This Second Empire mansion had a narrow escape: the third floor burned out in 1987, and the owner died the next year, leaving the house a derelict hulk. It was rescued from demolition at the last minute by serial restorationist Joedda Sampson, who painted it in her trademark polychrome style; it has since passed to other owners, whose pristine white also works well with the design. The house was built in 1871; Frederick Osterling worked on early-twentieth-century renovations and additions.
A Tudor house in Schenley Farms recedes into the woods, looking more and more like something from a fairy tale.
Addendum: According to a Google Maps user who has documented most of the houses in Schenley Farms, this house was designed by Maximilian Nirdlinger in 1911 for E. H. Kingsley.
The story told by architectural historian Franklin Toker is that the architect Henry Hornbostel wanted this building to face Fifth Avenue, with a long vista back from the street, but the clients insisted that it had to face Bigelow Boulevard. Reluctantly Hornbostel acquiesced—and then built it his way anyway. What are you going to do? Tear it down and do it over?
This is one of a number of buildings in Pittsburgh inspired by the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and this is the one that most obviously follows its model.
This building has had some adventures. Originally a typical Pittsburgh Romanesque commercial building, it had a radical renovation of the ground floor at some point in the Art Deco era (early enough that the entrances are still recessed from the sidewalk). Possibly at the same time, but probably later, the second and third floors were very inexpertly done over in an aggressively modernist style: the ornaments removed, the original tall windows replaced with much smaller windows, and the remaining space bricked up. Only the top remains more or less unaltered, though its ironwork date could use a bit of restoration, and the ironwork initials have left only their shadows.
This would be a fairly ordinary building, in what we might perhaps call Renaissance style, except for its curious Art Nouveau ornamentation.
Addendum: According to a city architectural survey, this building, the Everett Apartments, was a work of the extraordinary Hungarian Art Nouveau architect Titus de Bobula.
The “chocolate church” at Fifth and Negley was designed by Theophilus P. Chandler Jr., whose name always sounds to old Pa Pitt like the villain in a Marx Brothers farce. Chandler worked mostly in Philadelphia, but he also designed First Presbyterian downtown and the Duncan mausoleum in the Union Dale Cemetery.
This larger-than-life allegorical bronze sits over the entrance to the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Oakland.
You can make good money as a lawyer if you make the right contacts. Willis McCook was lawyer to the robber barons, and he lived among them in this splendid Gothic mansion on the Fifth Avenue millionaires’ row. The architects were the local firm of Carpenter & Crocker. It is now a hotel called the “Mansions on Fifth,” along with the house around the corner that McCook built for his daughter and son-in-law.
