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  • Three Houses by U. J. L. Peoples on Negley Avenue

    907–917 North Negley Avenue

    Three similar houses in a row, Pittsburgh Foursquares with dignified classical detailing, and all three in beautiful shape. Father Pitt has was told by the owner of one of them, an architect and community activist, that they were designed by Ulysses J. L. Peoples.

    909 North Negley Avenue

    Although the houses clearly go together, window placements and other details vary.

    917 North Negley Avenue
    Ionic capitals

    “Modern Ionic” capitals—the kind where the volutes (the spiral things) stick out at the four corners, as opposed to classical Ionic capitals, which are meant to be seen from the front and have pairs of volutes rolled up like a scroll.

    917 North Negley Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Comments
    April 21, 2025
  • Homer Apartments, Highland Park

    Homer apartments

    A trio of bay-fronted apartment buildings on Jackson Street. The design is not out of the ordinary, but it is a neat and elegant implementation of the ordinary. The bays, as Father Pitt likes to point out, are not mere decoration: they really do suck in the light, which is valuable for people who like natural light.

    Homer No. 2
    Entrance
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Comments
    April 21, 2025
  • Green Tulip

    Green tulip
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
    April 21, 2025
  • Silent-Era Theater in Carrick

    1732 Brownsville Road

    This building shows up as a theater on a 1916 map, and that is all Father Pitt knows about it.

    The intersection of Brownsville Road and Narrow Avenue (now Newett Street) in 1916.

    It is not documented at Cinema Treasures, where theater fanatics have catalogued 178 theaters in Pittsburgh, or at the expiring and impossible-to-navigate Carrick-Overbrook Wiki, so it may not have lasted very long as a theater. (And Father Pitt is only making the assumption that it was a movie theater rather than a live theater or vaudeville house, because the latter seems much less likely for the era and place.) If anyone from the neighborhood knows the story of this building, the information will be received with gratitude. The building is well kept: it has been updated just enough to be useful to its current tenant without destroying the original design of the exterior.

    Old theater in Carrick
    Perspective view
    April 21, 2025
  • Bethel Presbyterian Church, Perry South

    Bethel Presbyterian Church

    You might pass this building by on your way up North Charles Street and never think of it as anything other than another outcropping of generic ugliness. In fact it is a rare surviving frame church from the 1880s. It has been covered in sheets of cartoon fake brick, and the windows have been halved, but the building is still here. It was built before 1890 on Gallagher Street, near the intersection with Taggart Street, as the Bethel Baptist Church. By about 1900, Gallagher had changed its name to Melrose Avenue, and this was known as the Melrose Avenue Presbyterian Church. It kept that name as Taggart Street changed to North Charles Avenue.

    The Presbyterian congregation has almost been erased from history—it is hard to find more than glancing references to it—but the building has been occupied by a nondenominational congregation.

    Melrose Avenue Presbyterian Church
    Bethel Presbyterian Church
    Entrance
    Melrose Avenue Presbyterian Church
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Comments
    April 20, 2025
  • Dinwiddie Street: A Resurrection

    Houses on Dinwiddie Street

    In 1889, William Smith Fraser, one of our top architects in those days, supervised a whole long block of fifty elegant stone-fronted houses lining both sides of Dinwiddie Street.1

    A majority of the houses disappeared over the years; the street came to look like a battle zone, three-quarters abandoned.

    But the wheel turned again. About fifteen years ago, Rothschild Doyno Collaborative designed infill housing and refurbished the Fraser houses. The new houses were built at the same scale and setback as the old, and with some of the same massing; the old houses were refurbished with inexpensive materials that matched the new houses.

    Dinwiddie Street

    It’s still not a rich neighborhood. But it’s a beautiful and welcoming streetscape again, and it’s an inspiring example of how an interrupted streetscape can be made whole. The new houses are definitely of our century, but they belong on the street. Without duplicating the Fraser designs, they make themselves at home in the neighborhood.

    Houses on Dinwiddie Street

    In this picture, the houses with stone bays in front are some of the original Fraser houses. Their more colorful neighbors are the “infill” houses.

    Fraser houses

    A pair of the original Fraser houses.

    Looking down the row on Dinwiddie Street
    Houses on Dinwiddie Street
    Dinwiddie Street
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
    1. Source: Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, May 29, 1889, p. 246. “The contract for the fifty modern dwellings, previously reported, to be erected on Dinwiddie street by Mr. Lockhart, has been given to Henry Shenck. W. S. Fraser, Seventh street and Penn avenue is the architect. These dwellings will be of brick, with stone fronts, bay windows and porches, and all modern conveniences.” ↩︎

    Comments
    April 20, 2025
  • Trillium

    Trillium grandiflorum
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

    The Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) is a trinity of trinities: three petals, three sepals, and three leaves. In its pure white form it seems a perfect emblem of Easter.


    Comments
    April 20, 2025
  • Hazelwood Christian Church

    Hazelwood Christian Church

    Here is another church with the sanctuary upstairs, if you look at the front. This is Pittsburgh, though, so upstairs is the ground floor in the rear.

    Front elevation
    Entrance
    Cornerstone: “Christian Church, 1921”
    Front elevation really big
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G

    Comments
    April 20, 2025
  • House by Frederick Sauer in Highland Park

    5906 Callowhill Street

    Perhaps the best way to describe the architect Frederick Sauer is to say that he was a high-functioning mad genius. He produced some very respectable church designs—St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, St. Stanislaus Kostka, and St. Mary of the Mount, to name three. Meanwhile, he went home every evening and started pulling rocks out of his back woods and piling them up into whimsical buildings with his own hands.

    When he designed a private residence, Sauer sometimes pushed the limits of current styles. Here is a big stony house built from his design in 1893. It hits some of the fashionable Romanesque notes, but that immense crowstepped Flemish gable makes a big impression on the neighbors. (The high-pitched roof and big gables also give the house a roomy third floor.)

    5906 Callowhill Street
    5906 Callowhill Street, capital
    House by Frederick Sauer
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Comments
    April 19, 2025
  • Tulips

    Tulip
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

    Comments
    April 19, 2025
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