Does anyone know the history of this house? A twenty-year-old Post-Gazette article describes the restoration challenges that would have awaited a new owner; Father Pitt does not know the history of the house since then, and he thinks the article may be incorrect about the history before that. The Post-Gazette article says it was built for steel magnate Joshua Rhodes; but the Joshua Rhodes who turns up in every other search lived on Western Avenue and certainly did not have a 32-year-old wife in the early 1900s, which the article says was Grace Rhodes’ age when she died of a brain tumor not long after the house was built. Joshua Rhodes might have built this house for one of his sons; that is old Pa Pitt’s best hypothesis. William B. Rhodes would have been 39 in 1903; Walter J. Rhodes would have been 31. Either one of them might plausibly have had a wife in her thirties in the early 1900s.
Almost all the surviving great houses in Allegheny West have either been repurposed as institutional or office buildings or restored as grand mansions once again. This Tudor palace, however, seems to be in need of a bit of help. Clearly the exterior is in good shape, though the front lawn is not maintained much this year. A suburban doctor’s house would probably cost less than this 40-room mansion. Who’s ready for a do-it-yourself adventure?
The decorative shield over the front door looks from a distance as though it once bore an inscription, but as far as old Pa Pitt can tell it was always decorated with horizontal ridges alone.
Old Pa Pitt obsessively documented every building in the Craig Street automotive row. But he was even more obsessive than that. The thing that is most impressive about that row is that it is contiguous and intact: not a single one of the buildings, all put up at about the same time in the early years of the automobile, has disappeared or been seriously mutilated. Individual pictures do not show that impressive fact. Therefore, Father Pitt has made this composite view—by hand, he might add, since no automatic software was up to the task.
Click on the picture to make it very big.
The brands these dealers sold, left to right: Nash, Oldsmobile, Jordan, Kelly-Springfield tires, B. F. Goodrich tires, Franklin, and Oakland.
Much of the background had to be filled in with plain blue, and the joints are very obvious if you enlarge the picture. But this is the only way to convey the extraordinary fact that this whole row has survived intact. How long will it last? We can only keep our fingers crossed. But if these buildings disappear, at least this picture can show future generations what this row was like.
Until fairly recently, almost all the businesses along Warrington Avenue in Allentown bore German names. This building still bears a ghost sign for Geo. Matz & Sons Furniture and Carpets. The style of the building is typical German Commercial Romanesque, of the sort that is very common in the old German neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. The storefront has been filled in with Perma-Stone, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the windows have been replaced with smaller standard-sized windows (with fake “multi-pane” slats, because window companies insist on adding those even though they look completely wrong on most buildings from the middle nineteenth century onwards). But both those things could be undone when Allentown becomes trendy enough to make restoration worthwhile, and otherwise the façade of the building is very well preserved.
A garage from the early days of the automobile; on a 1923 map it is simply marked “Garage.” The fundamental simplicity of the Spanish Mission style made it popular for garages, and this front on Melwood Avenue looks almost like a cartoon drawing of a Spanish mission. We have already seen the ghost sign on the south side of it revealed by the demolition of the old Chevrolet dealer next door:
On the other side of the building is another ghost sign, probably later, advertising the Overman Cushion Tire Co.—a name that is still, or again, in use today by an Ohio restorer of antique tires.
Old Pa Pitt was not satisfied with the pictures he published of the Craig Street automotive row two weeks ago. The light was wrong: the sun was behind the buildings. We did our best with those pictures, but really the only way to get better ones would be to return at a different time of day. Father Pitt is so thoroughly dedicated to his readers that he did exactly that, so now here is a duplicate of that article, but with better pictures.
If this is not unique in North America, it has to be at least very rare: a complete contiguous row of buildings from the early days of the automotive industry, intact and largely unaltered. They are lined up one after another, without any gaps, along Craig Street from Baum Boulevard northward. It is one of Pittsburgh’s unrecognized treasures. Fortunately only one of the buildings seems to be endangered at the moment: the others have found new uses, and the owners have not made substantial alterations to the façades, several of which have fine terra-cotta details.
In 1905, a splendid amusement park opened on this site: Luna Park, the first of a chain of Luna Parks that spanned the globe.
This one did not last long, however: it closed in 1909—partly as a result of competition from the well-established Kennywood Park, where you can now see a smaller model of the Luna Park entrance.
The closing of the park opened up a broad expanse of cleared land, and the newly rich automobile industry moved in here. By 1923, all these buildings had been constructed in a long row.
We begin at the corner of Baum Boulevard, where the grandest of the lot actually sold low-priced cars. This was a dealer in—coincidentally—Oakland motor cars, which were named for Oakland County, Michigan, where they were made. Oakland was General Motors’ cheap division before GM bought Chevrolet.
Next in the row up Craig Street is a Franklin dealer.
Next come two tire dealers in identical buildings. The one on the left sold Kelly-Springfield; the one on the right sold B. F. Goodrich. These buildings are now the Luna Lofts, which probably sounds better than Kelly-Springfield and B. F. Goodrich Tire Lofts.
Here is the one building Father Pitt considers endangered, because vacant and ill-kept buildings catch fire mysteriously. It belonged to the Van Kleeck Motor Co., which sold Jordan automobiles. The façade is mostly original, though it has had some curious alterations, especially the door to nowhere with its tiny iron balcony. The terra-cotta decorations are well preserved, and Father Pitt was able to pick some of them out with a long lens:
And finally the Nash dealer, now home to a branch of North Way Christian Community, which has made the front look gorgeous.
This is the whole contiguous row along Craig Street, and it is incredible enough that the entire block of buildings has survived intact. There were also other car dealers in the same immediate area, and even more remarkably they have survived, too. We’ll be seeing more of them soon.
A splendid row of Second Empire houses on Lincoln Avenue, with their wood trim picked out in tasteful polychrome paint. They were built in 1872 and 1873.
Except for the inevitable distortion of the towers, this is a very accurate rendition of the front of St. Adalbert’s on the South Side. (The distortion is the result of using many photographs to construct what amounts to an impossibly wide-angled rectilinear lens to get the whole front across a very narrow street.) Built in 1889, this church served generations of Polish Catholics, and still serves the congregation of Mary, Queen of Peace parish. The architect does not seem to be known, but old Pa Pitt would be delighted to be informed if anyone does know who it was.
Psalm 83:5 in the Vulgate numbering (Psalm 84:4 in Protestant and more recent Catholic versions): “Blessed are they that dwell in thy house, O Lord: they shall praise thee for ever and ever.”
Father Pitt does not know much Polish, but this inscription honors the efforts of Fr. Wladislaw Miskiewicz, parish priest.
The church dominates the back end of 15th Street, one of those absurdly narrow streets in old Birmingham. This is the view from the steps up to the 15th Street pedestrian overpass that leads across the railroad tracks to the Slopes. This end of 15th Street was a whole village of Polish Catholic institutions.
St. Adalbert’s convent.
The rectory.
The Polish school.
We also saw the mid-twentieth-century auditorium, now being turned into condominiums.
When he published his recent pictures of the Craig Street automotive row, old Pa Pitt promised his readers pictures of some of the other nearby buildings from the early days of the automobile. Yesterday he walked over to Melwood Avenue to get pictures of the old Chevrolet dealer and found that he hadn’t walked fast enough, because this is what it looks like now:
Yes, it has been demolished for another apartment tower. Doubtless this will bring rolling waves of prosperity, though not everyone in the neighborhood is happy about it:
On the bright side, the demolition revealed an old painted sign that probably had not been visible for more than a hundred years:
Father Pitt has not been able to read the names of the two superimposed companies. This wall had been obscured by the Chevrolet dealer since before 1923, so this sign dates from the first decades of the automobile.
