Each one of them has had its individual adventures, but it seems fairly certain that this row of half a dozen frame houses with narrow dormers dates from before 1872. Together they form something of a manual or catalogue of things that can happen to a frame house in Pittsburgh over the course of a century and a half.
The congregation was founded in 1775 by John McMillan; this building was put up in 1840. These pictures were taken with an Argus C3 in 1999. Three years later, while renovation work was in progress, the whole tower end collapsed.
The lens on Father Pitt’s old C3 didn’t like being pointed toward the sun, so we have a bit of glare in this picture; but it does show us the old front before it collapsed. It was replaced with a new front, somewhat different but in sympathy with the building, as we see in this picture from 2015.
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. 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.
A Romanesque church whose immense chimney dwarfs its stubby little tower, this is probably the only church in the neighborhood still serving its original congregation.
Another small celebration of the varieties of woodwork to be found on South Side houses.
The Homewood Cemetery was planted as an arboretum, so it is one of the best places in Pittsburgh to see a wide variety of trees in a wide variety of colors.
This splendid house sits on the hill overlooking the part of Carnegie that was formerly the borough of Chartiers.
Here is another small bank that gets the architectural message exactly right, as we said a few days ago about the Carnegie National Bank. How could your money not be safe in a bank that looks like this? Imagine, too, how bright and cheerful the banking hall must have been before those tall windows along the side were filled in.
Winged chimeras guard the cartouche at the top of the great front arch.
Addendum: The bank was built in about 1924; the architects were Simons, Britton & English.1
