A modernist building typical of the postwar apartment boom, including the tall stairwell light made of glass blocks—a Pittsburgh product much employed in the middle twentieth century. To old Pa Pitt’s ears, “Castletone” sounds like the name of a third-string record company, but the apartments are in a very convenient location, just down the street from the Mount Lebanon subway station on the Red Line.
One of those visions of a fantasy past that resemble storybook illustrations more than they do any real historical architecture. This one is exceptionally fine, the fantastical elements carried out with good taste, and of course the snow added to the fairy-tale effect.
A blowing engine from a blast furnace, on display at Station Square, silhouetted against the skyscrapers that such machines made possible.
Henry Hornbostel had designed the campus of Carnegie Tech, and he taught architecture there, so he was the natural choice when the institution’s first president, Arthur A. Hamerschlag, decided to build a house nearby in Schenley Farms. The result, as you might expect from Hornbostel, was something unique—modern but not modernistic, picturesque but not gaudy, eclectic but harmonious. It sits on a ledge, following the terrain with its unusual obtuse angle, and therefore was known as Ledge House.
Father Pitt does not know the story of this building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and McMasters Way. The great G. C. Murphy downtown empire, “the world’s largest variety store,” slopped into it as it expanded, and by bad luck and misunderstanding the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation plaque for the main Art Deco Murphy’s building (designed by Harold E. Crosby in 1930) ended up on the front of this building instead. Whatever this building was originally, it’s obviously much older than 1930. Updates to the ground floor have been handled with good taste, and the entrance is still on the corner. Old Pa Pitt approves of corner entrances.
George S. Orth was the architect of this school, one of the first large institutional buildings in the Oakland district. It was built in 1894, and it still serves its original institution.
The style is a sort of Flemish Renaissance filtered through Americanized Rundbogenstil. The horizontal stripes in the brickwork are such an instantly distinctive feature that they have been imitated in the school’s modern additions.
The unusual lot demanded an unusual configuration of this double duplex, which is broad and shallow. It would have been more attractive with the original details, notably the roof (which would have been tile or slate), but it still holds down its corner with dignity.
Now the BNY Client Service Center, after some intermediate years as the BNY Mellon Client Service Center. The picture is made from three photographs at different exposures, so that we can see a bit of the interior through the windows.
Built in 1913, this house is a minor landmark of early modernism in Pittsburgh. Kiehnel & Elliott were the architects, and Richard Kiehnel had a thoroughly German architectural education. He applied the latest Jugendstil ideas of decoration, with a little Prairie Style thrown in, to the forms that were popular in Pittsburgh—like the standard three-storey Renaissance palace that is the basis of this house. The combination was a winner: clients got something that looked bracingly up to date, but didn’t make their neighbors hate them.
The image above comes to us courtesy of the amazingly thorough Brookline Connection site. It shows Princess Avenue in Beechview at the intersection with Westfield Street, and the houses in the picture all still stand today. We’ll look at three of them (we’ve already seen the duplex at far right), beginning with the biggest and most elaborate.
Here is a center-hall house that must have been well above the usual budget for Beechview houses. We notice the diamond panes in the upper sashes of the upstairs windows—a style we noticed elsewhere in Beechview and had reason to think might be associated with the architect W. Ward Williams. The house is now divided into apartments, but retains many of its characteristic details.
This gambrel-roofed cottage has had its porch filled in to make a sunroom, which the photograph shows us had already happened by 1916. A photo of the house still under construction represented Beechwood, the original name of Beechview, in an ad for the plan in the Gazette for May 7, 1905.
By the way, do you notice how the advertisement dwells on the paved streets? Take a look at the 1916 photograph again.
The Brookline Connection site once again comes through with a better version of the same picture:
A gable-fronted foursquare house. Except for the replacement of its original porch rail with a more durable brick one, it has hardly changed at all.
