveau to Highland Avenue.
As built in 1914, the apartments were luxurious residences. Each had a living room, dining room, solarium, kitchen, library or guest room, two bedrooms, bathroom, and servant’s chamber. There were garages in back with gardens on the roofs.
Scheibler took the idea for these mosaic patterns from the German graphic designer, architect, industrial designer, type designer, and artist Peter Behrens.
This is a strangely elaborate gateway for a postwar modernist apartment building. But anyone who knows the history of Fifth Avenue can guess that the gateway indicates where a grand mansion once stood on the Shadyside Millionaires’ Row. (Although city planning maps make Fifth Avenue the boundary between Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, traditionally both sides of the street were counted as “Shadyside.”)
Atherstone was the mansion, or “castle” as locals would have said, of hardware and steel magnate John Bindley.
It was built in 1890, greatly expanded during the First World War (when these pillars were built), abandoned in 1929, and torn down in 1938.
When the demolition began, the Bulletin Index, Pittsburgh’s high-toned society magazine, ran an article about the house that we reproduce below. The magazine had been infected by Timestyle with its horror of conjunctions and its quirky capitalization, but we trust our readers to interpret it without too much difficulty. The article gives us a picture of Depression-era Fifth Avenue at its lowest point, before the postwar housing boom filled many of the vacant estates with modern apartment buildings.
Forty years ago young Theodore Dreiser used to spend his evenings reading Balzac in the Allegheny Public Library, his Sunday afternoons walking out Fifth Avenue and back again. It was then one of the wealthiest, swankiest, most famous streets in the world. Dreiser gaped at the great mansions, marvelled years later in his autobiography that “even the lamp posts were better than in other parts of the city.” One of the most magnificent of the castles he gaped at was “Atherstone” (see cut).
Atherstone was a work of art, a baronial symbol of the great-spending paleo-industrial age of which William Randolph Hearst is the sole remaining big figure. Pittsburgher John Bindley, having grown rich with his Grant Street hardware store, richer as co-founder of the Pittsburgh Steel Co., built his four-story gargoyled castle (in 1890) in the grand manner, with crenellated turrets and 80 windows with leaded panes, named it after his ancestral home place in England. A widower with only two of his six children living, he travelled through Europe every year with his niece Elmina, brought back paintings, furniture, hand-carved panelling, marble mantel-pieces in the fashion of one who feels it a class privilege and duty to patronize the arts. Fixtures he had made to order in Manhattan to match the furniture he bought, for the Chippendale dining room, the Japanese room that was his favorite. During the prosperous war years Steelman Bindley spent $200,000 to remodel, add a wing to his castle. In an enlarged residence of 24 rooms, six baths, he installed an electric elevator, new copper drains, plumbing and kitchen equipment, added cupboard space that virtually equalled the room volume of an ordinary house, put two carved stone pillars at the driveway entrance, two huge solid oak doors at the entrance of the hand-carved oak panelled hall.
Four years later, at the age of 75, Steelman Bindley died. Atherstone and contents were left to Son Edward Houston Bindley, who died in 1929, to Daughter Adelaide Bindley Davidson, who closed up the castle, put most of the furniture (including the Japanese room) into one end of the Hoeveler warehouse, moved to California. Installed above the spacious six-room coachhouse in the rear was Niece Elmina McMillin, her four servants.
Many a great mansion Theodore Dreiser looked upon forty years ago now stands boarded up and weed-choked, many another has been torn down to leave great toothless gaps in swank Fifth Avenue. Fortnight ago came word that John Bindley’s Atherstone, scene of many and lavish entertainments, was to be given into the hands of home-wrecking Austin Givens, Inc. (who eleven years ago tore down John Bindley’s hardware store to make way for the Gulf Building). Last week the curious and buying public poked and peered through the cold bare rooms of Atherstone, being auctioned bit by bit. This week Wrecker Givens began to tear down, cart away.
—The Bulletin Index, December 8, 1938, p. 33.
“Mrs. Thaw’s chocolate church” was what the neighbors called it, since the brownstone church was largely built with Thaw money. The architect was Theophilus P. Chandler, Jr., a name that sounds as though its bearer was summoned into being to have his suspenders cut by the Marx Brothers.
More pictures of Third Presbyterian.
Built in 1908, the Minnetonka Building was designed by Frederick Scheibler, and it would be hard to imagine the impression it would have made in Edwardian Shadyside. It looks like a building thirty or forty years ahead of its time, with its simple forms and streamlined curves that look forward to the Moderne architecture of the 1930s and 1940s. But it also has details that remind us of the most up-to-the-minute ideas from those Viennese and German art magazines that we know Scheibler got his hands on.
This doorway with its Art Nouveau window and Egyptian-style tapering would have been right at home in a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.
More pictures of the Minnetonka Building.
Something interesting must lurk behind this wall along Howe Street.
As we step closer we notice the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque, and we begin to get a view of the cottage beyond the wall.
The sheltering wall seems to be there less to conceal the house than to delight us with the revelation. This is the Nora McMullen Mellon house, built in 1911 from a design by Thomas Scott. The unusual (for Pittsburgh) choice of stucco with brick trim makes this English cottage stand out on the street, and the current owners keep it as pretty as an architect’s rendering.
Probably built in about 1940, this was the science-fiction apartment building of the future. Except for newer windows, it has not changed much.
Here’s a house in an eclectic style made up of bits of other eclectic styles, but they all fit together well. The heavy arches picked out in darker brick remind us of the Rundbogenstil, a word we like to say as often as possible; but the irregular picturesque arrangement of parts takes inspiration from the style that, in defiance of history, was called Queen Anne.
The turret has a well-preserved witch’s cap and a rim of foliage scrollwork.
The oriel and the porch pediment are both decorated with grotesque foliage ornaments.
The house next door is a duplicate, but reversed.
Finally, a house that shares the same general shape, but is distinguished by its shingly top with curved surfaces and ornamental swags and foliage picked out in contrasting paint.
Like many Shadyside houses, this one has automobiles burrowing under the porch.
Parking garages sometimes give us good views of the surrounding buildings, and no one questions your right to be there as long as you look respectable enough. (The powdered wig helps.) Here are three interesting houses on Aiken Avenue seen from the Shadyside Hospital garage. First, an unusually well-preserved Shingle-style house with a lush crop of shingles.
This Queen Anne house has been turned into seven apartments, to judge by counting mailboxes and doorbells.
Finally, this mansion in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century interpretation of Colonial style has grown an apartment building in its back yard, a disease to which some old houses are subject in urban neighborhoods. It appears on Google Maps as a “community correction center,” so if you make a mistake in typing you can probably come here to have it corrected professionally. Old Pa Pitt prefers to make his own corrections, but he is glad there is a service for people who need it.
