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Hampton Hall
The Tudor style adapts itself to an apartment building with some success. Old Pa Pitt can’t keep himself from wondering whether there are actually apartments up there under those peaked roofs with the dormers. Most of the Tudor atmosphere is in the detailing of the stone, but we have a few cartoonish suggestions of half-timbering just so nobody mistakes the style for anything else.
Addendum: According to the city architectural inventory (PDF), Hampton Hall was built in 1928.
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D’Arlington Apartments, Oakland
Edward Keen was the architect of this intriguing apartment building on the edge of Oakland, just where it meets Shadyside. It was built in 1910, and the style seems to old Pa Pitt to be something like Italian Renaissance fading through Prairie Style to modernism. It has the simplicity and squareness of all three styles; the details are subtle but rich (especially the cornice); and the inset balconies, with much effort put into preventing them from breaking the lines of the rectangular walls, presage the simplicity-at-all-costs of the modernists.
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View Down Fifth Avenue in Oakland
Decades from now, some curious soul exploring the back corners of archived Internet content will come across this picture and spin an elaborate theory of exactly what it was we were going to get through together. Possibly Fifth Avenue traffic, which is unusually moderate in this picture, but minutes later was brought to a standstill by a truck that decided to stop diagonally across the entire boulevard and unload its cargo.
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First Church of Christ, Scientist
Designed by S. S. Beman, a Chicago architect who made Christian Science churches a specialty, this now belongs to the University of Pittsburgh as it slops over from Oakland into Shadyside.
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Tiki Boats
They belong to Cruisin’ Tikis Pittsburgh: you can charter one for up to half a dozen people, or two lashed together for up to a dozen. Bring your own alcohol, because as far as Father Pitt can tell these are basically floating bars.
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Rodef Shalom Temple
One of Henry Hornbostel’s most impressive works, Rodef Shalom, built in 1906, is notable for its colored terra-cotta decorations, which—according to the interpretive sign on the temple grounds—were among the earliest uses of polychrome terra cotta in the United States.
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Sunshine and Clouds
Downtown Pittsburgh seen from Point State Park. From this angle, you might suppose that the city did not exist at all before the Second World War—although, if you enlarged the picture, you might wonder why there was a British colonial flag flying.
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It Used to Be a Store
In the days before suburban shopping centers, every block of a city neighborhood would have its backstreet grocery store. Many of these old stores have been converted to apartments, but you can still recognize them easily. They’re often on a corner, and the ground floor in front is distinctly different, usually distinguished by space for a sign along the top of the ground-floor façade, sometimes with the shop windows filled in with siding or other later accretions. Here are two typical examples from the South Side.
