Since it was built as public housing and opened in 1973, and since it bears a strong resemblance to his many other public-housing projects, Father Pitt does not hesitate to assign this building to Tasso Katselas, the king of public works in Pittsburgh.
An apartment fire fortunately was confined.
This quiet enclave of small apartment buildings is part of the same “city set on a hill” development as the Morrowfield, and the buildings were probably also designed by J. E. Dwyer. They’re fairly ordinary Pittsburgh buildings of the early 1920s, Mission style with a bit of Romanesque thrown in. They look their best in black and white.
These two identical fantasy-Tudor apartment buildings at the corner of Morrowfield and Shady Avenues were built in 1929. Father Pitt does not know the architect, but they are very similar to apartment buildings built at the same time in Mount Lebanon and associated with Charles Geisler. Since Geisler worked on other buildings in Squirrel Hill, he is a likely candidate.
We have the technology to take those utility cables out of the picture, but in this case not the patience.
This beautiful building shows some obvious influence from Henry Hornbostel’s famous Rodef Shalom, but it is original enough to be called a tribute rather than an imitation. The architects were Charles J. and Chris Rieger, and it is a backhanded compliment to these underappreciated brothers that some of their best works have been misattributed to more famous architects. This building in particular is usually attributed to Alexander Sharove, but we are quite sure that the Riegers designed it.1 The cornerstone was laid in 1928, and the building was dedicated in September of 1929.
The entrance, which is where the Hornbostel influence is most obvious, is a feast of polychrome terra cotta and stained glass.
Once again our frequent correspondent David Schwing has spotted something important and delightful: a previously unidentified work by Elise Mercur, Pittsburgh’s first female architect. It’s been sitting right there in the open, but nothing on the Internet has pointed out its significance.
Mercur was a fascinating character. At a time when women as architects were almost unheard of, she was getting big commissions and supervising crews of men who knew they had better not cross her. (See the picture above: would you want to get that look from your boss?)
She first came to national attention when she beat twelve other competitors with her design for the Woman’s Building at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895. The decision of the committee was unanimous: she blew the other competitors away.
These renderings were printed in a big architectural magazine, which picked them up from another big architectural magazine. They were also front-page news in Atlanta, and of course in Pittsburgh. The Inland Architect and News Record accompanied them with this brief introduction to the architect:
Miss Elise Mercur, architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Of thirteen designs submitted, hers was considered of the highest merit and was accepted. As a preparation for her professional life Miss Mercur studied four years at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and subsequently continued her artistic studies in Germany. The lady has been a resident of Pittsburgh for four years and has been engaged upon practical architectural work in the office of Architect Thomas Boyd, whose foreman she now is. Miss Mercur assisted in the preparation of the plans for the new city Poor Buildings at Marshalsea and superintended their erection.
Thomas Boyd was a very prosperous architect in those days, and we must give him credit for recognizing ability when he saw it. It took courage to make a woman his construction foreman, but Mercur was up to the task.
Soon she had a prospering practice of her own, and she insisted on being in every way equal to a male architect.
For doing men’s work I always insist upon getting men’s prices. I never accept an assignment for less than 5 per cent. I never have any trouble. Contractors who have worked under me know that I won’t stand any ‘monkeying’ and do not try to fool me with poor material, careless work, &c. While I am willing to do what is right, I generally make them live up to the specifications, and any work done improperly has to be gone over again. (Mercur quoted in “Pittsburg’s Woman Architect,” New York World, January 9, 1898.)
Much of her work was academic—dormitories and classroom buildings for colleges. And that explains why most of it is gone. College presidents hate old buildings, because they stand in the way of big donors’ vanity projects, and college presidents are generally hired for their ability to round up big donors, not for their sensitivity to the architectural heritage of the campus. As far as we know, all of Mercur’s academic buildings have been demolished, some fairly recently. In fact, until a little while ago the only remaining building by Mercur known to exist was St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the Hill District. But now we have a fine house whose identification rests on solid ground.
Dr. William H. Mercur has purchased a choice plot on Fifth avenue, opposite Lilac street, as a site for a new home. The lot measures 50×200 feet, and it belonged to Charles D. Callery. The price paid was $10,000 cash, or $200 a foot. Mrs. Elsie Mercur-Wagner is making plans for a $15,000 brick dwelling which is to be erected on the property within the next few months. (“Real Estate Transactions,” Pittsburg Press, April 27, 1900, p. 14.)
By this time Mercur was married and using the name Wagner along with her own. We may point out in passing that the name “Elise” was unusual enough that almost half the construction listings misspell it as “Elsie.” Dr. William H. Mercur was her brother, and we imagine he was quite pleased with the house his sister built for him.
“Lilac Street” in the listing is now St. James, and the location “opposite Lilac street” makes the house easy to find. Plat maps shortly after the house was built show it as belonging to M. S. Mercur (probably William’s wife; property was often put in the name of the wife). In 1923, it still belonged to M. S. Mercur. It is on the side of Fifth Avenue that is counted as Squirrel Hill by city planning maps, but traditionally both sides of the street were “Shadyside,” and the Mercurs were rubbing elbows with some very rich people in the Shadyside millionaires’ row.
By comparing this lot with the one next to it, we can see that the lot level was originally above the garage doors. The front yard has been dug away to make space for driveway and garages. Much of the distinctive detail of the house has been preserved, however, and we hope the owners realize that they possess a rare treasure.
The Morrowfield is that big building that looms ahead as you approach the Squirrel Hill Tunnel on the Parkway from downtown Pittsburgh. It was built in 1924 as part of a huge development promoted by developer Thomas Watkins as “a city set on a hill,” and most of the buildings—including this one—were designed by the architect J. E. Dwyer, originally from Ellicott City, who built himself a house right next to the site and spent years supervising construction projects.
In this map from “A City That Is Set on a Hill,” Building Age, December, 1923, p. 36, the big rectangle marked “148 FAMILY APARTMENT” would become the Morrowfield.
The same article printed the architect’s elevation of the new apartment building, spread across two pages. We have taken some pains to restore it to legibility.
The building went up at a breakneck pace, with crews doing everything all at once. It was finished in less than a year. Below, “Steel work in the early stages showing the brick filler walls being laid before the concrete work was begun, to rush the job along.”
By the time the October, 1924, issue of Building Age came out (from which the pictures of the construction above were taken), the whole project was complete, and this photograph of the building from a distance was taken in time to make it into the magazine.
The entrance is liberally decorated with polychrome terra cotta.
The building of this project was watched nationally, because it was unusual to place such a large building on such a difficult lot. The architect’s elevation shows the slope of Murray Avenue along the front; here we can see that Morrowfield Avenue, on the right-hand side (in terms of the elevation), slopes upward even more dramatically. Then the street behind, Alderson Street, slopes upward again, so that the ground-floor entrances on Alderson Street are three floors up from the main entrance on Murray Avenue.
From that same article in Building Age:
The Morrowfield Apartments presents an interesting study in the effective utilization of exceptional grades. The front elevation faces a western street that is 30 feet lower than the street level in the rear, and a grade running north and south affects the building lengthwise as well as in depth.
The consequence is that the apartment is partly seven and partly eight stories high in front, and only five stories in the rear. What is really the fourth story when seen from the south elevation, is the first when seen from the rear, and the occupants of the fourth story front are therefore enabled to reach their apartments without the use of stairs or elevator by simply coming in the other street.
We saw these houses last fall on a dim and rainy evening, and at that time we explained what little we knew about their history. Here are the ones on Beeler Street in bright sunshine.
Old maps show that this apartment house was built after 1910 and before 1923, and that the owner was C. P. Hitchens. C. P. Hitchens was a Pittsburgh architect, so it’s probable that he designed the building. It’s an attractive design with elements of everything from Romanesque (the recessed arched entrance) to Prairie Style, all harmonized so that nothing seems out of place.
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.
Built in 1931, Laughlin Hall was designed by E. P. Mellon, an architect of conservative but refined taste who prospered through his connection to the Mellon family. (E. P. stood for Edward Purcell, but he seems to have been known by his initials.) The Mellons were big patrons of the Pennsylvania College for Women, Chatham’s predecessor, and Uncle Andy himself had his house nearby.
