Pittsburgh has many Millionaires’ Rows, and one of them is along Aylesboro Avenue in Squirrel Hill. This house is typical of the rectangular Renaissance-palace style that was popular for large houses in the early 1900s.
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Renaissance Palace in Squirrel Hill
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Round Bank in Squirrel Hill
From the “form follows function” era of the middle twentieth century comes this round bank. Round is probably the most impractical and anti-functional shape you could come up with for a bank, but modernism sacrificed function for a striking effect much more often than Victorian classicism did. This was built in 1965 for Mellon Bank.1 It now belongs to Citizens Bank, which bought Mellon’s retail branches when Mellon merged with Bank of New York and decided not to deal with grubby working-class people anymore.
Addendum: The architect was Pittsburgh-based Harry Lefkowitz.2
- Our source for the date is this Post-Gazette article. ↩︎
- Source: “Mellon Bank Building Office,” Pittsburgh Press, July 26, 1964. “An elliptical structure of new and daring design by Pittsburgh architect Harry Lefkowitz…” ↩︎
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Warwick House, Squirrel Hill
Warwick House was built in 1910 for Howard Heinz, son of the ketchup king H. J. Heinz. The architects were Vrydaugh and Wolfe, and the construction budget was $75,000. After the Heinzes it passed through the Hillmans, and now it belongs to the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, from which it is rented by Opus Dei, the Catholic organization famed for its albino assassins. But the organization seldom sends the assassins out against anyone but renowned curators; the rest of us are quite safe. At an open house this summer, old Pa Pitt was graciously allowed to take a few pictures of the beautifully maintained Jacobean interior. Above, the window in the grand staircase.
This picture of the front is not the best; the light was from the wrong direction. It means we will have to return soon at a different time of day.
The front door.
The front hall; the door to the library is on the right, the grand staircase on the left.
A little bit of the decorative woodwork in the front hall.
The grand staircase.
Modern American houses forget about the ceiling, as if people never looked up. Warwick House does not make that mistake. This is the decorated ceiling in a side hall.
The former ballroom was converted into a chapel by the late Henry Menzies, an ecclesiastical architect whose specialty was refurbishing modernist churches of the 1960s and 1970s to make them suitable for liturgical worship. He liked to use a baldacchino to give proper emphasis to the altar. (The ballroom was added to the house later, probably in 1929 according to the current residents.)
The ceiling of the ballroom.
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Colonel Alexander Leroy Hawkins Memorial
Col. Hawkins was a state senator as well as a much-respected officer in the Spanish-American War, which America fought to free the Spanish colonies, and the ensuing Philippine insurrection, which America fought to keep her newly acquired colony. He died in 1899; this memorial was put up in 1904. Originally the base extended in an embracing curve, as we see in this old photograph from Historic Pittsburgh; the extensions were probably cut off when the approaches were built for the Panther Hollow Bridge.
In an earlier version of this article, Father Pitt had negligently typed “1894” instead of “1904” as the date of this memorial. It is harder than one thinks to cross the gap between centuries.
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Mellon Park Gatehouse
With a redbud tree.
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Apple Blossoms in Mellon Park
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Bowl of Tulips
In Mellon Park.
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Sixth Presbyterian Church, Squirrel Hill, in 1994
One of the many black stone buildings that still remained in Pittsburgh in the 1990s. Like almost all the others, Sixth Presbyterian has since been cleaned and restored to its original color.
Father Pitt has always wondered why the Presbyterians kept numbering their churches. “First Presbyterian” is an honorable distinction. “Fifth Presbyterian” just sounds tired. And then why stop at six? There is a Seventh Presbyterian in Cincinnati, for example. (Update: They did not stop at six; in fact both Presbyterian and United Presbyterian churches in Pittsburgh went into the double digits. Sixth Presbyterian is the highest number still going that we know of.)
Addendum: The architect was John Lewis Beatty; the church was built in 1902.1
- Record & Guide, February 12, 1902. “J. Lewis Beatty, Jackson Building, has prepared plans for the Sixth Presbyterian church and they have been approved by the Building Committee, of which Dr J. Guy McCandless, Director of Public Works, is the chairman. It will be 32 x 132 feet, of sandstone, hardwood interior finish, handsome furniture and fixtures. The cost will be about $60,000.” The measurement of 32 feet has to be incorrect; no church of any consequence is that narrow. About 82 feet would be plausible, according to the lot measurements on the 1923 Hopkins map. ↩︎
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The Walled Garden at Mellon Park
With dancers practicing in the distance. Did old Pa Pitt wait until they were in the most comical possible positions to push the shutter button? Maybe.
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Sunnyledge
Built for a prosperous doctor, this house was designed by Longfellow and Harlow (soon to be Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow), and shows the restrained good taste that would be the hallmark of the firm’s work for decades. Although it is technically on the Squirrel Hill side of the street, socially this house forms part of the Shadyside millionaires’ row along Fifth Avenue.
