This fairy-tale palace, finished in 1930 or 1931, was designed by Paul Scheuneman, whom old Pa Pitt has already pointed out as a skilled practitioner of what we call the fairy-tale style—see these two houses in Green Tree. This one was featured in the Sun-Telly on Washington’s Birthday in 1931:
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, February 22, 1931. Note how much lighter the stones were when they were new.
“English Design—Caste Brothers, builders, have recently completed this home in Cedarhurst Manor, new residential park on the outskirts of Mt. Lebanon. The architect was Paul R. Scheuneman. Several more homes are being planned.”
Coraopolis is notable for the variety of styles in its houses. Many have been altered over the years, but the back streets are still very pleasant. A few weeks ago, old Pa Pitt took a long walk through Coraopolis on a slightly drizzly day.
This seems to be the parsonage for the Methodist church next door.
The siding has swallowed the original details in this house, but it is neatly kept, and the Georgian form of it still carries a load of dignity.
This is a sad thing to happen to any house, especially a fine Dutch colonial on a pleasant street like this. We hope insurance will cover putting the house back together; we place it here in the middle of the album so that it will be documented if it has to be demolished, but there are still plenty of cheerful pictures to follow.
A pair of brick-and-stucco houses that stand out for their unusual choice of material by Coraopolis standards.
The Colonial Revival comes to Coraopolis in an exceptionally tasteful small house.
This center-hall house is remarkable, but not more remarkable than the trees in the front yard.
A few pictures from a very brief walk after a day of rain. Glenmore Avenue may not be quite as tony as Espy Avenue a block away, but it has its share of elegant homes. As in many other streets in Dormont, the elegant homes are mixed in with pleasant little apartment houses and duplexes—a core principle of what old Pa Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development.
We start with a house that, although it is addressed to Glenmore, actually faces the cross street, Lasalle Avenue.
This Tudor seems to present a modest front to LaSalle Avenue, but turning the corner to Glenmore Avenue reveals a long side of dimensions that would almost qualify it for mansion status.
Next to the Tudor mansion, a symmetrical double house arranged as two Dutch Colonial houses back to back.
A typical Pittsburgh duplex—except that the typical Pittsburgh slope of the lot gives it the opportunity for a third apartment in the basement, with a ground-level entrance on the side street, Key Avenue.
An apartment building that looks like many other small apartment buildings in Dormont. They probably all share the same architect: Charles Geisler, who lived nearby in Beechview and designed dozens of buildings in Dormont and Mount Lebanon.
Even though he has walked on Glenmore Avenue many times before, old Pa Pitt never made this association before now. This is a smaller cottage, but it was clearly designed by the same hand that drew this overgrown bungalow on Mattern Avenue:
This is what you get if you tell your architect, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” The house on Glenmore may originally have had stucco and half-timbering like this: there’s no telling what’s under that aluminum siding.
This striking house in a subdued version of Prairie Style has been rescued from decay, with tiny plastic paste-on shutters as a signifier of a high-class renovation. Here they are installed behind downspouts, which makes them even more conceptually absurd.
Old Pa Pitt’s New Year’s resolution is to bring you more of the same, and to try to get better at it.
The May Building was designed by Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, and a versatile one as well.
The famous Sicilian Greek mathematician and philosopher and inventor and scientist Archimedes was nicknamed “Beta” in his lifetime, because he was second-best at everything. That was Charles Bickel. If you wanted a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this one, he would give you a splendid one; it might not be the most artistic in the whole city, but it would be admired, and it would hold up for well over a century. If you wanted Richardsonian Romanesque, he could give it to you in spades; it might not be as sophisticated as Richardson, but it would be very good and would make you proud. If you wanted the largest commercial building in the world, why, sure, he was up to that, and he would make it look so good that a century later people would go out of their way to find a use for it just because they liked it so much.
The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.
The lobby of One PPG Place. Father Pitt has decided to round up a random number (twenty-nine, as it turns out) of pictures from 2024 that he thought had exceeded his usual standard, and here they are to goad him into doing better next year.
Lantern in Allegheny West.
St. Bernard’s Church, Mount Lebanon.
House in Virginia Manor, Mount Lebanon.
Liberty Avenue from Seventh Avenue.
The Sixth Street or Roberto Clemente bridge.
Fern fiddlehead.
Fourth Avenue bank towers.
Dandelion seeds.
House in Seminole Hills, Mount Lebanon.
Evening sun on the Donahoe’s building.
A panorama of the skyline from Mount Washington.
Entrance to the Union Trust Building.
The Logan-Gregg Hardware Company building, designed by Charles Bickel. This composite of six photographs produced a very good architectural elevation of the façade.
Alcoa Corporate Center.
Liberty Center.
Tree and moon.
A gravedigger at work behind the grave of Andy Warhol.
Hilltop neighborhood with misty skyline.
Flax (Linum usitatissimum).
Union Church in Robinson Township.
Abstract forms in the Gateway subway station.
Fall colors at Gateway Center.
This picture of tombstones in Clinton Cemetery was taken with an Argus A, which is going on 90 years old, on Kentmere Pan 100 film, and developed in a monobath. It was meant to be a picture for Halloween, and it succeeded in creating exactly the right mood.
The back slopes of Mount Washington, seen with a long lens from Beltzhoover.
The roofline of the Haller Baking Company building in Emsworth.
A picture of some houses on Baywood Street in East Liberty. It looks like nothing special, but that is the point of it. It illustrates the streetscape very well, and in composition and color it is one of Father Pitt’s favorite pictures to look at.
In the engraving, the Fidelity Building on Fourth Avenue as it was designed. In the photograph, the building as it exists today (or actually as it existed in 2015, but not much has changed—even the posters for ABC Imaging were the same the last time old Pa Pitt looked). Father Pitt has tried to arrange the comparison to make the one substantial difference obvious: at some point between design and construction, one more floor was added.
The architect, James T. Steen, was an early adopter of the Richardsonian Romanesque style: Richardson’s courthouse, which set off the mania for Romanesque in Pittsburgh, was still under construction when this building was put up. This was before the age of skyscrapers, when the base-shaft-cap formula gave architects a simple way of extending height indefinitely by multiplying identical floors in the middle. Here, Steen seems to have decided that just duplicating one of the floors would make the top of the building undersized and underwhelming. Instead, he added a new sixth floor between the fifth floor and what had been the sixth but now became the seventh floor. He gave this new sixth floor arches smaller than the ones below but larger than the ones above, and transferred some of the weighty stone detail from the fifth floor to the new sixth floor. The result was a composition that still seems rightly balanced, and you would probably never guess that the height had been extended if you had not seen the earlier drawing.
