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Stevenson Stop on the Red Line, Dormont
Many streets in the Pittsburgh area used to have a median where the streetcars ran in a separate right-of-way: Center Avenue in West View and Brookline Boulevard in Brookline are two examples. Broadway in Dormont is the only one where the streetcars still run in the median. We could also count the Silver Line through Bethel Park as a broad instance of the same kind of development, although the streets between which the trolleys run have different names.
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Glen Tenement House by Titus de Bobula, Hazelwood
This tenement house in Hazelwood was built in 1903, making it one of Titus de Bobula’s early commissions in Pittsburgh. It is very conventional for De Bobula, but it represented him in a Pittsburgh Press roundup of local architects in 1905 (“Able Architects the Authors of City’s Architectural Beauty,” April 29, 1905), where this picture was published (we regret that we have not been able to find a better copy than this ugly microfilm scan):
From what we can see in the indistinct old photograph, the building has not changed much at all, though Gertrude Street in front of it has been regraded.
The Gertrude Street face. It is likely that many of the first residents were Hungarian millworkers: that is a bit of De Bobula’s First Hungarian Reformed Church peeking out from behind the building.
Entrance on the south end of the building. The entrances originally had some sort of triangular pediment or small projecting roof; the Press photo is too indistinct to make out any details, but we can see the shadow of a triangle over the entrances at both ends.
The Elizabeth Street end of the building.
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Peoples Center and World War II Veterans Memorial, North Shore
The Peoples Center is one of a number of buildings that have gone up on the North Shore in the past two decades in the style old Pa Pitt calls neoneoclassical, in which cheap modern materials are arranged in forms that echo classical architecture, but without any embarrassing artistic detail. The buildings look traditional and unobjectionable. They make decent citizens of the urban landscape. They have nothing to excite interest in themselves, but they have nothing to excite disgust or dismay, either.
The lighted World War II memorial in front gives this night view a drama it would not have otherwise.
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Stone House in Point Breeze
This stone house makes a fine impression as you walk by on Reynolds Street. If you just glanced at it, you might miss a very unusual feature: the corner windows in the front bedrooms on the second floor. Corner windows were very popular for a while in the middle twentieth century in modernist residences: they had the very practical purpose of leaving large expanses of wall blank for furniture or decorations. But it is not common to see them on a house that probably dates from about 1900.
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Public Comfort Stations in 1913
We prefer not to think about it, but the unfortunate fact is that human beings have natural functions that must be attended to. If we attend to them in the street, we will be arrested. The alternative is to go to some place that is privately owned, where we are subject to the whims of the owner.
Our ancestors occasionally attempted to deal with the problem more forthrightly than we are willing to do. From a 1913 magazine:
Public Comfort Stations in Pittsburgh
Two new public comfort stations installed by the county commissioners at the Allegheny County courthouse in Pittsburgh on either side of the Fifth Avenue entrance have been opened for public use. There are two rooms provided, one for women and one for men. They have been finished in white marble and fitted with most modern plumbing appliances.
A rest room for women is furnished with chairs and couches, and the women’s station will be in charge of a matron from 8 a. m. to 11 p. m. Towels, soap, brushes and combs will be found in both stations free of charge. The men’s station will be open at all hours day and night.
With the opening of the new stations Allegheny County will have four public comfort stations in use in Pittsburgh, two on the Federal Street Bridge and the courthouse station.
—Building Age, 1913.
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Concrete Rowhouses by Titus de Bobula, Greenfield
These tiny houses on Frank Street have a historic importance far out of proportion to their cost and size. First of all, they are among the relatively few remaining works of the eccentric architectural genius and flimflam artist Titus de Bobula, the man who would have been Fascist dictator of Hungary if he had had better luck. Second, they are built of reinforced concrete, some of the very first American houses so built. Titus de Bobula was the apostle of concrete in his brief architectural career, and his influence would be hard to overestimate.
The houses have had their separate adventures since they were built, including some artificial siding. This one has had windows and front door replaced, but at least it shows the simple outlines of the design, including the bay window in front.
The house on the end may be the best preserved of the row.
Many sources say that twenty of these houses were built. Six remain, and old Pa Pitt believes there were never more than nine. The architect claimed to have built more, but we cannot rely on anything Titus de Bobula says about his work, because he was prone to exaggeration and outright fabrication.
The houses were an investment by multimillionaire newspaper magnate Eugene O’Neill, owner of the Dispatch and no relation to the playwright of the same name. He owned the land on Frank Street and along Greenfield Avenue to either side. Some architectural historians say that De Bobula rowhouses went up on Greenfield Avenue, but that is contradicted by old maps and today’s evidence.
These rowhouses on Greenfield Avenue, on the land once owned by Eugene O’Neill, were built at about the same time as the De Bobula houses, but these are standard brick. Old maps do show three more concrete houses on Lilac Street, perpendicular to the row on Frank Street, but those were replaced after the Second World War by two larger and more expensive houses:
These two houses stand where a row of three concrete houses, probably by De Bobula, stood in the first half of the twentieth century.
For more on Titus de Bobula and his very surprising career, you can see the article on Titus de Bobula in Father Pitt’s Pittsburgh Encyclopedia.
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