Category: Squirrel Hill

  • Squirrel Hill’s Manor Has the Atmosphere of a Country Club

    The Manor in 1922

    The Manor, which opened in 1922, was designed by Harry S. Bair, who did a number of theaters around here (including the Regent, now the Kelly-Strayhorn in East Liberty). As the caption says, it was “a distinct departure from the conventional,” and the Tudor half-timbering of the exterior advertised the sumptuous club-like atmosphere of the interior. Today the exterior has been simplified, and the building expanded, but it still feels like an outpost of Merrie England on Murray Avenue.

    Manor in 2024
    Gable

    This gable on the Darlington Road side of the building still preserves all its intricate diagonal brickwork and half-timbering.

    Chimney
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    These little chimneys should have their own separate landmark status.

    Almost nothing remains of the original interior, though the Manor is still a movie house, now divided into four small theaters. Originally, the lobby was a feast of luxurious furniture and decoration.

    Entrance lobby

    And that was just the entrance lobby. If you were meeting someone or just waiting for something, you could retire to the parlor:

    Parlor

    There was also a men’s club room with the atmosphere of an old English manor:

    Men’s club room

    After all that, movies seem almost superfluous, but the auditorium was just as luxurious as the rest of the building:

    Auditorium

    Old Pa Pitt particularly likes the arrangement of tropical plants in the orchestra pit.

    Today, although the Manor is still a very pleasant place to take in a movie, almost nothing is left of that sumptuous interior except a bit of ceiling and this fine chandelier:

    Chandelier

    The 1922 pictures all came from a two-page feature in Moving Picture World for August 5, 1922, and we reprint the text of the article here (making a few silent typographic corrections).

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  • Rafferty Rows, Squirrel Hill

    Rowhouses on Wilkins Avenue

    These two long rows of houses where Beeler Street meets Wilkins Avenue make a striking impression now, but they must have been more striking when they were built in the early 1900s. For several years they sat out in the farmlands of Squirrel Hill, forming a strange urban island (along with two rows of three houses across Beeler Street) in the midst of the otherwise rural East End. We caught them on a dim and rainy evening.

    1910 fire-insurance map.
    Rowhouses on Beeler at Wilkins

    Note how the rhythm of the houses is made more interestingly varied by alternating the peaked and rounded fronts but running the oriels in a series of three.

    Row of houses on Beeler Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
  • A Rainy Evening in Murdoch Farms, Squirrel Hill

    1311 Bennington Avenue
    Architect: Lamont Button.

    It was rainy and dim, so don’t expect too much of these pictures. But old Pa Pitt happened to be in Squirrel Hill just before dark with half an hour to waste, so he took a walk in the rain in Murdoch Farms, one of the richest parts of Squirrel Hill, and did what he could with the camera.

    5458 Fair Oaks Street
    5462 Fair Oaks Street
    Architect: Edward Crump.
    1200 Bennington Avenue
    1320 Bennington Avenue
    5450 Fair Oaks Street
    5357 Fair Oaks Street
    5357 Fair Oaks Street
    1331 Bennington Avenue
    1310 Bennington Avenue
    5367 Fair Oaks Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
  • Warwick House, Squirrel Hill

    Front of Warwick House

    Warwick House was built in 1910 for Howard Heinz, son of the ketchup king H. J. Heinz. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, who designed several other millionaires’ mansions around here, as well as a number of fine churches. The house now belongs to the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, and it is rented to Opus Dei for a dollar a year, under the condition that the tenants undertake the maintenance, which is enormous.

    Once a year the residents throw a big open house, which gave us a chance to get a few pictures. We would have got more, but we were having too much fun.

    Warwick House
    Front of Warwick House
    Front door
    French door in the rear

    A French door in the back leading out into the garden.

    Warwick House

    The rear of the ballroom, an addition built in about 1929. It is now a chapel.

    Arbor

    An arbor with some splendid ironwork runs along the back of the garden.

    Decorative ironwork along the arbor
    Ironwork

    From an earlier visit, we also have several pictures of the interior of Warwick House.

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10. Most of the pictures are HDR stacks of three photographs at different exposures.

  • Chapel, Office, and Gatehouse at the Homewood Cemetery

    Tower of Homewood Cemetery Chapel

    Albert Spahr of MacClure & Spahr designed the chapel, the administration building, and the gatehouse for the Homewood Cemetery in a Perpendicular Gothic style. (Mr. MacClure had already died, but his name remained at the head of the firm.) The effect is to make us think of our ideal image of an English village.

    Office and chapel
    Chapel
    Chapel
    Chapel with trees
    Tower entrance to the chapel
    Inscription: Anno Domini MCMXXII
    Lantern
    Flower and foliage
    Hinge

    The doors have impressive iron hinges and pulls.

    Door pull
    Tower clock

    Here is an extraordinarily rare thing: a tower clock that is keeping accurate time.

    Office

    The administration building.

    Office
    Office entrance
    Gatehouse

    The gatehouse appears to have been expanded by a third on the right; the seam is only just visible in the front, but much more obvious in the rear.

    Rear of the gatehouse
    Rear of the gatehouse

    Cameras: Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans f/1.4 35mm lens; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Chandelier in the Manor Theatre, Squirrel Hill

    Chandelier in the Manor Theatre

    Though the Manor has long been subdivided into four small theaters, part of the original ceiling remains in the lobby, and this chandelier, according to staff at the theater, is an exact replica of the original.

  • Mellon Bank, Squirrel Hill

    Mellon Bank

    One of several round banks Mellon Bank built in the modernist era. It is still a bank, now belonging to Citizens Bank, Mellon’s successor in retail banking.

    Roofline
    Canon PowerShot A540.

    We also have a less abstract picture of the whole building.

  • Arts-and-Crafts Terrace in Squirrel Hill

    Terrace on Denniston Street

    Old Pa Pitt enjoys pointing out the many ways architects and builders have answered the terrace question. “This method of building three or six houses under one roof shows a handsome return on the money invested,” said an article about a terrace of houses in Brighton Heights, but the investment pays off only if tenants are willing to move in. The later Aluminum City Terrace development in New Kensington, designed in a starkly modern style by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, had a hard time attracting tenants in spite of cheap rents and an acute housing shortage, because locals thought it looked yucky.

    The terrace question, then, is this: How can we build economical housing that is nevertheless attractive enough to seem desirable to tenants?

    This terrace obviously had a higher budget than many, so it answered the question with fine design, elaborate decoration, and good materials. The materials were good enough that they have survived intact more than a century: these houses on Denniston Street, twenty-four of them in four rows of six each, were put up before 1923, but they still have their tile roofs and other decorative elements.

    Two houses in the tarrace

    Probably because of the steep hill they occupy, these houses have unusually generous front yards—generous enough for a whole container vegetable garden, for instance.

    Looking up at the houses
    Along the row
    Sony Alpha 3000.
  • Fountain in Richard B. Mellon’s Garden

    Fountain of light pink westerly granite, R. B. Mellon Estate

    Courtesy of the New England Granite Works, a picture of the fountain in the Mellons’ Walled Garden shows us a little of what the garden, now part of Mellon Park, looked like when the Mellons lived there. The sculpture on the fountain is the work of Edmond Amateis, and the fountain has been beautifully restored for the delight of visitors to the park.

  • Niches on the College of Fine Arts Building, Carnegie Mellon University

    Henry Hornbostel designed the front of the Fine Arts Building with niches that display all styles of architectural decoration, and more practically give students a place to sit between classes. The niches have continued to accumulate sculpture in styles from all over the world. The whimsical figures in the Gothic niche may have been done by Achille Giammartini.

    Figure in first niche
    Figure in first niche
    Foliage with critters in first niche
    Lion eating an unfortunate Gothic figure
    Figure in first niche
    Figure in first niche
    Second niche

    In the classical niche, the three orders of Greek architecture: Corinthian, Doric, Ionic, demonstrated with correct proportions.

    Third niche
    Fourth niche
    Sculpture in Indian style, with Egyptian column