A big house or small mansion in a particularly lush Tudor style. The woodwork is decorated with unusual care.
-
Spring Wildflowers
Spring flowers are blooming everywhere, and that means that our sister site Flora Pittsburghensis is filling up with more pictures. Here are a few to get you started, and you can see many more over there.
-
Christ English Lutheran Church, Knoxville
Now St. Paul A. M. E. Zion Church. This congregation had money in the 1960s, it would seem; a new sanctuary in 1960s modernist Gothic was grafted on the older Sunday-school and office wing, which is in a stony Jacobean style.
-
Pussy Willow
An interesting thing to know about pussy willow is that the cut branches will root in water. Last year old Pa Pitt was given a bouquet of pussy-willow branches, which rooted in the vase. Planted in a big tub, they grew plenty of catkins this year, of which these are a few.
-
Spencer House, Shadyside
This house on Amberson Avenue at Pembroke Place was built in the 1880s; it appears on the map in 1890 as belonging to Mrs. C. H. Spencer. The “stick style” is fairly unusual in Pittsburgh, but this is a magnificent example.
-
Calvary Episcopal Church, Shadyside
Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, this church has a more austere sort of dignity than the architect’s other two works in Pittsburgh, East Liberty Presbyterian and Holy Rosary Catholic. It apparently took some delicate maneuvering to get an Episcopal congregation with low-church sympathies (but lots of money) to accept a Gothic masterpiece.
St. Mark.
St. Luke.
St. Andrew.
Unusually decorative downspouts.
-
Acrisure Stadium
That’s what it’s called now. Old Pa Pitt hopes that the city will not have to build any more large stadiums any time soon, but if it does come to that, Father Pitt suggests a stipulation: there will be no public money in the project and no tax breaks for the owners unless the citizens retain naming rights, which they may not alienate by selling them to a corporation or individual.
-
Knable House, Shadyside
A tasteful Jacobean house built in 1911, as we know from the date stone over the front door. It seems to have been built for a John E. Knable.
Addendum: The architect was W. F. Struthers, who had formerly been partner with Thomas Hannah.
Architectural historians sometimes use the term “Jacobethan” for a style that is indeterminately Tudor and Jacobean mashed together.
-
Knoxville Baptist Church
Now Iglesia de Cristo León de Judá, the Knoxville Baptist Church was built in 1909; it is a typical small vernacular-Gothic church with some Arts and Crafts details. The attractive indigo paint applied by the current congregation makes it stand out from others of its type.
Fundamentalist Christians in the United States have always had a deep suspicion of stained glass as creeping idolatry, but the Spanish-speaking Evangelical congregations are the most vengefully thorough about it. As soon as they take over an old church building, the stained glass is removed. Usually it is replaced with clear glass, but this congregation has blocked all natural light from entering the building. Photographs of services on line show that the interior is set up like a theater, and natural light would only interfere with the projections and spotlights.
